A month or so ago I promised comedy for my next postings; even if this wasn’t what I’d envisioned, I think it still qualifies:
Lumiere or Melies? Discuss.
Seriously though... “Speculative news” goes at least as far back as Alfred Jarry’s The Passion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race (a conceit later borrowed by J.G. Ballard for his The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race). Subject-wise, this Tiger Woods car crash video, produced by Hong Kong-based Next Media, lacks the sacrilege of the Jarry or Ballard pieces; whatever shock effect the video carries is in the hilarity of its visual imagination and as a queasy portent of things to come. In my new media critical studies course we spend one day on readings and discussion about Photoshop, video compositing, and photographic truth-value; while students are generally moderate when it comes to the ethics of altered images, I come away with a sadness that they’ve never known a time when questions of photography’s truth-value were NOT met with cynicism or believed to be naïve. So why am I not upset with this video? Perhaps if it were something of real consequence, rather than a professional golfer being chased in his Cadillac SUV by his golf-club wielding wife through their gated community outside of Orlando, my attitude would be different. Maybe this is just the treatment the story deserves? Unless of course R. Kelly is available for some more hip-hopera...
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