Jason Zimmerman

The video Fair Game was crafted after many hours spent by the artist culling through over one hundred and fifty episodes of Fox Broadcasting Company’s reality-based television program COPS. In the process, all of the foot pursuit segments available in those episodes were extracted and then edited into one continuous looped sequence. The cinéma-vérité style of the originally televised footage lends itself well to this technique, as the fast-paced movement and rough-cuts of each clip seem to stream endlessly into one another. This, in effect, creates the visual suggestion that the police and their ‘perp’ are caught in a perpetual chase, a futile game of cops and robbers, or perhaps even better still, of cat and mouse. The continuous engagement of FairGame with its regular beat, resulting from the repetitive heavy breathing and foot stomping of the microphoned officers and the constant jostling of the hand-held camera eventually commits the viewer to a state of mind that’s, interestingly enough, counter to the show’s original nature. One might begin to meditate on the methods and functions of contemporary mass-media in American society, or the current and inevitable state of the prison based punitive system, rather than to submit them.

Fair Game was originally shown at Transformer Gallery in Washington, D.C. in 2005. The gallery’s storefront location— in what was at the time a very recently gentrified neighborhood made it perfect for community engagement. The video was made viewable from the street as a large scale projection, and speakers were mounted to the roof of the gallery, so that the work could be experienced trough all hours of the day and night, regardless of the established hours.

Tags: Video

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