Paloma Schnitzer
Feed and Famine is a project born from the difficulty of creating art within a socio-political context where any act of production risks feeding the very system it seeks to critique.
The installation constructs a closed circuit: a smartphone scrolling through images of famine in Palestine, appearing on social media feeds; a surveillance camera capturing the screen; and a monitor re-displaying and enlarging the signal. Within this loop, images are continuously mediated, never encountered directly.
“Feed” refers both to the production and to the continuous flow of images that structures contemporary experience, suggesting nourishment while operating through extraction, selection, and control. Set against this, “famine” names a human-made condition, pointing to systems of production and distribution that actively generate scarcity, and raising the question of how such conditions are sustained and fed by the same media apparatus that circulates their images.
Emerging from ideas of destruction and failure — “Die Zeit für Neuigkeiten ist vorbei” — the work turns attention toward the set of devices that present a mediated reality that society often tries to ignore.
Paloma Schnitzer — Feed and Famine
Die Zeit für Nettigkeiten ist vorbei — Summer 2024
Feed and Famine is a project born from the difficulty of creating art within a socio-political context where any act of production risks feeding the very system it seeks to critique.
The installation constructs a closed circuit: a smartphone scrolling through images of famine in Palestine, appearing on social media feeds; a surveillance camera capturing the screen; and a monitor re-displaying and enlarging the signal. Within this loop, images are continuously mediated, never encountered directly.
“Feed” refers both to the production and to the continuous flow of images that structures contemporary experience, suggesting nourishment while operating through extraction, selection, and control. Set against this, “famine” names a human-made condition, pointing to systems of production and distribution that actively generate scarcity, and raising the question of how such conditions are sustained and fed by the same media apparatus that circulates their images.
Emerging from ideas of destruction and failure — “Die Zeit für Neuigkeiten ist vorbei” — the work turns attention toward the set of devices that present a mediated reality that society often tries to ignore.
CTR Monitor, iphone and surveillance camera. Variable dimentions.
