Slotnoot
‘When you act in groups, social and political movements, or on issues, information becomes the heart of the matter, the key. You’ve got to get the information out. At the same time, that’s where you realize the media can really be an adversary.
The media represents truth in our societies. But the truth lies. The news media lie by omission, by distortion, by change of emphasis, or they just outright lie, putting words and images in your mouth and eyes that were ever there.
And like advertising or even art in a lot of cases, the news media address spectators, in a situation where they can’t talk back. Art in our societies stands for the individual, for subjectivity: it’s the opposite of organized party politics and propaganda. Which is fine for us, because we don’t believe in political parties as they’re organized today, and we don’t want to produce propaganda.
What passes for art in the multimedia economy of contemporary society is something that constantly borders on visual enter-tainment, the endless production of new attractions, novelty for novelty’s sake.
We want to create situations where you talk to people who talk back. Situations where the ears are as important as the eyes, where the written word and image get left behind in the coversation. The thing is just to find a social and political twist in artistic creativity, to set artistic processes at work in a group or a social and political movement, to turn originals into multiples, or multipliers.’
- Atelier des Invisibles