In CNN Concatenated, death is signified by a compulsive staccato montage of words, phonemes and pauses for breath sampled from ten thousand hours of images recorded from the 24-hour news channel, all uttered by male and female presenters who are substituted one for another, in one long chain of identical links. A meta-discourse of breath and words takes force rather form in this montage, which builds the anxious rhythm of an urgent harangue, subliminal and paranoid, uttered in the first person and addressed to ’you’, a spectator that is both specific and anonymous. With its look, its stars, its round-the-clock operations, its vocabulary, its intonation and its dramaturgy, CNN is news as theatre, a theatre here infiltrated by Fast. In his pirate compilation these talking heads, stiff while reading the teleprompter but not quite actors, succeed each other on screen in accordance with a mechanical rhythm. (Elisabeth Lebovici, "From Homer to Omer Fast", Afterall)
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