HISS-CLICK... (CNBC report) From the Rhode Island School of Design, spawning ground for the Talking Heads, comes Emergency Broadcast Network. Who can forget George Bush intoning Queen's immortal stadium chant "We Will Rock You"? It was an historic moment. If you were a U2 fan, you may have thought they were video stylists for U2, but hardcore adepts know them as a cult in their own right.
EBN's self-titled video release on TVT Records combines video and audio samples of Bush, Clinton, Dan and Marilyn Quayle, Dan Rather, Mariah Carey, Harrison Ford, and other simulacra, and over an acid beat, gets them shouting out in rhythms that would do James Brown proud. This is soundbite soul, video cacophony that you can dance to.
The power of this slice & dice bite-o'-life comes from three RISD grads--Joshua Pearson, Gardner Post and Ron O'Donnell--armed with hour-upon-hour of VHS VCR tapes, a Roland W-30 sampler/sequencer and their primary addiction: shooting the curl...
JOSHUA PEARSON: Absolutely!
GARDNER POST: It's great! Channel surfing is one of our primary inspirations... as well as one of our main methods of procurement.
JP: It really came about for us with the advent of cable television itself, in the early 80's. We were among the first to subscribe and have been happy customers ever since.
GP: I don't think it would have been as easy to do if it weren't for the infra-red remote, as well. I've been told that there are statistics that men channel surf more, and quicker, than women.
HISS-CLICK... (public access vanity show of self-absorbed monologist)
Most of the time it's no more than an itchy trigger finger to scratch the irritation of your limited ability to access the information flow in the ether of waves about you. Ask almost every girlfriend of every guy-with-remote-to-cable and her frustrated sigh will surely be something to the effect "Why can't we watch just one show?"
How do you answer her? How can you explain that it's not just one channel that interests you? That each station represents a parallel universe and if you could only see them all at once, you might, just might, be able to see The Pattern. If you could somehow jack into the flow... And, of course, she will give you that pained look that says: "So why don't you check into a nice rehab for a while?"
Nevertheless, you persist. Time compression and jump cuts give the perspective of Marcel Duchamp and the Dada-o's randomizing art through the "exquisite corpse," kicking off the cut-up craze before handing the ball off to Brion Gysin & Bill Burroughs for recontexturalization and on to Nam June Paik to pump the images into computer memories and find the finger on the pulse of history as the thumb on the select button.
Soundbite electroculture blurs the chain of talking heads streams a sentence as an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters screams out a Burmese ketchack when their script of Hamlet falls out of the void.
HISS-CLICK... (Mind Extension University, "Postmodern Criticism as Theoretical Physics")
The comparison between Chaos Theory and television is that there are logical principles behind the idea of the spontaneous generation of order out of turbulence and finding order in a random sampling of news items. Energy whorls spin out of the non-regular stream and the self-similarity replicates this event down to microcosmic detail, as in the Mandelbrot series.
Consider the concept of cable TV, then, as a tube of rushing optical/audio data under pressure. To increase the flow is to stress the images one against another until the critical threshold is passed and it breaks up into whorls called turbulence. To follow this to its conclusion, if channel surfing is the steady-state of the medium, then turbulence comes when you stop on one show and spiral into its system.
JP: Let me get this straight: the program itself is turbulence? Hmmm... As in Chaos Theory, perhaps, our method for coming up with these compositions is not one specific method. It can also be a random succession of events that leads us to certain conclusions that make us produce one composition this way and another totally differently.
HISS-CLICK... (PBS affiliate, Bill Moyers' Journal: "The Science of the Mind")
Every time I play with the set, I try to line up as many words and phrases together as possible, just for the bizarre fun of it.
JP: That was one of the early experiments we performed. We actually would be recording, instead of flipping channels we would pause and record as fast as you possibly could. That way you would get a similar effect to surfing as fast as you could.
Moments where everything all comes together without prior planning?
GP: Oh yeah! All the time! I mean, the whole story behind the "Lawrence Welk Is Dead/Elvis Presley" thing was kind of strange where the sequence of events--Lawrence Welk died after we produced the piece--and then other politicians started mentioning Welk and Elvis as well, like Perot and Al Gore.
And Johnny Carson? Did I hear Carson's voice coming out of George Bush's mouth?
JP: No. That was George Bush.
Are aural hallucinations a common complaint form EBN overexposure?
GP: Yes. [heh heh] We're studying these effects carefully.
Is that why "Lawrence Welk is Dead" is the only video to have "The End" at the end? Is that because this is the end of Lawrence Welk?
JP: We can't be sure.
Not as long as the signal doesn't degenerate too much in continued reproduction, right?
JP: Oh, we're always recycling bits from other tapes and recycling things we've already finished.
GP: It's an ongoing operation and all the results aren't in yet so we can't come to any conclusions.
More and more you guys are sounding like scientists regarding a petri dish of coagulating cultures. Do you see yourselves like that?
JP: Well, in the way that we like to make an unusual product and test it on our audience.
GP: The most surprising result is that people have been thanking us. As if people have felt manipulated by television for so long that they're just thanking us for, perhaps, reprocessing it and taking control of it ourselves. People are just so grateful for what we do and, for us, it just seemed to us to be a normal thing to do--sort of a natural thing to manipulate this barrage of media that comes in and overwhelms us everyday.
JP: But we also recommend regular exercise and a balanced diet as well.
HISS-CLICK... (CNBC continued)
"Emergency Broadcast Network--or EBN--is an alternative video, music and performance production company which specializes in the development of advanced audio/visual display systems which are used for the live performance of EBN material. These performances create a high-impact barrage of fully-integrated video/music created from network television sound bites and presented with the aid of specially-designed delivery systems..."
"The inspiration behind EBN was the marketing techniques of major corporations. We decided to get with the corporate audio- visual display style; we just increased the volume as much as we could." --Joshua Pearson. [footage of the Parallax Corporation psychological evaluation test film from the 1974 film The Parallax View]
HISS-CLICK... (PBS Special, Law & the Arts)
However, what one man calls collage, another calls copyright infringement. The case of rap music is well-known for the measures of old records ending up as the mainstay behind new ones. But what of the case of Image Piracy?
JP: We honestly don't see what we do as theft and robbery. We pay for cable service; we pay for the VCR; we pay for the tape we record on. The airwaves should be free; they're just particles traveling through space. We have the capability to drag them in-- why not use them? We're also not repackaging MTV and selling it. We're making something genuinely new. GP: A valid critique. This is our form of artwork.