The Battle for Kobane
“The Battle for Kobane” is a glitch art series that deals with the close relation mass media has with war. Let’s be honest: war brings us the most shocking, intense, horrifying, glorious and also beautiful images there are. You could paraphrase that war is the father (or mother) of all sujets since the earliest paintings and relief’s where about war and conflict. But that was in the old days when imagery was propaganda…
Hundreds of cities have been ravaged by fundamentalism in Syria and Iraq in these last months, no camera was present, newspapers & TV where slow to realize the tragedy that was going on. It was such a nice summer. But that’s how modern day mass media work. The need an iconic subject, a small world to exemplify and explain the big world to us…
Ferguson at war (with the media)
Seeing the situation in Ferguson from a safe distance, it looks like a war. But that is what our (German) media is transporting. Rage, anger, hate, violence, black people. The connection is all so simple. Of course This time the message is: „…right now coloured people are justified (in a sense) in being angry and violent.“ But the underlying message remains: „…coloured people are being angry and violent.“ Then again mass media has never been so good in identifying subtle differences or the complexity of the real world. It is a unifying medium….
