Talking Back to the Media was a manifestation that took place in Amsterdam during november 1985. It focussed on the media and its influence and how artist reacted to this influence. In september 2013 LIMA and de Appel arts centre started with the archiving and conservation of the '85 manifest Talking Back to the Media.
UPDATE RESEARCH MAY 2014
David Garcia: The basis of the experiment was: Can you produce an event for a city where all the basic platforms of mass media are combined so that the artist's media-presence has an equivalent impact to corporate and state media?'
As one of the initiators and together with Raul Marroquin the co-creator of the concept, David Garcia was an important person to contact for our research on Talking Back to the Media. David lives in the United Kingdom, but luckily he had a conference in the Netherlands in December. Early in the morning before his conference I met David at Raul's home. While Raul was making a wonderful breakfast David talked to me about the manifestation, his previous experiments on Kabeltelevisie Amsterdam and his hopes for what could be on the threshold of media development.
After talking for a while about what we did and did not find in the archives, David started talking about how he looks back at the manifestation after so many years: 'There were a lot of good things coming out of the manifestation and there was a lot that was less good. It was a gigantic experiment. And the basis of the experiment was the question: can you produce an event for a city where all the channels of mass media are combined so that the artist's media-presence in the city has the same impact as corporate and state media? Can we as artists, who since the advent of Pop Art have been “talking back to the media'', design an event which gives the practice of art the possibility of that level of city wide impact? It was very ambitious and in a way it was only conceivable in Amsterdam. Because Amsterdam has the quality of a capital city but the scale of a small town.
Read the complete interview on LIMA blog