This reminds me of Barthes... particularly his affection for the fake beards in Ivan the Terrible

A desperate western interpretation... Photoshop-Tricks of Humanism.

The opening ceremony of the games was similar, but molded on to a staged performance— really astonishing in its novelty… a special effects film production made to be performed live, not for an audience sitting in front watching a framed screen, but sitting above, hundreds of meters away. The fluid combination of media with performance showed the continuing trajectory of media art for the stage—a hugely expanded Blue Man Group, that has come so far from Laurie Anderson in spectacle to be almost unrecognizable as the same genre of performed media, combining the novelty of technology with illusionistic stage performance, reminiscent of late 1800′s stage magic.

The show ostensibly provided a science-center like chronological tour through Chinese history, beginning with reference to the recently unearthed primitive Fou drums (and also a clear lift from one of the Blue Man Group’s epitomal pieces… drums as colored light), through Chinese early history, dynasty by dynasty: courtiers, courtesans, through to a naive expo-like future of people made of energy and floating astronauts. Curiously absent was the communist revolution, but perhaps, as the only piece of history not relegated to a symbolic life—in fact the political structure promoting and housing all other symbols—it need not be represented (looking again at the images of the ceremony, I am struck by China’s lack of inhibitions against potentially fascist imagery… in the west, such a maximal transformation of the human in to the mechanical would be immediately criticized, and would work against our delusions of humanism).

Can these symbols even be pulled apart? I wonder at the comparison to both the typical American half time show, a similar array of disconnected spectacle that seems to wish to iterate, ‘America Now!’… a performance by a pop star, a marching band, a waving flag, fireworks display, some hip hop dancers, dancing girls… and to fascist pageantry: displaying a united national history as proud and linear and homogenous… a sort of techno-Riefenstahl). Certainly it points, in part, to China’s curious relationship with it’s own history… the of-empire history that was rebelled against now repackaged as the national identity of the people… it’s very Chinese. A presentation of history as linear and unifying instead of problematic would be considered severely naive now in the West— can you imagine anywhere in America but the smallest town, dressing up it’s performers in the costumes of Paul Revere and George Washington, Indians and Pilgrims, Fur Traders, and French Merchants to perform the identity of the American nation? And yet in China, as the underdog always proving its deserved importance to the world, this is a needed communication…

That is, this show was made for us, not for them.

One billion dollars of advertising to recoup is a lot of advertising. All of this without any acknowledgment of the 12 hour time difference, and, moreover, a global media which people have become accustomed to accessing without corporate controls. To prime its advertising revenue (basically to conform an all day event across the world into its age-old standard programming format of “prime time” and late-night slots) NBC decided to delay the broadcast of the opening ceremony—and much of the events—12 hours. Anyone who uses the internet for their news and sometimes media knows what happened. People figured out ways to view the events live, finding foreign feeds that had not been IP blocked as they should have been, forming ad-hoc blog and Twitter communities telling eachother how to hack the IP system or where to find unlicensed videos, which the NBC team of computer experts and lawyers chased after, sending out hundreds of thousands of take-down notices. Basically, once again, corporations made ad hoc communities of hackers out of their prime audience.

NBC are idiots.

We can only imagine the different paradigm of broadcasting that would have been given to us if Google were given the Olympics’ contract. NBC’s complete failure to understand the new paradigm is staggering. The live-ness of the broadcast is their only commodity. Recycling, delaying, copying, and commentating is something that everyone with a laptop can now do and access ubiquitously. But, for me, it having been years since I watched an Olympics broadcast, and having taken all my broadcast media from the internet the past few years, I was stunned by the antiquity of NBC’s broadcast paradigm. They seemed to beg you at every moment to turn off the TV and go searching the internet. The cacophony of boring commentators, the real dearth of camera perspectives and contextual footage, and the constant manipulative delay of events to make room for advertising, as if I couldn’t, with little effort, step around their broadcaster information dams and find out what I want… it was infuriating and reminiscent of watching my grandfather operate the remote control. What people want now is access to multiple perspectives, Live-ness, instantaneity, and a network of different commentators and communities.

It is worth noting that most of the European broadcasters—because the contractors were largely public television stations less committed to the broadcast advertising economic model—instead streamed the games live and then placed limits on this streaming so that only people in their own country (or international hackers) could access the video streams.  It seems that large corporation broadcasting—like many corporate dinosaurs—may go extinct as a result of this digital change, but public broadcasting, with its open-access ideology, is well suited to survive.