(6:30)

     All the video clips here were scanned from basic cable TV, using only a DVR and a desktop computer, during the week of 15-22 January 2006.  All were complied and re-edited to re-tell a story of the enormous pressures of being ‘female’, and coming of age in a visual world filled with extreme, violent, conflicting, and exploitive images.  It is a simple approach of appropriation and remix.  From it, however, grew the formation of my much deeper brand of critical, surreal, media ethnography.

     Indeed, much of TV looks like this because this video is actual TV.  Indeed, we see content like this every day.  Only now through critical ethnographic montage, its exploitative intention is purposefully up-ended, distanced, redeemed, liberated.

     And so at first glance, you’ll find very little new here.  What is new, however, is the ability to use our ubiquitous media tools to re-interrogate, re-fragment and re-function an insistently re-mediated world. 

     With this video I began to see for myself that through only individual effort, with simple tools and for one’s own personal reflexive understanding and consumption, we can purposely begin to unveil the power of media images... which is something words alone (and standard media critique) simply cannot do.