Life Copy

Life Copy is a video installation consisting of a real book about terrorism that I co-authored, alongside video footage of an internationally televised appearance on CNN performing as a “terrorism expert.” Here, I have appropriated and repurposed the commercial publishing and television news formats, exploiting the news channel’s own video cameras to document a performance. The video contains selected ads from the time of the broadcast, highlighting the absurdity of the juxtaposition of subject-matter, and emphasizing the nested layers of advertising that exist in the commercial market for information, including in the news itself. Life Copy asks the audience to confront the uncomfortable subjectivity at the heart of our reliance on media sources for the "truth" on important subjects of power politics. It may therefore be read by some as subversive—of journalism, media, commerce, the capital market for information, the capital market for art, and our understanding of the “real.”