The transformation of reality into electronic images is one of the characteristics of postmodernity. The public's fixation with television is current in today's society. Through this medium we recieve messages that mean something in some areas of our sub-conscience. The mixing of violence, love, desires, plentifulness...characterizes the allegories in which we are submerged.

News, the concrete things in this medium, are presented according to the interests of the broadcaster and the results of audience measurements, whose sophisticated methodologies are applied to know the interests of the viewers. With his provocative Polaroid snapshots, taken in his Oakland, California apartment, James Radke lets us elaborate on this phenomenon of transforming facts into sterilized images.

For the first time in recent history, a "superproduction" is made to broadcast a "real" war live. What did we watch? What was censored? To what extent was our fascination for the conflict fed by the dramatized way it was presented to us? Saddam and the children, trails of the bombs, maps of eden, among other things form this exhibit, which transmit a meticulously edited version of reality, in order to keep distance and avoid intruding into our private space, to desensibilize the viewer about wars real horror.

Juan Alberto Gaviria

February1993

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