Big Art Group – The People

2007 – Serial Project

Description:

THE PEOPLE is a transformation of civil life: an expansion of the experiments of Real Time Film to a panoramic new scale– the conversion of a village into a multi-location video shoot, simultaneously projected & broadcast into the public square; a retelling of the Oresteia in the age of information war and electric vengeance; a counterstrike from the culturally assaulted. The People sprang from an impulse to extend Big Art Group’s experiments in a contemporary language for performance, especially the relationship between communication, images, and actions. The People is realized as a kind of living television; or the re-tooling of commonplace technologies and modes of dialogue (the video clip, the interview, the re-enactment) to invert the established relationship between ‘mass-media’ and private interchange. It reflects new forms of dialogue such as video-sharing sites, blogs, and new technologies— and sculpts these developments into a performative action that takes as its inspiration a foundational idea of community dialogue, the birth of democracy and the role that ‘ordinary’ people perform in self-government.