Television and the moving image have long shaped our perception of dramatic events such as conflicts, and at the same time they are an antecedent of how and if such events happen. The script of Who, What, Where, When, Why and How, focuses on the way in which similar speeches and political rhetoric – declarations of peace or preemptive war – have been repeated and reused by numerous governments across continents and through the decades, to justify acts of state sanctioned violence.
Mirroring real press briefings, the live address will be filmed and photographed concurrently. The resulting footage will used as the basis for a subsequent video piece. The obvious cameras presence is fundamentally connected with the ways in which press statements are constructed for the template of television and current affairs programmes for which they are designed to be disseminated and which in turn shape political and social reality.
About the artists
Rod Dickinson's work explores ideas of belief and social control. Using detailed research regarding moments of the past and present, he has made a series of meticulously re-enacted events that represent both the mechanisms that enable belief, and the social systems that underpin much human behaviour. His previous works include a recreation of Stanley Milgram’s infamous 1961 social psychology experiment Obedience to Authority (The Milgram Re-enactment, 2002), and a recreation of the media surrounding a bomb attack on Greenwich Observatory in 1894 (Greenwich Degree Zero, 2006).
The script Who, What, Where, When, Why and How is co-written by Steve Rushton, a writer and co-founder of Signal:Noise, a research project about the pervasive role of feedback mechanisms in contemporary culture.