Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship - autonomous ...

artificial hells
Artur Żmijewski, Them, 2007, video still
collective identifi cation, the role of images in forging these identifi cations,
as well as a harsh parable about social antagonisms and the facility with
which ideological differences become hardened into irresolvably blocked
patterns of communication.
The genealogy for this type of performance work is complex. On the
one hand it bears a strong relationship to the contemporaneous emergence
of reality television, a genre that evolved from the demise of documentary
TV and the success of US tabloid TV in the 1990s. 21 Like reality television,
it also has roots in a longer tradition of observational documentary, mock-
documentary and performative documentary that emerged in the 1960s and
Artur Żmijewski, Them, 2007, video still
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