Keying as a Subversive Strategy of Appropriation: Experimental Investigations of Media Settings

Project director: Prof. Dr. Friedrich von Borries, Hochschule für Bildende Künste
Research assistance: Mara Recklies

The object of the investigation is the trans-media intervention RLF: an acronym of ‘real life fiction’ and ‘Das richtige Leben im Falschen’ (‘the right life in the false’). RLF is a protest movement initiated by Prof. Dr. Friedrich von Borries that is simultaneously ‘real’ and ‘fictional’, whose ostensible goal is to defeat capitalism using capitalism’s own tools. This involves producing and selling expensive designer products (from a luxurious tea service to a gilded coffee table) in order to use the proceeds to finance the ‘revolution’. In order to market its designer products and to disseminate the political messages implemented through them, RLF makes use of narrative media (novel), representative media (exhibition), situated media (demonstration, performance), interactive media (website, serious video game), and documentary media (films).

This part of the project investigates the ways in which translation into the various different media can lead to expanded meanings, changed meanings, or loss of meaning: through reciprocal situational displacement of real elements into the fictional space (e.g. ‘real’ interviews with the theoreticians Stéphane Hessel, Judith Butler and Harald Welzer in the novel) and fictional elements in the real space (e.g. the appearance of one of the novel’s characters – portrayed by an actress – at real events such as exhibition openings etc.), a fundamental sense of unease is created. In the spirit of Goffman’s frame analysis interpretation, these disruptions or deceptions are a form of “keying”, opening up a potential for subversive transformations and appropriations: in the case of RLF, these subversion strategies range from autonomous extensions (or ‘spinning out’) of the novel’s plot to the carrying out of activist type interventions of one’s own within the ‘Start-a-Revolution’ games.

The starting point of this part of the project is the assumption that, in the media transformations of RLF, tactics between art that is critical of society, social protest movements, advertisement strategies and marketing strategies are inscribed. Associated with these are practices of perception and of appropriation, through which the various different media settings and framings addressed by RLF are appropriated in situationally different ways. The proposed course of action is an ‘auto-ethnographical’ research project: its methodology takes a step into new territory. It is therefore particularly important that this project should reflect the methodology and processes of media translation and framing practices, and that it should bridge the gap between scientific and artistic research. Preliminary work for the projected investigation was carried out in the DFG project entitled Urbane Interventionen (2010-2015), and in the exhibition Realität und Fiktion (Villa Schöningen, Potsdam 2013).