PUNCH ME BEOGRAD - 2013

"PUNCH ME BEOGRAD" INTERNATIONAL TRIENNIAL OF EXTENDED MEDIA 2013

A CERTAIN DEGREE OF FICTION. 'Schematic' is the key-word for the new pieces Dragot proposes in his participation of the most recent edition of International Triennial of Extended Media 2013. Beograd. By 'schematic' ,one has to understand the essential outcome of an information, the reduction to the purest single element , the 'graphical' outlines of an image or the retransformation of the specific into a prototype form of decrypting in order to be more easily read by a larger group of people. More easily read and looked at or the way comics or cartoons function. Not only does Dragot turns his attention to a larger group of people by using the technique of cartoon but in this specific case to the most fragile part of it:the children. Dragot ,once again, deals with the daily information which reaches us in succeeding "waves" of images, good and bad news(preferably bad because it does better feed our voracious appetite for sensation and thriller-like kicks , camouflaged banalities or one-hour scandals which often tend to disappear before they really destroy reputations . Media are the most powerful predators on our small planet and media travel at the speed of media.It has its own logic.The other thing with media is that it exists as data or pure information and that it doesn't make any distinction between 'good 'or 'bad' ingredients. Only the reader does put the ethical full stop here. And the reader has to be protected or needs a certain kind of immunity in order to surf beyond risk.Because surfing is risky business and that is probably part of the message the artist wants us to understand. Because this daily 'tsunami' or non-stop flow of information is larger than we ,as adults,can digest and one does not need to be introduced in contemporary human behavior to understand that copy-cat attitudes often lead to exponential dramas such as high school shootings or 'hidden' agendas for group suicides (as was the case in Japan a couple of years ago).The point is often children are badly hit by the wrong contents.They simply are incapable to de-contectextualize and put it in a rational perspective. Fragilised people pay a great deal of attention towards the slightest change in the media and are as such more easily exploited.We all were introduced in the subtle strategies sooner or later.Part of growing up.. The artist has been gradually selecting images from the web .Images (stills and cellular videoshots) depicting "indoor" violence .Images which were meant to be consulted and commented by the same sort of people that throw them on this insiders 'stage'. This information, because of its illigal and illicit content is often taken off the web (read censored) under governmental or corporate pressure.It could indeed lead to embarassing incidents between governments or stimulate massive crowds in the streets if well conducted. In this endless stream of visual data ,the artist has saved and selected on 'You Tube' a small series of brutal videostills where Greek policemen were forcing Roma or Albanian youngsters (2 young men) to hit each other in the face harder and harder, under the amused eyes of the servicemen which are supposed to represent the law and order of a respectable member of the European Union.The cellular shots make one think of the pop song and videopiece "True Faith" once realised by New Order in the 80's where in some sort of choreography people were hitting each other in the face..or less popular the performance "Rythm 0 1974"by Marina Abramovic where she assigned a passive role to herself, with the public being the force which would act on her and gradually use more and more violence against her, enjoying the kick of the forbidden.. The You Tube images Dragot luckily saved(before they were removed) were not intended as a popsong neither as an artistic performance but where filmed by policemen with their private cell-phones and shortly after flung on the internet as the worst taste trophies imaginable .These youngsters were publicly exposed in a merciless orgy of cruelty. Now the information is one thing, treating the information is another thing,treating the information in an intelligent and emotionally balanced artwork is a completely different mission. Dragot started to select the crude 'matter' or 'matière première'(found footage on the net) and to sculpt it socially and artistically in order to slide it in collective memory by a rather fresh and funny (read cynical) strategy.Turning them into cartoons.. Doing so ,he manages to expand the dialogue towards a larger group of society . He refuses to pinpoint the artwork as the next cheap sensational micro scandal in the over-and-done-with academy of shock.(dating form the period BC read "before Crisis"). He devoids the sequence of images (selected stills from the shock video posted) of any recognisable realistic detail and turns the reality into a certain degree of fiction:a cartoon which transposes the action on a different level.Thus the artist decides to vehiculise the information into this fragile target we call children . Children are confronted with violence to an up-to-now unknown degree (useless to draw the lifelong list of video-games,movies,ads,newsflashes not to forget the most subtle of all: reality and needless to say that heaps of books treat this rather spooky subject and discussion panels turn in circles circumventing the real topic:the measurable impact of violence on the mind of the exposed child). Here in the Tirana Museum Dragot has draw huge size stills in a cartoon-like sequence of 6 or 8 images , life size, that is to say the average size of a just-not-teenager . The drawnings (stills sequence) on the wall are emptied of their short historical dimension of a drama which happened in protected police quarters in some capital city (Dragot says" it could be anywhere" .The kids only find the black outlines. On the floor of the museum ,lots of little boxes of 'multi-talent pencil' or wax crayons in a predefined range of colours. The piece is a large sort of "colorbook" and the children have to color in the various segments of the drawings as shown in the pinned up example.. A couple of schoolclasses are invited in the afternoon to color on the walls of this museum, and in the evening ,the piece is shown to the larger public. Has the violence been hidden or substracted out of the raw material (you tube cellular phone videos) and softened in order to protect the children or is the ultimate goal of the art project to accustom the kids to little doses of violence and maybe rediscover the true content?And where is that true content? It seems that the freshly and "disney colored" drawings warn us seriously for the highly manipulated way in which encapsulated violence might reach us since all violence is not visual,but rather subtly merchandised and consumable even for the most innocent sweeny toddlers. Extremely important is the fact that the artist has not forgotten the origin of his found footage and in an adjacent space,the visitor is confronted by the rawness and brutality of the lift off images for the project.The adult side of the piece?The true content? The visitor indeed goes the other way round just as the salmon swims up the river and therefore the result is much harder to take in.Black and white becomes color and color becomes video. This wake-up is directed to the conscience of the adult and leaves him critically behind with it..vision and sound this time.. koen wastijn november 2009.