Comments on: Omer Fast

Omer Fast

vronsky — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:18:13 -0800

CNN Concatenated by Om er Fast

By: clearly

clearly — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:23:14 -0800

WHAT. THE. FUCK. VRONSKY?

By: aubilenon

aubilenon — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:25:47 -0800

I don't get it.

By: shadow vector

shadow vector — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:28:30 -0800

Reminds me a little of Seen And Not Seen, somehow.

By: cashman

cashman — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:32:32 -0800

The lip smacking pauses made it.

By: Ambrosia Voyeur

Ambrosia Voyeur — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:37:39 -0800

Wild and woolly semi-automatic truck bomb. Time for us to bug out.

By: msconduct

msconduct — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:39:28 -0800

i hate youtube.

By: longsleeves

longsleeves — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:41:16 -0800

I always knew there was a hidden message.

By: languagehat

languagehat — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:42:23 -0800

In the insightful words of YouTube commenter goodwillsidis: unbelievable!!! ONE THOUSAND STARS AND A BILLION THUMBS UP! TUPAC IS THE BEST RAPPER!THUG

By: Daddy-O

Daddy-O — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:45:40 -0800

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

By: GuyZero

GuyZero — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:46:29 -0800

I thought it was awesome. The clips of breathing/mouth-opening-sounds really made it.

By: Ambrosia Voyeur

Ambrosia Voyeur — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:47:58 -0800

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.

By: furtive

furtive — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:51:09 -0800

By: vrakatar

vrakatar — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:08:54 -0800

L-l-l-ove those Blipverts!

By: Nattie

Nattie — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:11:21 -0800

Uh.

By: nola

nola — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:16:07 -0800

This is perfect. I can't get over how perfect it is.

By: mrgrimm

mrgrimm — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:17:24 -0800

Nice work. Thanks.

By: zpousman

zpousman — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:19:34 -0800

Supercuts. I think that this is kinda played, but ....

By: puke & cry

puke & cry — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:20:39 -0800

AAGHHH! I can't stand watching that for some reason.

By: loquacious

loquacious — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:21:35 -0800

This is awesome, I really like how... *eyes glaze over, jaw goes slack* MEATBOT #17349 STATUS READY AWAITING FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS

By: The Light Fantastic

The Light Fantastic — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:25:34 -0800

That was pretty damn awesome.

By: Fiasco da Gama

Fiasco da Gama — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:26:17 -0800

So this is the future. A human face stamping on youtube forever.

By: Marisa Stole the Precious Thing

Marisa Stole the Precious Thing — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:33:37 -0800

That second video was as pure and disturbing as finding a dead praying mantis in the bathroom sink.

By: TheOnlyCoolTim

TheOnlyCoolTim — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:37:35 -0800

By: nola

nola — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:43:27 -0800

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

By: OverlappingElvis

OverlappingElvis — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:52:29 -0800

Jesus, that's bleak.

By: chudmonkey

chudmonkey — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:57:04 -0800

People don't die in front of their community weblogs, right?

By: lalochezia

lalochezia — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:03:06 -0800

I saw this in a musum a few years ago and have been trying to find it since.....

By: goodnewsfortheinsane

goodnewsfortheinsane — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:22:01 -0800

All I know is that I am now fitter, happier, and more productive.

By: Herodios

Herodios — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:23:22 -0800

AAGHHH! I can't stand watching that for some reason. posted by puke & cry

By: NoMich

NoMich — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:28:22 -0800

vronsky veat: you hit that perfect beat, smalltown boy.

By: xmutex

xmutex — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:37:53 -0800

AWESOME.

By: odinsdream

odinsdream — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:49:55 -0800

The lip smacking pauses made it. Truly Robert Novak's was the best. This was great - I felt that there was something missing at the end, however.

By: knave

knave — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:53:07 -0800

Awesome. What's with all the snark in here?

By: bicyclefish

bicyclefish — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:57:07 -0800

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!

By: refrigerateafteropening

refrigerateafteropening — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 20:01:02 -0800

downright poetic

By: o0o0o

o0o0o — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 20:11:20 -0800

More like CNN pixelated, amirite?

By: Ryvar

Ryvar — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 20:25:52 -0800

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?

By: odinsdream

odinsdream — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 20:33:31 -0800

Could you imagine anything creepier than that? No.

By: sluglicker

sluglicker — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 20:45:23 -0800

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.

By: vronsky

vronsky — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 21:03:56 -0800

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."

By: kozad

kozad — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 21:11:59 -0800

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.

By: Mikey-San

Mikey-San — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 21:38:47 -0800

a pig in a cage on antibiotics.

By: longsleeves

longsleeves — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 22:25:14 -0800

Truly Robert Novak's was the best. I more enjoyed Larry King's little moment of mute fish-eyed incomprehension.

By: minifigs

minifigs — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 01:06:52 -0800

GLaDOS 2.0

By: Clay201

Clay201 — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 02:38:34 -0800

That was trippy.

By: Prospero

Prospero — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 04:20:20 -0800

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).

By: Prospero

Prospero — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 04:20:44 -0800

Oh--the first paragraph above is a quote from Ryvar--it should be in italics.

By: cjorgensen

cjorgensen — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 04:39:47 -0800

Yeah, there is a reason Max Headroom is no longer on the air. I made it Wolf Blitzer before having to stop.

By: R. Mutt

R. Mutt — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 05:25:58 -0800

I've met Omar Fast. He, and his work, kick ass.

By: R. Mutt

R. Mutt — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 05:49:26 -0800

*Omer, that is.

By: Pogo_Fuzzybutt

Pogo_Fuzzybutt — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 06:00:38 -0800

I love the fact that the "primitive organ" sentence ends with a picture of Robert Novak. That works on so many levels.

By: autodidact

autodidact — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 06:42:43 -0800

That first video was also great the first 200 times I saw random 15 year-olds do it on Youtube.

By: ersatz

ersatz — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 08:09:42 -0800

unbelievable!!! ONE THOUSAND STARS AND A BILLION THUMBS UP! TUPAC IS THE BEST RAPPER!THUG note: Everyone needs a thug.

By: R. Mutt

R. Mutt — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 08:38:54 -0800

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....