Video. 12' 37"

According to Eugeni Bonet, Media Ecology Ads (1982) was a video about television that was divided up into three sections, which referred to the notions of time, narrativity and information. Christopher Philips adds that in the video, the image is reduced to three short segments, each based on a minimalistic image that suggests an unstoppable and irreversible movement in time. The first is a fuse that burns from left to right across the screen, the second a sand clock whose grains run down the center of the picture are, and the third a faucet spewing water at faster and slower speeds. Each of these images is accompanied by a synchronized flow of text. The faucet, for example, is flanked on their side by a flowing column of words which suggest Muntadas' idea of the hidden principles that govern the flow of images in the media landscape: Back–Myth–Forward–Dreams–Fake–Market–Real.

Muntadas subverts the language of commercial advertisements in his witty visual critique of the production and consumption of television images. The three segments — Fuse, Time and Slow Down — are visual commentaries that challenge specific formal elements of TV advertising: edited time, visual speed, the relation of text and image, narration and format. Physical events evolving in real time — a burning fuse, a timer, a slowly dripping faucet — unfold in leisurely contrast to the fragmentation and speed of edited TV time, which signifies the "time is money" equation that dominates the market ideology of television's media landscape.

Media Ecology Ads also go beyond the primary materialism. For the real-time operations of video—made ever more sophisticated with devices that allow you to work and rework the signaletic image in numerous complex ways—alert us to the fact that video is not just pure perception / matter, but more precisely an instance of memory. It is an interface that, like our brain, creates its own cuts and delays in the temporal flow—on the one hand as the automated memories of sensory motor reactions that move too fast for our conscious registration, and on the other hand as a creation of conscious memories or images that continuously split time into past and present with a view to future action. […]

Ina Blom

Muntadas' Mediascapes (2011)