Michael Jackson Motorcade

2014

Single Channel video. A compilation of news footage and citizen-filmed video taken from YouTube. 6 minutes 7 Seconds. Collection of the Artist.

Materials: single channel video played on a collection of recycled televisions.

Michael Jackson Motorcade is a collection of silent videos taken by pedestrians on the motorcade route filming from their digital cameras and cell phones. Also collected is footage from TV News stations filming the motorcade from helicopters and bridges. Michael Jackson’s death, which dominated Western news June 2009. Not since the death of Princess Diana had a celebrity’s passing created such a media spectacle as the King of Pop.

“As twenty-first century cellphones enable the acts of participating, observing, and reporting to overlap in unprecedented ways (and among unprecedented numbers of people), are we more akin to the performer or the masses? Viewing these works in the comfort of an Antipodean gallery, our geographic distance from the subjects may be great, but we each hold unique emotional and ethical positions in relation to these same subjects. In the context of this globally-networked terrain, the identity of the foreign correspondant and the ‘situation’ they report on fold into one another, and the clarity between us/not us collapses. Who is the citizen reporter? Are they us, and are we them?”

Excerpt taken from the essay ‘Other People’s Problems’ by curator Emma Ng. Published by Enjoy Public Art Gallery for the exhibition ‘The Screen’, 2014.