Omer Fast

August 12, 2008 5:18 PM

CNN Concatenated by Omer Fast
posted by vronsky (52 comments total)

WHAT.
THE.
FUCK.
VRONSKY?
posted by clearly at 5:23 PM on August 12, 2008

I don't get it.
posted by aubilenon at 5:25 PM on August 12, 2008

Reminds me a little of Seen And Not Seen, somehow.
posted by shadow vector at 5:28 PM on August 12, 2008 [1 favorite]

The lip smacking pauses made it.
posted by cashman at 5:32 PM on August 12, 2008 [1 favorite]

Wild and woolly semi-automatic truck bomb. Time for us to bug out.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 5:37 PM on August 12, 2008 [1 favorite]

i hate youtube.
posted by msconduct at 5:39 PM on August 12, 2008

I always knew there was a hidden message.
posted by longsleeves at 5:41 PM on August 12, 2008

In the insightful words of YouTube commenter goodwillsidis:

unbelievable!!! ONE THOUSAND STARS AND A BILLION THUMBS UP! TUPAC IS THE BEST RAPPER!THUG
posted by languagehat at 5:42 PM on August 12, 2008 [2 favorites]

NICE.
POST.
VRONSKY.
THIS.
IS.
INTERESTING.
YES.
clearly.
I.
AM.
CLEARLY.
MAKING.
FUN.
OF.
YOU.

posted by Daddy-O at 5:45 PM on August 12, 2008

I thought it was awesome. The clips of breathing/mouth-opening-sounds really made it.
posted by GuyZero at 5:46 PM on August 12, 2008

I like what he's doing with both works. Serene, and simple: taking a core sample of our culture of spectacle and violence, and dissolving it into mere phonemes and reconfiguring them into a darkly poetic, existential expression of the lonesome beauty that persists within the post-modern, media-saturated individual. A quaintly confessional example of the always political forms of detournement and collage.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 5:47 PM on August 12, 2008 [5 favorites]

<deep breath />
posted by furtive at 5:51 PM on August 12, 2008

L-l-l-ove those Blipverts!
posted by vrakatar at 6:08 PM on August 12, 2008

Uh.
posted by Nattie at 6:11 PM on August 12, 2008

This is perfect. I can't get over how perfect it is.
posted by nola at 6:16 PM on August 12, 2008

Nice work. Thanks.
posted by mrgrimm at 6:17 PM on August 12, 2008

Supercuts.

I think that this is kinda played, but ....
posted by zpousman at 6:19 PM on August 12, 2008

AAGHHH! I can't stand watching that for some reason.
posted by puke & cry at 6:20 PM on August 12, 2008

This is awesome, I really like how... *eyes glaze over, jaw goes slack*

MEATBOT #17349 STATUS READY AWAITING FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS
posted by loquacious at 6:21 PM on August 12, 2008 [3 favorites]

That was pretty damn awesome.
posted by The Light Fantastic at 6:25 PM on August 12, 2008

So this is the future. A human face stamping on youtube forever.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 6:26 PM on August 12, 2008 [1 favorite]

That second video was as pure and disturbing as finding a dead praying mantis in the bathroom sink.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 6:33 PM on August 12, 2008 [2 favorites]

I like what he's doing with both works. Serene, and simple: taking a core sample of our culture of spectacle and violence, and dissolving it into mere phonemes and reconfiguring them into a darkly poetic, existential expression of the lonesome beauty that persists within the post-modern, media-saturated individual. A quaintly confessional example of the always political forms of detournement and collage.

I thought the Obama rickroll was a better.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 6:37 PM on August 12, 2008 [2 favorites]

MEATBOT #17349 your instructions are as follows: go on a long rant about the evils of advertising, followed by a none sequitur about running a dope ring with Tito Puente >> END LINE
posted by nola at 6:43 PM on August 12, 2008

Jesus, that's bleak.
posted by OverlappingElvis at 6:52 PM on August 12, 2008

People don't die in front of their community weblogs, right?
posted by chudmonkey at 6:57 PM on August 12, 2008 [1 favorite]

I saw this in a musum a few years ago and have been trying to find it since.....
posted by lalochezia at 7:03 PM on August 12, 2008

All I know is that I am now fitter, happier, and more productive.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 7:22 PM on August 12, 2008 [1 favorite]

AAGHHH! I can't stand watching that for some reason.
posted by puke & cry
posted by Herodios at 7:23 PM on August 12, 2008

vronsky veat: you hit that perfect beat, smalltown boy.
posted by NoMich at 7:28 PM on August 12, 2008

AWESOME.
posted by xmutex at 7:37 PM on August 12, 2008

Awesome. What's with all the snark in here?
posted by knave at 7:53 PM on August 12, 2008

Truly Robert Novak's was the best.

You beat me to it, odinsdream. He looks so cheerful! Like he's about to start singing a children's song!
posted by bicyclefish at 7:57 PM on August 12, 2008

downright poetic
posted by refrigerateafteropening at 8:01 PM on August 12, 2008

More like CNN pixelated, amirite?
posted by o0o0o at 8:11 PM on August 12, 2008

Man. The only thing I could think while watching that video is "holy shit is there a great confrontation-with-the-evil-computer scene buried in this." Seriously - think of it. The gang of hacker misfits finally walk into the room where they confront the big evil computer and it begins speaking to them entirely in single word clips from nightly news programs.

Could you imagine anything creepier than that?
posted by Ryvar at 8:25 PM on August 12, 2008 [4 favorites]

I felt that there was something missing at the end, however.

You're right, it is an excerpt from a longer piece:

The most talked about works in the show is Omer Fast's 18-minute-long CNN Concatenated (2002). The Israel-born New Yorker and Whitney Biennial vet, who first showed at Momenta Art in Williamsburg, has culled footage from CNN and radically edited it together into what sounds like poetry -- much of it like the angst-ridden stuff teenagers write. "Just get near me already you hypocritical opportunist fake phony con-artist sell-out lip-serving limousine-liberal white chickenshit motherfucker!" says one amazingly spliced together passage, in which each word jumps from a different newscaster's mouth. The increasingly mesmerizing, seven-part tape hectors the viewer about its own importance and his or her shallowness, weakness, hypocrisy and self-absorption. [Sherry Wong]

Although that's sensational, the poetry from this two-minute clip made me shiver:

Listen to me! I want to tell you something. Come closer. Don't be upset and don't get emotional. Just get near me and pay attention, please? Look, I know that you're scared. I know what you're afraid of. You mistrust your body. Lately, it has been looking more and more foreign. It's been doing strange things. You suspect that it has been keeping something from you. That knowledge of your own death is already programmed inside it somehow, that it's stored in a primitive organ, that in between the crush of blood and digestion, your appendix or spleen sits obliviously still like an overgrown traffic island keeping watch over a terrible secret. You worry that this knowledge will arrive at your very last moment, not as a spiritual revelation accompanied by an overwhelming cascade of sensations, but as a very public and vulgar betrayal. You're afraid of dying alone, but you're even more terrified of dying in public. Look, it's not happening at this very moment, perhaps not as long as you listen and watch. People don't die in front of their televisions. In the meantime, we could probably do something about it together. I could tell you exactly what to expect. I could explain using precise words and heartbreaking imagery.

Nice post, vronsky. Thanks.
posted by sluglicker at 8:45 PM on August 12, 2008 [6 favorites]

Yeah the youtube is mistitled Sluglicker, thanks for the link, I emailed Cortex to fix it.

"I have never seen ‘CNN Concatenated’ in it’s entirety. I have only seen clips that sometimes appear on YouTube, often mislabeled, as this one is introduced as "CNN Concentrated".

For the record, I had to look up "concatenated" which is a computer programming term meaning: the operation of joining two character strings end to end."
posted by vronsky at 9:03 PM on August 12, 2008

Quite a variety of opinions on this, more so than on the usual metafilter link.

Personally, I am now a Fast fan. The juxtaposition of CNN reporting with an unsettling visceral message is powerful, and not coincidentally makes a point about the relentless fear-mongering that is the red meat of journalism.
posted by kozad at 9:11 PM on August 12, 2008 [1 favorite]

a pig

in a cage

  on antibiotics.
posted by secret about box at 9:38 PM on August 12, 2008

Truly Robert Novak's was the best.

I more enjoyed Larry King's little moment of mute fish-eyed incomprehension.
posted by longsleeves at 10:25 PM on August 12, 2008

GLaDOS 2.0
posted by minifigs at 1:06 AM on August 13, 2008

That was trippy.
posted by Clay201 at 2:38 AM on August 13, 2008

The only thing I could think while watching that video is "holy shit is there a great confrontation-with-the-evil-computer scene buried in this."

Not quite the same, but this technique is actually used in Live Free or Die Hard in a videotape that announces an impending terrorist attack (though there the footage is of presidents, not newscasters).
posted by Prospero at 4:20 AM on August 13, 2008

Oh--the first paragraph above is a quote from Ryvar--it should be in italics.
posted by Prospero at 4:20 AM on August 13, 2008

Yeah, there is a reason Max Headroom is no longer on the air. I made it Wolf Blitzer before having to stop.
posted by cjorgensen at 4:39 AM on August 13, 2008

I've met Omar Fast. He, and his work, kick ass.
posted by R. Mutt at 5:25 AM on August 13, 2008

*Omer, that is.
posted by R. Mutt at 5:49 AM on August 13, 2008

I love the fact that the "primitive organ" sentence ends with a picture of Robert Novak. That works on so many levels.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 6:00 AM on August 13, 2008

That first video was also great the first 200 times I saw random 15 year-olds do it on Youtube.
posted by autodidact at 6:42 AM on August 13, 2008

unbelievable!!! ONE THOUSAND STARS AND A BILLION THUMBS UP! TUPAC IS THE BEST RAPPER!THUG

note: Everyone needs a thug.
posted by ersatz at 8:09 AM on August 13, 2008

Artnet: The Jerusalem-born, Berlin-based artist Omer Fast has won the Whitney Museum’s munificent Bucksbaum Award for 2008, a prize that comes with a $100,000 purse and an exhibition at the museum....
posted by R. Mutt at 8:38 AM on August 13, 2008