WORKS / THE PEOPLE (2007) SERIAL PROJECT
THE PEOPLE is a transformation of civil life: an expansion of the experiments of real-time film to a panoramic new scale: the conversion of a village into a multi-location video shoot, simultaneously projected & broadcast into the public square: a retelling of the Oresteia in the age of information war and electric vengeance: a counterstrike from the culturally assaulted. The People sprang from an impulse to extend our experiments in a contemporary language for performance, in particular the ideas of everyday language and the relationship between communication, images, and actions. We imagined The People as a kind of living television; or the re-tooling of commonplace technologies and modes of dialogue (the video clip, the interview, the re-enactment) to invert the established relationship between ‘mass-media’ and private interchange. In a sense this reflects what we perceive in video-sharing sites, blogs, and new technologies— The People is an attempt to sculpt these developments into a performative action, that takes as its inspiration a foundational idea of community dialogue, the birth of democracy and equally to capture the role that ‘ordinary’ people perform in self-government.