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Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck & Media Farzin

Description

Produced by multidisciplinary artist Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck in collaboration with art historian Media Farzin, “Chronoscope, 1951, 11pm” is a 24-minute video that uses original footage from “Longines Chronoscope”, an American television program that aired between 1951 and 1955 in the US, and invited “experts in the field” to offer opinions on current affairs. The subject of the video is the nationalization of oil in Iran and its reverberations in the Western world. While the video appears to be a straightforward TV program, its source material has been heavily edited to emphasize the eerie resonances between the 1950‘s and the present. The easy-flowing sound bites reveal contradictions within the culture of political honesty and openness of the “democratic” West, exposing the mass media’s desire for instant gratification that has been a part of infotainment from its earliest moment.

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