On Translation: Açık Radyo (Myths & Stereotypes)

The Political Advertisement project began in 1984, when New York-based media artists Muntadas and Reese produced their first compilation of American presidential commercials, beginning with Eisenhower in the 1950s. Every four years since — aligned to the national election cycle — they’ve updated the collection to reflect the current moment, presenting the clips in chronological order, with no voice-over editorializing, a tour-de-force of witty and incisive editing. Consisting of rare as well as notorious footage, Political Advertisement argues for television’s enormous importance in selling the presidency — a force that transforms citizens into consumers, and the presidency into the ultimate product.

Muntadas writes: "This tape is in effect a readymade. It was produced by the Pepsi Cola Co. for its own use. It was accidentally substituted for a tape of mine in 1974. The mistake in the transfer was a communications mishap which involved a series of people and corporations. Because of the type of material involved — which directly affects our lives — because the tape itself proposes many questions and is open to more than one interpretation, and it was to me an unusual use of video, I decided to recycle this tape through public showings."

Between the Lines examines the "invisible mechanisms" that control and contextualize media information. Analyzing a news report to demonstrate how facts are mediated by television's limits, Muntadas focuses on the role and responsibility of the reporter — the person between the facts and the audience. Following a reporter for WGBH-TV, Boston, as she covers a meeting between Mayor Kevin White and a community development group, Muntadas observes the decisions, selections, schedules and editing that determine how the "news" is transmitted on TV. He states: "When we say we are 'reading between the lines' we are completing information from the text with our own process of thinking, knowledge, information, subtlety. With television, words and images are experienced together; there is no time to stop and think while we absorb information from a moving image." - EAI

In a project sponsored by the Public Art Fund, Muntadas installed the fifty-second message This is not an Advertisement on the electronic Spectacolor lightboard that then dominated New York's Times Square. Every twenty minutes, between commercial advertisements, the sign broadcast the text: "This is not an advertisement... subliminal... speed... fragmentation," alluding to the surrounding media environment of marketing and billboards. With each successive signal, the message became more distorted and abstract, until it was rendered virtually illegible.

The Surrealist, "Exquisite Corpse" was a French Café parlor game. "Exquisite Moving Corpse" is more of an artist chain letter. 60 artists participated over a two-year period, beginning in March 2020. Each invited artist made a one minute video in response to the last frame of the previous minute.