Recycle the dead!
The long heralded death rattle of printed news has at last arrived. In the past year, the industry has purged thousands of staffers as advertising revenues dissolve. Armed security personnel line the halls of top-flight magazine offices to prevent newly fired photo assistants from looting "fashion closets," while the publishers of once decadent media fiefdoms shake their withered fists at the heavens.
If printed news is dead, let this be a funerary monument! But let it also be a cryonic freeze chamber, whose Utopian logic points toward the resuscitation and recycling of the terminal body. The New York Moon, an experimental art and journalism publication founded in 2007, offers a proposal to these ends.
Inverting the atrophied approach of converting static print reports into "interactive" or "multimedia" products for the web, the Moon's projects originate on the internet, but threaten to take mutant, physical form in the real world. This month it may appear as a monumental newsprint tombstone, and the next it may emerge as a barely audible broadcast rumbling from an unseen speaker system in a deserted alleyway.
In content as well as form, the reports gathered in this exhibition dig up and reanimate necrotic media. Whether proposing to reconstitute biological material from the East River into an ultra-utilitarian, synthetic fish or using an abandoned subway tunnel as a musical amplification device, they investigate how to make sense of the present and future with "dead" tools. The ancient, ghostly audio data of sand dunes in Liwa, UAE are digitally recorded, reprocessed, and represented; the crumbling cultural regime of luxury restaurants is converted into depression-friendly, corporate sponsored eateries.
It is not sufficient to simply exhume the old. The Moon is anachronistic in style but obsessed with the long view. As correspondent Nick Calvero notes in his proposal for a wax museum depicting a stock exchange floor in the midst of economic collapse:
"It is difficult to figure out just what is a credit default swap today — by next week, my mind will have permanently evacuated itself of something so abstruse. To remember, we need a monument to what John Kenneth Galbraith called the 'seminal lunacy' that seems to sweep over people every few generations."
Then let this pile of dead trees be such a monument, engraved with the epitaph "Remember the Future!" CARPE FUTURUM!
- The NY Moon, 2009