Excerpt from Saturation Station
Saturation Station
The events of 9/11/01 created a panoply of images of mass destruction
and made New York City, already one of the most documented and
recorded cities in human history, become a global symbol of the
American project. In Jean Baudrillard's essay "The Spirit
of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers" (Verso 2002),
this sentiment is echoed and amplified by a kind of fugue state
- Baudrillard regarded the terror strikes as part of a much larger
system of mystification - of the world regarding America an an
almost mythic mirror of human aspiration, and of New York in particular
as the embodiment of that world condition.
In "Saturation Station" I worked with a multi-media
artist collective "One Infinity" (now currently working
under the title 47)
to understand the kind of trance that the media portrayal of 9/11
created. "Saturation Station" posits that the way that
the media has participated in the war effort as a kind of fundamental
flaw in the liberal ideal, the achilles heel of the modern liberal
democracy. We took images from all over the internet and made
a mix from them into a kind of stream of consciousness collage.
You could say that "Saturation Station" arose out some
of the ways that the bombardment of images that occurred after
the terror strikes, and the kind of repetition that the media
used to highlight the intensity of the moment. Like the documentary
project Here
is New York or the German satirical photographer John Heartfield's
portrayal of Germany during the early years of the end of the
Weimar Republic, "Saturation..." confronts the reality
of the terror as a media construct with a kind of exorcism.
Through repetition and by reflecting the way it was mediated
and repeated over and over again in the news media of the West
"Saturation..." acts as a kind of temporal cipher, reducing
the repetition to a short term image overload. "Saturation
Station" asks like Baudrillard in his essay "The Despair
of Having Everything" - how much history can we take? Where
Baudrillard could say "The West's mission is to make the
world's wealth of cultures interchangeable, and to subordinate
them within the global order. Our culture, which is bereft of
values, revenges itself upon the values of other cultures,"
"Saturation Station" investigates the linkages of the
media and the representational "world picture" America
lives in. Like a cocoon bursting open, like a flower blossom of
terrible truth, these images try to evoke the media trance in
hopes that, in the hopes that by understanding how the images
of terror were beamed around the world, we can look for deeper
underlying truths in the repetition. Again, it's a recursive logic
at play here - one where by understanding the seamless repetition,
one can break it down, and find human empathy with the victims
of this terrible tragedy. Sometimes images speak far louder than
any written words, and that is what "Saturation Station"
portrays - the changing same, the real time flow of a culture
living in loops, the circular hungry repetition of a country put
in a situation of deep trauma by the events of the last several
years, but unaware as to the reasons why there is so much anger
leveled at it's policies.
"Saturation Station" is an invocation of hope, that
outside of Baudrillard’s analysis where he says "What
we hate in ourselves -- the obscure object of our resentment --
is our excess of reality, power, and comfort, our universal availability,
our definite accomplishment, this kind of destiny that Dostoevsky's
Grand Inquisitor had in store for the domesticated masses. And
this is exactly the part of our culture that the terrorists find
repulsive (which also explains the support they receive and the
fascination they are able to exert). Terrorism's support is not
only based on the despair of those who have been humiliated and
offended. It is also based on the invisible despair of those whom
globalization has privileged, on our own submission to an omnipotent
technology, to a crushing virtual reality, to an empire of networks
and programs that are probably in the process of redrawing the
regressive contours of the entire human species, of a humanity
that has gone "global." (After all, isn't the supremacy
of the human species over the rest of life on earth the mirror
image of the domination of the West over the rest of the world?).
This invisible despair, our invisible despair, is hopeless since
it is the result of the realization of all our desires" America
can find a new sense of purpose beyond the ideology of war and
retribution the Bush Administration is pursuing on a global scale
- using 9/11. It's a modest proposal for an era of total media.
The sound for the piece is taken from a collaboration I did with
the New York based string ensemble "The Freight Elevator
Quartet" |
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DJ Spooky has participated in two new book projects.
DJ Spooky also has participated in renowned photographer Lyle Owerko's new book "The Boombox Project" on the history of boomboxes. 
Copyright Criminals - a Documentary by Ben Frantzen and Kembrew Mcleod
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OUT NOW! DJ Spooky's "Sound Unbound"
CREATION REBEL MIX CD on Trojan Records
DJ Spooky has produced material on the new Yoko Ono album.
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