Media Analysis

Created with artist Jolie Ruelle. 

“Reading various popular magazines through the camera, the dominance of advertising over content becomes apparent as the same cigarette ads are consistently legible, while the various articles become a blur. A quick scan with no pause for reflection is the only reading possible of the rapidly turning pages. Muntadas asks whether magazines might be manufactured to be read as passively as television, questioning the consequences of active, or critical, viewing.”

— Mark Mendel, Muntadas: Media Landscapes (Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art, 1982)

Magic Thinking is a multi-platform film installation steeped in the current moment when climate catastrophe, the COVID pandemic, and the rise of fundamentalism combine to contribute to an apocalyptic aura. With this aura, magical thinking can become a survival strategy, creating surprising bedfellows. In particular, the confluence of far-right extremism and the “wellness” world.

"There are three scenes in this work, all reflecting a changing sense of time. Each has a voiceover soundtrack with a similar structure, but with different information. Some of the comments presume that the viewer is privy to information which is never given..."

Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (English Version) is an experimental documentary about "The Western Hostage Crisis." The crisis refers to the abduction and detention of Westerners like Terry Anderson, and Terry Waite in Lebanon in the 80s and early 90s by "Islamic militants." This episode directly and indirectly consumed Lebanese, U.S., French, and British political and public life, and precipitated a number of high-profile political scandals like the Iran-Contra affair in the U.S.

A formidable collage of striking images, this powerful and provocative work confronts racial violence through images of ecological mayhem, machismo, pornography, and Third World poverty — images which return to the taboo body of a black man. "Directed and produced by our culture," An I for An I studies how violence is internalized and psychologized by overlapping soundtracks, printed texts, recurrent images, doctored footage and split screens. The piece attacks racist culture and pleads for an alternative recourse to violence.

In Greetings from Lanesville, the Videofreex tour the countryside of Lanesville, New York interviewing the local people for a weekly broadcast program all from behind the wheel of the Lanesville TV Media Bus. As the first localized pirate television station, Lanesville TV brought its guerilla broadcasting to Upstate New York with interviews of ordinary townspeople in an effort to present an image of community created by the community itself.

The four‐part cycle Parallel deals with the image genre of computer animation. The series focuses on the construction, visual landscape and inherent rules of computer-animated worlds.

"Computer animations are currently becoming a general model, surpassing film. In films, there is the wind that blows and the wind that is produced by a wind machine. Computer images do not have two kinds of wind."

—Harun Farocki

Removing keyframes from a digital version of John Ford's The Searchers, Baron and Goodwin attack the film's temporal structuring to render a kinetic “painted desert” of the West. The dust kicked up by the movement in the film is pure pixel, unanchored from the photographic realism that used to constrain it.

A live performance on a public-access cable program in New York deconstructing the messages in Vogue and its advertising. The work looks at the institutional slants of the magazine industry and the fashion industry’s reliance on sweatshops.

Three Songs of Lenin is an 11-minute piece made from three one-second samples taken from the second song We Loved Him of Vertov's film Three Songs About Lenin. Building on Vertov's second song's structural use of moving and still images to articulate a dynamic of Lenin's passing from life to death, this video employs an algorithmic structure where every other frame is the first frame of the one-second sample. The 29.97 frame rate allows us to almost see moving and still images at the same time as an imagining of Lenin haunting the present.

Anthony Ramos' astute deconstruction of television news focuses on his part in the media coverage of President Jimmy Carter's 1977 declaration of amnesty for Vietnam draft evaders. Ramos, who had served an 18-month prison sentence for draft evasion, was interviewed by news reporter Gabe Pressman, whose film crew meets Ramos' video crew in a confrontation between technologies and sensibilities. At the time, some broadcast television news crews still used 16mm film, although the expensive transition to ENG (electronic news gathering) systems had begun in 1974.

The "cross-over" in Olympic Women Speed Skating is juxtaposed against General Hospital's whites in reverse angle shots. A couple tries disparagingly to reach an understanding. Skaters continuously return to the starting line. Frustration and exertion combine with originally scored soundtracks of disco, rock, and jazz.

Like all of Smith’s videotapes, Down in the Rec Room is based on a performance that finds Mike once again all dressed up with nowhere to go. Smith mimes along with a children’s “let’s play make believe” record, and then repeats the action—this time disco dancing along with Donny and Marie on the TV set. Down in the Rec Room continues Smith’s critique of American fantasy culture by depicting the sorry life of the average guy.

Intertwining associated experiments in image and sound generation using AI, Nearest Neighbor focuses on language acquisition and mimicry between humans, birds and machines, asking fundamental questions about consciousness, learning and understanding. The film is a contemporary reflection on the state of technology in relation to the natural world. It asks us to think about what we want from inter-species communication and what we expect from technologies that aspire to substitute for living beings.

Based on a set of drawings that depict George W. Bush's administration as wounded soldiers in the war against terrorism, RE:THE_OPERATION explores the sexual and philosophical dynamics of war through the lives of the members as they physically engage each other and the "enemy." Letters, notes, and digital snapshots "produced" by the members on their tour of duty become the basis of video portraits that articulate the neuroses and obsessions compelling them toward an infinite war.

With a combination of Hollywood, European, and Israeli film; documentary; news coverage; and excerpts of 'live' footage shot in the West Bank and Gaza strip, Muqaddimah Li-Nihayat Jidal (Introduction to the End of an Argument) critiques representations of the Middle East, Arab culture, and the Palestinian people produced by the West. The video mimics the dominant media's forms of representation, subverting its methodology and construction.

"Noted critic Judith Williamson ventures from her English home to a shopping mall in Southern California to proffer some opinions on the working of American culture under capitalism. Using the exponential increase in the numbers and styles of socks available in the marketplace as a wry point of departure, Williamson shops for socks and questions the dubious need for a specific style of sock for just about any endeavor one could name."

—1987 AFI Video Festival Catalogue

Cacheu is a 10-minute shot of a lecture, performed by Joana Barrios, revolving around four colonial statues, which are stored today at the Fortress of Cacheu, one of the first bastions constructed by the Portuguese in 1588 in order to facilitate slave trade in the West African country of Guinea Bissau. Barrios evokes symbolic conflicts by tracing back different contexts in which the statues make an appearance: on a pedestal during Portuguese colonialism, dethroned and broken in pieces after Independence in the film Sans Soleil by Chris Marker, as background ghosts in Mortu Nega by Flora Gomes, and finally displayed at the Cacheu fort. The montage is a process that takes place before shooting, so that the image production is a result of a performative assemblage between text, acting, projected image and the framing of the camera by the director of photography, Matthias Biber.

The 2008 iteration Muntadas and Reese's series documenting the selling of the American presidency features political ads from the 1950s to ads from the 2008 campaigns, and highlights the development of the political strategy and marketing techniques of the TV campaign process.

Made in collaboration with Chip Lord and Jody Procter

Crowds line the streets for the wedding procession of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts.

Shot and edited by Ligorano Reese
Online editor Rick Feist
Post-production by The Standby Program at Matrix

The four‐part cycle Parallel deals with the image genre of computer animation. The series focuses on the construction, visual landscape and inherent rules of computer-animated worlds.

 “Computer animations are currently becoming a general model, surpassing film. In films, there is the wind that blows and the wind that is produced by a wind machine. Computer images do not have two kinds of wind.” 

-- Harun Farocki

Playing back "visual quotations" of everything from Poltergeist to Blade Runner, Muntadas rescans the surface of the monitor, questioning the "nature" of media—film, television, video, and image. Television emerges as the medium to eat all mediums, raising the question: Is it possible,within the context of television, to tell art from life or fact from fiction? An endless row of generic TV monitors visually evokes a hall of mirrors as the expression of the cultural homogeneity and bland abundance achieved through the dominant medium of the late 20th century.

Slogans is a visual deconstruction of advertising slogans, a literal and metaphorical illustration of the disintegration and loss of meaning in the contemporary media landscape. Appropriating text from a series of familiar print advertisements—Choose Your Weapon, Play To Win, Talk Is Cheap—Muntadas enlarges, digitizes, and overlays words until they devolve into abstract mosaics. Accompanied by a banal muzak soundtrack, this display of text as image demonstrates advertising's insidious transformation of language into empty signifiers.