FRIDAY NIGHT PURGE

PERSONAL NOTE FOR VIDEOMEDEJA

I’ve worked in video art, new media, documentary, and screened a video in your festival some years back. In the last few years though, I’ve turned to experimental sound narrative. When I saw your theme for this year, I thought I might pitch something unusual — a crazy narrative sound work, accompanied by graphic visual images. What follows are some thoughts regarding how it might work as an installation.

INSTALLATION + CONTEXT

Friday Night Purge is a looping 37-minute sound piece/radio play created for experimental podcast form and here inserted into an installation context. The work is a reflection of American trauma, and a dark, comic critique of rising fascism and artificial intelligence. The current iteration features a series of vignettes of an AI-spawned, anguished-ridden stick figure from the Age of the Purge strung along the wall. While ideally, the work is experienced and isolated in a single room, the current physical requirements are flexible, and can easily be accommodated to a shared space with headphones, etc.

AUDIO PRESENTATION — DESCRIPTION

Why are some folks worried about the world around us, when everything is so darn wonderful? Friday Night Purge celebrates America with thrilling spectacle, big patriotic vibes, and the satisfaction of cleaning up messy problems. It presents a broadcast of America’s favorite televised event — Friday Night Purge — where dissidents are ritualistically executed in a packed stadium, complete with cheerleaders, marching children and play-by-play announcers. The work provides a giddy critique of not only growing American fascism, but also the rise of AI (there’s an assortment of twisted AI songs and commercials, including a country-rock Purging in the USA and a Broadway version of Die Marxist Scum Die.) In evoking a murderous extravaganza sponsored by Palantir, Apple, McDonalds and other trusted corporations, the episode’s darkly comic celebration may feel a bit too familiar for comfort.

HAPPY THOUGHTS, PEOPLE!

I published a work earlier this year that might be an alternative accompaniment to Friday Night Purge. It’s an AI-picture book of affirmations in the age of Donald Trump. It embraces his “Make America Great Again” theme by using old pop Americana images to create positive messages about our world. As the book goes on, the imagery gets darker, stranger  and more surreal— all the time happily assuring readers that “everything in America is going great!”

BIO

Bob Paris is an electronic artist who frequently investigates mass media, social duplicity and our culture of violence. His work has screened at venues around the world including the Image Forum Festival in Tokyo, the Sarajevo Winter Festival and the Whitney Biennial. He currently directs the Fearful Symmetry Podcast, an ongoing experiment in sonic narratives. Paris is an associate professor in Kinetic Imaging at VCU’s School of the Arts in Richmond, Virginia.

(for more info regarding Fearful Symmetry, click the “About” link at the top of the page)