Munich, Germany
Mission Title: Watching Ourselves Being Watched - Earth TV
Mission By: Gianmarco Castiello, Luca Serafino
Mission Finished on Date: 26-06-2008
SCRIPT
- Reach Munich and visit Earth TV studios.
- Meet the director of the project, Thomas M. Hohenacker, and let him explain you the whole concept behind it: when did the project start, and why? How is it structured and how does it work?
- Earth TV website states that the aim of its mission is to "bring the world together LIVE on television as it evolves day by day, hour by hour – in all of its diversity and beauty": how does the projects express this objective? What kind of places is it focused on? How places are chosen? What do the "personal cameras" shoot, what kind of events are they interested in?
- Delve into the relationship between the network and its users: this is a really collaborative project, is it based on users' ideas too, or they're just viewers? Ask people who work for Earth TV if they think they're offering a cultural service or if they're working only in filling screens at dentist offices.
- Ask Thomas M. Hohenacker how does he expect his project to interface with other media, and how it will affect them?
- Is it offensive to use landscape, human and natural, inoffensively? Is creating "content" without content just another way of keeping us from self
- reflection? Are they offering a service? Do they think they're offering a service or are the honest about their role as mere "filler"?
TRAVEL BAG
How does visual "content" affect our perception of landscape outdoors and non-spaces in-doors?
In hotel lobbies, elevators, doctor office waiting rooms, and on hold for any number of corporations, the classic string arrangements of Muzak attempted to calm your potential aggression, ease the pain of waiting, and above all inoffensively fill empty space. Muzak above all is music for non-spaces to please everyone, and, of course, therefore ends up pleasing no one.
With the proliferation of television screens everywhere from the classic spaces of muzak to train stations and buses, bars and lounges, a new niche has opened up. Filling the emptiness with sound is no longer sufficient, we now need equally inoffensive images to fill the countless screens that when not selling us products we generally don't need are keeping us from getting bored but without actually entertaining us. Enter Earth TV, with a system of cameras that would make Big Brother proud. But rather than stocking up footage for panoptical control, Earth TV merely shoots landscape, and lots of it. From Hong Kong to Times Square, Glacier Park to Gay Paris, hundreds of cameras all over the world, shoot the passing traffic and drinking deer. 24-7-365. One might think this a creepy level of surveillance, but instead it's creepy for a whole another reason: it's quiet, insistent way of filling empty time with noncommittal landscape.
