| Our major artistic concern is the creation and facilitation of free modes of communication. Our interest in the exploration of media began with our mutual frustration over the quality of printed media, particularly magazines. We felt that they lacked in originality, expression, voice, or freedom. Nearly every title was, and is, in someway under the influence of an external power. Market and political factors influence content, advertising subsidizes their existence, and state or institutional controls manage the latitude of conversation. We want to create a space that exists free of these constraints that allows for unrestricted ways of seeing, listening, and producing. Ultimately we want to find a different way to tell, so that we might say something new. |  |
Megawords
Our major artistic concern is the creation and facilitation of free modes of communication. Our interest in the exploration of media began with our mutual frustration over the quality of printed media, particularly magazines. We felt that they lacked in originality, expression, voice, or freedom. Nearly every title was, and is, in someway under the influence of an external power. Market and political factors influence content, advertising subsidizes their existence, and state or institutional controls manage the latitude of conversation.
We want to create a space that exists free of these constraints that allows for unrestricted ways of seeing, listening, and producing. Ultimately we want to find a different way to tell, so that we might say something new. We think that the best way to say something new is to create the physical and mental spaces for this to happen, then utilize these spaces through action.
Megawords Magazine is an object that readers can touch, hold, and easily pass along to others. In this way an audience is created. This phenomenon causes both immediate effects and more subtle, long-term changes upon us as creators, those who actively experience the magazine, and those that are passively involved, such as people, objects, and ideas that are examined in the publication. Ideas are cross-pollinated among people from different media, social and economic classes, and geographic locations. Established hierarchies are chipped away and ideas are exchanged among parties that otherwise would not interact.
We are also concerned with expanding the space in which communication can happen. We imagine this space as physical objects, such as the printed issues of Megawords Magazine and Public Wall Writing in Philadelphia, performances like the Megawords radio show, installations like our projects at the Powell house and Printed Matter, concrete spaces like the Megawords storefront, and our project spaces on Girard Avenue, Philadelphia. The point of these concrete acts is to open up a mental space that allows alternative modes of thought to develop. Through each of these projects, we seek to foster these alternate modes and free exchange of ideas and to build a diverse community centered around Megawords.
Let us illustrate these ideas with an anecdote: In late February we held an impromptu Megawords party at Steve Powers’ Chestnut Street sign shop. Incense smoke hung thick in the air, and the only light was supplied by the small lamp placed over a set of turntables. A handful of people gathered in this small room, listening to music and talking.
A man in his mid-twenties began speaking about his job. He had a thin mustache and a gaunt face. We learned that he was a union steamfitter who lived in Upper Darby, a suburb of Philadelphia. He said, “If the steamfitters would let themselves be happy with one row home and one car, things would be different! When the bosses laid us off, we could tell them, ‘We don’t care. We don’t need the money.’ Then the workers would see who really had the power.”
“Why don’t the workers realize this?” I asked.
He replied, “They get married and buy these huge houses in Jersey. They end up working just to pay the mortgage. They’ve got no time to think about these things!” He spoke with the wonder of a man who had never before expressed these thoughts aloud.
The man took a marker and wrote this on the wall, “When I have no possessions and no belongings, then I will truly be free.” I was astounded by his words. I felt happy that we had given him the forum to voice these radical ideas and express them with a concrete action.
The spaces we seek to create foster conversations and ideas and nurture them. We may not always agree with the ideas we encounter, but we think it is important that they are given a voice. We must challenge ourselves and our audience to engage with and confront notions that run counter to our established expectations. We want our audience’s ideas to mingle with ours, and create new ideas that neither of us would have or could have thought of on our own. We document and rebroadcast these new ideas via the appropriate means.
