The group Ant Farm was founded to explore relations between art and architecture and denounce the rigid systems of representation prevailing in the United States. Participating in a veritable "guerrilla" movement against American media monopolies and capitalist values, Chip Lord, Doug Michels and Curtis Schreier described themselves as a kind of "art agency that promotes ideas that have no commercial potential, but which we think are important vehicles of cultural introspection".

Media Burn gives expression to this particular combat with irony and aggressiveness : in a mocking remake of the big nationalistic parades, a video-guided Cadillac from the 1960s, the "ghost of a dream car", crashes into a pyramidal wall composed of fifty television screens, which immediately burst into flames. This explosive collision between the two major symbols of American society, the automobile and the television, is one of the manifestos of the alternative video movement against the political and cultural order imposed by the dominant media.

Stéphanie Moisdon

Translated by Miriam Rosen