The project’s title is a reference to a series of lectures by Gene Youngblood, a media theoretician and one of the first to recognise video art as a new art form. In Secession From The Broadcast, Youngblood postulates separating oneself from the dominating culture of broadcasting. He expresses the view that private media are an even better way to control society than national media because they appear to be neutral. This ostensible transparency of private media allows it to normalise the values and views of the dominating class. This is why Youngblood considers liberal democracy to be a fiction masking an oligarchic system. Bujak proposes a radical separation from mass culture and encourages belief in utopia. According to the artist, the revolutionary desire to change the system is not naïve – it is only portrayed this way by broadcast culture.
In his work, Bujak distances himself from soft forms of anarchism (or post-anarchism) and embraces a more radical approach. TV sets slipped out of their boxes, tempting with the fulfilment of middle-class dreams and aspirations, and changed the existing manner of information flow, most importantly by socialising it. The new form of information distribution proposed by Bujak turns the consumer into the decision-maker – not only freely administering content but also broadcasting it. Declarations of ‘the end of the old television’ and ‘new-generation devices’ are yet another context of the work. At the same time, the artist’s gesture targeted the art world which, according to him, has became fabricated – it focuses mostly on the distribution of the content of a given artist and allows the fetishisation of the art object. This, in turn, handicaps and reverses the evolution of art. For this reason, Bujak used ready-made objects for the publication accompanying the exhibition, minimising production costs. Instead of ordering new artbooks, the artists simply photocopied pages from the publication. In the zine, we can also find TV manuals, graphs presenting how the receivers work, and TV test screens besides Youngblood’s texts. These technical diagrams are a form of protest against the inherent sensuality of advertisement.
