BREAKING NEWS. ICONOPLASMA
The cliché represented by the pose and the visual construction of a media communicator seems to function more efficiently when we have to do with a consistent public, ready to be “informed”.
There are a number of procedures and practices that are applied “professionally” by the news anchors in order to bring the audience to a good understanding of the message, of the piece of information that is deemed “news”.
The vertical posture of the body, with a straight backbone, the eyes wide open looking the viewer right in the eyes, the perfect pronunciation are but a few means (or techniques) used to penetrate the public, to convince the viewer about the importance of the moment, about the wide range and gravity of the news item.
The switch proposed in this project is a poetic one, a sort of “what if...” The moments in which the body functions overcome the rational, the conscience, those moments of “breathe” or “rest” are those which transfigure the speakers making them more human, more vulnerable, very much like their target public. Thus, a piece of news is not pure statistics anymore; it becomes a form of remembrance, of meditation, perhaps of pain and sufferance. A Zen state of mind.
Of course, this is not only unlikely, but quasi-impossible; however, something understandable after all. This is effectively about a “profession”, about a necessary service brought to a certain type of manipulation.
And, if there are a number of “actors” who are sometimes touched by an “emotional state”, this is something that doesn’t appear as necessarily natural. Moreover, such a situation would leave the viewer (the perceiver) with a strong sense of improvisation, of theatricality-in the pejorative sense of the term-therefore bringing the although vital information to a sort of desubstantialization, firstly making it a farce and then transforming it into a simple residual sign.
This will lead us to consider-at the most-only the dystopic dimension of a presupposed “state of grace” in which a piece of news can also bring pain.
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