Critical Concepts dictionary-Media Burn SF

Visting artist Darren Martin showed a short movie about an avant garde performance art group called "Media Burn". The movie centered around a spoof event orchestrated on July 4th 1975. Two "dummy artists" (as they were called) drove a cadillac into a stack of TVs. Before the actual event took place an actor dressed up like JKF did a formal speech about the importance of this event. The mock president said "The world may never understand what happened here today, but the image will never be forgotten". The speech critiqued the medias hierarchy and its ability to control the masses. The event decontextualized the 'spectacle' of mass media. For example; Darren stated that "the media takes individual events like 9/11 and completely takes them out of context by ignoring the historical events that lead up to it". Thus making an event like 9/11 seem like a spectacle and unrelated to anything.