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Visit People's Park Plinth

Being Boring

08/10/2004
joachim

No Playstation. No TV. Real Life. For a week.

‘Being Boring’ an evolutive net.film by Fran Ilich.

The story is quite simple: 2 girls lose their TV so they have to find a life of their own until the TV is repaired, which will take at least a week. A week without Telenovelas, without MTV, without the Discovery Channel, without Big Brother, without TV ads, without talk shows, without Coca-Cola ads, no world news updates, no dream cars to win, no money to cash in, and worse, all those full days with nothing to do.

Fran Ilich – novelist, filmmaker, media-artist, director of the narrative media seminar of the Universidad Internacional de Andalucia, in Sevilla (Spain), and curator of borderhack showing here an evolutive net.film that deals with addiction.

Episode 1, opens with a ‘We have to find a life’ statement. They try to re-invent their own time using various strategies. They call emergency numbers to find out if someone can help them, share their last valium. Become tourists in their own town, run like Athenian athletes and they inhale canned air to overcome their huge boredom. Chatting on the internet even leads them to the idea of making the ‘revolution of media’ as they call it, with nothing to revolutionize, no manifesto, just by pressing the ‘enter’ key on their keyboards and wearing ‘the revolution will not be televised’ and ‘psychic TV’ t-shirts.

When watching these girls trying their best to deal with their TV addiction, and voting to choose what will happen next, one cannot help but think about the Real TV dimension of the 17 films. Nothing to do means nothing to see, Fran Illitch invites the visitor to share the girls’ idleness.

As Fabrice Richard said in a recent interview: “A high dose of TV would make a fool out of anybody. These young girls are TV junkies. And drugs have always been a way of escaping a boring everyday life. But what is the point in showing young good-for-nothing girls crying about the absence of their television? Is the answer to be found in the artist warning us (at the beginning) that the work’s title is, Being Boring?”

The story is bathed in an excess and juvenile hysteria, dealing with a monumental fiasco, for they cannot bypass their TV addiction. They finally find themselves in front of the reparation store waiting for dawn to come, for their TV to come back home, and for their nightmare to end.

Other net.films by Fran Ilich can be found at http://delete.tv/net.films. Fran is currently curating the exhibition ‘another narrative is possible!’ at the Centro multimedia del Centro Nacional de las artes, http://www.cenart.gob.mx/html/cmmp.html in Mexico City.

Fabrice Richard is an ex-student of the “political sciences”school. He is studying about art’s relationship with its environment, and is running towards a “specialised studies” diploma dealing with the cultural policies of towns.