<nettime> MDK Confronts Corporate Control of Media

[US Department of Art & Technology <press@usdept-arttech.net>]

US Department of Art & Technology
http://www.usdept-arttech.net
press@usdept-arttech.net

Press Secretary
For Immediate Release:  June 3, 2003


MDK CONFRONTS CORPORATE CONTROL OF MEDIA

WASHINGTON, DC - The US Department of Art & Technology is today 
announcing its plans to release the Media Deconstruction Kit (MDK) in 
response to an ideologically fractured Federal Communications 
Commission vote to eliminate media ownership rules.

"We will confront corporate control of mass media," Secretary Packer 
stated outside his office in Washington, DC, "so that a new century 
is spared new horrors of CNN - the issue Americans should care most 
about. We will appropriate with magisterial fearlessness, 
transforming CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News into magical images, and bring 
about the systematic reordering of the senses through the 
deconstruction of live, broadcast media."

US DAT intends to distribute the Media Deconstruction Kit among 
performance artists throughout the nation, who will manipulate media 
coverage of the national election beginning with the Washington 
primary in January of 2004. By providing instantaneous access to 
live, broadcast media - and the ability to act upon it - the Media 
Deconstruction Kit transforms the one-way paradigm of broadcast media 
into many-to-many forms of interaction by leveling the playing field 
between medium and viewer.

The MDK will enable artists to remix live news stories,TV sitcoms, 
stock market quotations, manifestos, advertising - scramble 
fabricated news in with actual news broadcasts - and put the altered 
matter out on the Net. The Department believes these techniques could 
swamp the mass media with total illusion.

Trace Reddell, Under Secretary for the Bureau of Pharmakogeographical 
Surveying, advocates systems of varied media ambiences "diverting 
[mass media] from its current roadmap to manufactured similitude 
through an hallucinatory recycling of composted media content."

US DAT and the Experimental Party are now rallying the nation's 
experimental artists, including newly appointed Under Secretary for 
the Bureau of the Aesthetic Hyperculture DJ Spooky, to prepare for 
the virtualization of medial space in 2004.

For additional information:

The US Department of Art & Technology
http://www.usdept-arttech.net

The US Department of Art and Technology is the United States 
principal conduit for facilitating the artist's need to extend 
aesthetic inquiry into the broader culture where ideas become real 
action. It also serves the psychological and spiritual well-being of 
all Americans by supporting cultural efforts that provide immunity 
from the extension of new media technologies into the social sphere.

The Experimental Party
http://www.experimentalparty.org

The Experimental Party - the "party of experimentation" -  is an 
artist-based political party that has been formed to activate 
citizens across the country in an effort to bring the artists' 
message to center stage of the political process. This is a political 
awakening, 'representation through virtualization' is the major 
political thrust of the Experimental Party, it is the driving force.

Contact: Press Secretary of the US Department of Art & Technology
press@usdept-arttech.net

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