Arie Altena
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Arie Altena
Gepubliceerd in Mediamatic Magazine 9.2, 1998
Zapruder Stress: the weight of endlessly expanding meanings (meanings of representations of what might have taken place). No mystery is solved, and there's no promise of redemption. Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, to get rid of Zapruder stress.
The world and its appearances
In its appearances
the world, good-bye
world, good-bye appearances
Was that the arrangement?
Dirk van Bastelaere, 'Zapruderstress'
Take me back to where I belong
History begins as a myth. It might be the first news broadcast that you saw on television when you were young, the war in Cambodia, something that touched you. News like that retains a mythical value. It's not imprisoned in the realm of the history book, nor is it exposed to inflation via overload and habitation: the umpteenth crisis in the news, the umpteenth civil war - how interesting is that after a while?
You notice that images and events have a mythical value when you see them again. I breathlessly watched all the documentaries about the German Autumn of 1977, screened extensively on German television in 1997, recording them on video so that I could watch them again. Why? Are they indeed my mythical stories from the age of television, the stories and images I grew up with? Aside from Black Arrow and Thierry la Fronde, also the Baader-Meinhoff Gruppe, terrorists and freedom fighters?
Third grade, elementary school: arithmetic, the most boring of subjects. We're sitting together in a group of five. We're being pests. The substitute teacher comes up to us. Who's the leader here? I say, No one, we don't have a leader. We're communists. Bewildered by so much brutality, she answers, But communists have a leader, too. Sure, but we don't.
I reenacted the civil war in Angola with my little brother. He had to be the FNLA, while I was the MPLA. The MPLA were the communists, the revolutionaries. Of course I had to play the communists. Perhaps I also imagined that I was the RAF, much like I played Black Arrow, or played my favorite hero, Thierry la Fronde.
The photos of the Baader-Meinhoff Gruppe were similarly burned into my memory while I was still young and had no notion of politics or reality. The irresponsible innocence of youth in a 1970s new housing estate in a mid-sized industrial city?
Calling History
Dial History. That mythical moment when the news hasn't yet been fossilized in schoolbooks and hasn't yet been lost from our attention by the stream of newsbites which you keep following for years; could that be a decisive moment in the constitution of the subject in the age of the mass media? An appointment with history. Hello history.
Dial History. Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. Sixty-eight minutes of video about air hijackings. A shock of recognition. Hijackings, attacks, images from the news which helped my outlook on life, and I never realized it myself. Seen on the news between the children's cartoon show and the 7 o'clock TV series. I remember this; the heads of the hijackers, I instinctively identify with them. Is that because of the intoxication that video produces, the nose-dive through the visual material, or is it actual identification?
Dial History. Allow me to explain the title. The terrorist is the last individual of the twentieth century, making a call to the history hotline. Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, 1-800. Is it the number you can call to become a part of history? The terrorist draws world history towards himself. You place a bomb and make a phone call. The bomb explodes and you're on TV. If you're on TV then you're a part of history. Right?
Or is Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y the emergency hotline you can call with suggestions on who murdered history?11 See: Tom Paulus 'Bezet', in Andere Sinema 141, p.57 Has history been murdered? Are the mass media guilty because they exchanged history for the news? The news: forgotten tomorrow, never forming a standard for how you should live, what you have to believe in or what you can expect. It has no memory. And the murdered history: an explanatory story, with context, meaning, and a memory that tells us who we've become and how it's come to be that way.
Are the guilty parties the individuals who, instead of making history, sought their refuge in the mass media? The revolutionaries who adapted to the logic of the media (hunger for sensation: the more powerful the explosion, the bigger the impact). It's only really happened when it gets on the news; only then will it form a part of what people believe.
Are the hijackers candidate suspects for the murder of history? They transferred their battle to the media's spotlights. They got the Palestine issue on the agenda via media exposure, they liberated their colleague freedom fighters via media exposure. Did they adapt to the new world order in which the image rules supreme, in which power is divided by the media?22 See: Don DeLillo Mao II Or is the audience guilty of letting themselves be driven mad, of believing in it?
Was history murdered by cynical theorists who contended that hyperreality had won the debate? Communications consultants and advertising people, that bunch, with a vested interest in the erasure of the external world before representation - are they guilty? Or did history simply hide behind the veil of mediatization, the veil of the simulacrum? The simulacrum of numbers, statistics, media images, representations, diverging meanings? Can we recover history by looking through the simulacrum?33 Or is the terrorist, as Tom Paulus writes, the one who so easily sabotages the history hotline? The only one who can make inteventions where the world leaders have long been powerless, where United Nations are powerless institutions. The terrorist as a sniper in the realm of signs? Someone who slips through the seames? The warlords, sure, they slip through, just like the algerian murder commandos. Their struggle displays no interest in the media. Their terror doesn't need TV. Can the terrorist of today even be compared to the hijacker of 1970? Can the terrorist of then and now even be placed on the same plane as the warlords of the ninetees in Rwanda, Somalia, Liberia and Bosnia?
Perhaps I'm asking too many questions. I'm undoubtedly asking questions which are not exacted from Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, but which stem from my own obsessions. It buzzes in my head, and the video is definitely responsible for that.
Why are the hijackers the stars in this 68-minute long compilation tape by Johan Grimonprez? Why was Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y a hit at Documenta? Why have articles about Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y appeared in magazines you'd never expect to cover it? Why is it being shown everywhere? Why are we discussing it here? Does it summon up relevant questions? Or is it because the intoxication of watching is 'fun'? Why was I touched by it? Call history.
Watching Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y
Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y consists largely of archival footage: hijackings, terrorism in the air, and everything that has to do with it - from the fear of flying to the murder of Sadat. News items, old film journals, bits of interviews; it's a look back.
We see Kozo Okamoto defeated in the dock, Leila Khaled, the explosion of three Boeings in the desert, Castro and Lenin and Mao - all phantoms and cliches of international terrorism. A voice-over reads texts about plots, terrorists and catastrophes, almost all of which are borrowed from two Don DeLillo novels, White Noise and Mao II. The music of David Shea heightens the sense of nostalgia; nostalgia for a time when it was still possible to unleash a revolution which wouldn't degenerate into a vulgar civil war, nostalgia for a time when terrorists wore bell-bottoms.
Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y is after an emotional reaction. It is a nose-dive through images. Backgrounds aren't investigated; you learn nothing about what the terrorists wanted, nothing about the context of the events. No explanation is given: the viewer is treated to a 'fun' video in terms of dynamics and motion, which overwhelms you, overpowers you and confronts you without brief asides, without ever putting the images in perspective. It is sublime; here are the pictures, do what you want with them. The video is based more on the visual aesthetic of samples than on their historical or social meaning.44 For me, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y was a journey of exploration during which I was inspired by media such as CNN, MTV and NBC. I wanted to mimic their aesthetic strategies, says Grimonprez in an interview. It's an aesthetic in which the media make the news into a soap opera, interrupted by commercials.
Samples, contexts and context horizon
Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y is a compilation video. Grimonprez selects bits from the news and from films and reassembles them. The meaning of his story, insofar that you create one as a viewer, lies in the sequence of the fragments, the flow. He hardly uses juxtapositions or Eisensteinian argumentative tricks. The fragments don't collide (with some exceptions), but rather follow each other, complement each other, build upon each other, occasionally give another vision than the previous bits. The montage is more or less cleanly sequential, and the fact that the video is largely chronological has everything to do with this. In fact, Grimonprez uses a form of montage which has more of a narrative effect than a disruptive or argumentative one.
His handling of the voice-over is similar; the content of the fragments which are read aloud continually builds upon or interprets what you can already see in the picture. Text and image complement one another, relate to one another in a particular way, as the major themes are continually repeated. These are not deep chasms, and there are no explosions (there are enough of those in the visual material) which summon meaning. The pictures draw the viewer in, into a network of pictures which refer only to themselves, whereby the relationship to the world outside threatens to disappear. The video is enough in and of itself, just as the world of the media is.
Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y constricts its own context by showing the same kind of images again and again. The video might just as easily have made the context horizon as broad as possible by indicating that there are connections to be made to the politico-historical situation. It could show that other perspectives exist. But it doesn't, undoubtedly by design. And that's what allows Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y to have such an emotional impact.
The selected texts continually emphasize the same things - catastrophes, terrorists, media. The music offers an upbeat counterweight which, however, turns out to be all the more cynical as the images become more horrible. Text and image don't allow any openings to or perspectives on other worlds; they assume a media mono-perspective.55 And this is not because it is a compilation of media images, it is a result of the way Grimonprez handles them Yet this doesn't detract from experiencing the material and the story in various, even contradictory, ways.
Hijacking developed from a romantic, innocent idling of time up until the placing of bombs, that's the story I construct. And I see the governments' reactions: from granting demands, to employing murder commandos, all the way up to shooting a passenger plane out of the air. We never come to know the how's and why's of it all.
It seems that Grimonprez is showing innocent, human, amiable terrorists versus frightening government leaders. This is his set-up: violence on a human scale, carried out by individuals, perhaps terrifying ones (I'm inclined to forget the blood-bath in Lod...) as opposed to an anonymous fighter jet casually blowing a Boeing out of the air. The terrorists from the seventies come across as individuals, and even now can still be recognized as people with human feelings. The terrorist from the beginning of the seventies is a romantic hero with a calling, while the responsible government leaders sound like Saddam Hussein, or laugh their heads off at a dumb joke: Clinton and Yeltsin, as seen on TV.
While Clinton and Yeltsin, for example, seem locked up in the prison of the media simulacrum, the terrorists from the beginning of the seventies still stood outside of it - or at least seemed to be standing outside of it. Yeltsin and Clinton are lifeless marionettes, and the innocent terrorists - granted, from another age - are amicable people with whom you could have a nice chat at a party.
When I saw Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y for the first time, I interpreted it as a rewriting of the history of hijackings from the perspective of the terrorists, as sympathy for the terrorist. The terrorists weren't actually violent and inhuman; just look at how well the initial hijackings went. It was the governments who stepped up to inhuman violence and forced its escalation; witness Reagan's counter-terrorist rhetoric. I identify with the terrorists - out of fascination?
What's fascinating about the terrorist is his unfaltering belief. His resolve and determination. A belief so strong that he's willing to die for it. What a relief in times of hypocrisy. What a relief in times in which the only ones who are still willing to die for their belief are rabid nationalists and extreme fundamentalists. Today's democrat in the western world believes in the economy, in cost and benefit analyses, believes that the economy regulates everything. But whose belief in the economy is as strong as the terrorist's belief?
That's how it reads in Mao II as well, and this is quoted in the video. Georg Haddad, the terrorist, says, Is history possible? Is anyone serious? Who do we take seriously? Only the lethal believer, the man who kills and dies for faith. Everything else is absorbed (p. 157).
The figure of the terrorist is a possible fulfillment of the dream of being completely free, an independent person instead of a trivial part of an undifferentiated mass. Does the terrorist allow us the possibility of redeeming our longing to break through to history?
In my view, it doesn't matter what genre Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y belongs to. Is it art, a documentary, a pseudo-documentary? Is it fiction or just a carnival of samples, an over the top video clip with texts by DeLillo? Does it belong in a museum, in a cinema or on TV?
It doesn't really matter. The determination of the genre and the placing of it within a certain exhibition context are neither the only nor the most important criteria in the creation of meaning, and they don't significantly alter the experience of watching. What I wonder about is what meanings are conjured up by the film, what it releases, what kind of view of the world and of history we're being served up here, regardless of the genre; in other words, not where the video belongs, but what happens . The relevant context is the context that the viewer constructs with the video. The context is what you know about the RAF, the PFLP, the German Autumn, what you know about the theories on the power or the powerlessness of the media, what you know about the work of DeLillo, what you know about historiographical theories. In short, your knowledge of the world.
Why should you have to attach all of these kinds of meanings to a collage of images? Is it because of the nature of the visual material (images of terrorists are always politically charged)? Is it because Grimonprez, in his other work, focuses the center of attention precisely on the anthropological, the historical? Or is it a sense of the context that draws you closer as a viewer, inspired by your own interests and fascinations, your own background, your own biography?
I make immediate connections, even while I'm still watching, with the paranoid novel, with postmodern theories on media and history. Another voice beckons: Come on now. It's art, not serious anthropological research. Knock it off. But the question is to what degree one is allowed to ascribe these meanings to the video. Every rerun of it on my own TV made me rethink it, until I tended to believe that the video is so unimposing in its suggestions that it's hardly possible to speak about a meaning of the video itself. It's my own stream of associations, set in motion by a few images that I isolate from the video.
The cynical view: hijacking used to be the favorite way for a group of weary terrorists to spend their time, terrorists brought to discredit by an overabundance of violence. Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y is a video about the rage of hijacking, hijacking as hula-hooping, what does it matter? You with your DeLillo, your speculations, your theories and your fascinations, you imbue it with far too much meaning.
Maybe Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y is only about the aesthetic of news images, using the theme of hijackings as an example. Without any conclusions being drawn. Just a nice game, purely visual, nothing to do with the world beyond images. But can that be so? Is it possible as a viewer not to make any conclusions?
The video can't escape the viewer's urge to interpret. Only the purely sublime, which simply fascinates, escapes that urge. But where does that lead? To anesthetization? Shrugging of shoulders? Fear?
Grimonprez and DeLillo
The fragments from DeLillo's works play a leading role in the video. They interpret the images, they forge the link to postmodern media theory. They program the context in a rather banal way. But there's something up with Grimonprez' use of DeLillo. It's no surprise that he chooses DeLillo, as no other writer has thought as deeply about terror and the similarities between the loner - the man who works in isolation, the writer - and the terrorist, about history and plots and catastrophes.
Grimonprez borrows texts, which he sometimes adapts, from two novels: White Noise and Mao II. White Noise (1985) is about catastrophes, plots, simulacra, the fear of death. It reads like a parodical variant of an overwrought, postmodern, panic-stricken thinking. Mao II (1991) is an expose on the differences and similarities between the writer of novels and the terrorist, and a good deal of it concerns the contrast between the word (the novel) and the image (the mass media).
Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y seems to begin from the standpoint of the dead-end idea that only what enters the media actually happens. Nothing happens until it's consumed, and All plots tend to move deathwards: that's the Cold War DeLillo in White Noise. We engineer death each time we make a plot. The images which Grimonprez has sought out seamlessly connect with these statements.
The statements are seen out of context here, which is hardly a crime. The quotes from White Noise threaten to lose their layered irony. What functions in the novel as irony is taken literally within the video. Which is, of course, allowed. Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y also seems to underscore that George Haddad, the terrorist intellectual from Mao II, is right. With DeLillo, the terrorists are the do-gooders who have sold themselves to the power of the Image. They see this, according to George Haddad, as their last chance to still have an influence on the thinking of humanity in an apocalyptic world in which the media decide what reality is. On the terrain that once belonged to the writer, the terrorist is now the lone combatant. In Mao II, DeLillo specifically demonstrates the limits of this vision and tries to demarcate the terrain of the writer anew. He shows us, in White Noise and Mao II, people who sit locked up in the snare of the simulacrum, and it is the vision of these characters which Grimonprez uses as his starting point.6
What it should be, if I were you
In Underworld, DeLillo's most recent book, these themes get a new, partially more hopeful, interpretation. The ubiquitous paranoia and global systems have made way for an emphasis on networks between people. The fear of masses has made way for the longing for communities and the emphasis on their importance. Instead of the Cold War and the threat of an ultimate catastrophe, there are the problems of nuclear waste and pollution. Instead of plots and the fear of death, there's an emphasis on loving your neighbor, even if there are still a few murders. Instead of only the sublime image which withdraws out of reach, there are individuals who make images of their own. And not only terror has become local, history is now local as well. There is still a loner walking through all of this, but he doesn't escape from everything. He's no longer busy with a lone quest, a plot, a journey to the West which will end in a meeting with death. Even if he is still an introverted man who, just like everyone else, bears the burden of his own history on his shoulders. There is no more plot, but there are still stories, many stories which intersect with each other and which are served up here in such a way that the reader doesn't fall into the paranoid tendency of looking for a plot to hatch. In Underworld, the fascination of the media perspective is broken down. Underworld recounts what you might naively call 'real' history, the underworld. It focuses on the lives of people instead of on paranoia, systems, being blinded by the media, technology and politics. Even though that life isn't necessarily easy, it is, in any case, more human. The thoughts of the loner Nick Shay, after a visit to the artist Klara Sax (who paints old B-52s in the desert), are telling in this regard, even though they're just as flat as the statements Grimonprez chooses: I lived responsibly in the real. I didn't accept this business of life as a fiction, or whatever Klara Sax had meant when she said that things had become unreal (p. 82).
I would like Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y to look beyond the spectacle of the media, beyond the paralyzing grip of the simulacrum; I would like it to show history, which has always been with us, anew.
Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y is easy to deactivate: just put it in a postmodern vacuum. The video is only about how terrorists get into the news, how the media generate images of the terrorists. Yeah, sure, but we already know that song. Although it's executed very well here, it is rehashed; Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y as an apocalyptic video about how catastrophe has penetrated our living rooms. The viewer who interprets Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y in this way suffers from catatonia, is paralyzed in the mirth surrounding the approaching of the end of time.
Seen from this perspective, Grimonprez is stuck in a vision of television, media and history which is passe, passe because it fits too well with the contemporary situation, thereby confirming the status quo and cooping us up in a dead-end alleyway without any prospect of escape. Good art shows an escape route. Grimonprez displays a deluge of images which tend to result in claustrophobia. He doesn't appropriate any of the images himself in order to bring another meaning to the surface, he doesn't delve deeply enough. Grimonprez' compilation is hilarious and in a cynical way ridiculous, yet it is also upsetting. Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y shows the triumph of a hyperreality which doesn't allow any history. Sure, that's all well and good, exactly right. It's undoubtedly true within the context of the story of media in postmodern times. But what about it? It's old news.
Why is the video a hit? Because it's a pleasant stream of images. Because it cynically and ironically underscores with a roaring laugh what we've known for a long time. We're not confused, not wrong-footed. The media have power, the news has taken over history, and there were still innocent freedom fighters back in the seventies. We laugh about it. It's a cynical laugh at a cynical history. But anyone who laughs in this way is trapped in the idea that there's nothing outside of this; he gets stuck in a catatonic intoxication (doesn't he?). Same old song. Everything is constructed, everything is constructed - all together now...
I don't want that. That's not a message I find relevant. It's a dead-end alleyway, a slogan heard too many times. I want to hear another story, a story that offers more clarity on how our world works.
Something curious is afoot here: the video shows cracks, cracks which allude to an escape route, cracks which show that the oh-so-easy 'there's nothing beyond the media' catastrophe mindset doesn't hold true. That there's something else. Or am I just imagining it?
History calling
The meanings with which you imbue Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y depend on what you believe. They depend on what you think history is, how history is made, whether there is any history beyond the media, whether or not the news has replaced history. Looking at Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y can be a discovery if you think about these things deep down in your heart, deep down in your gut.
Do you identify with the terrorist? And do you think that the actual changes which terrorists effect lie not in the impact of their media image (the worldwide fear of airplane bombs), but rather in what happens on the local level (the history that is played out behind the spotlights, in people's homes and on the street)? Do you believe in the existence of a story alongside the sublime, incomprehensible TV image of a Boeing shattered to pieces? Then you'll find something else in the video than will the post-modernist who thinks that in White Noise and Mao II, Don DeLillo is simply sketching a convincing and truthful picture of the condition in which we live.
Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y might just as well be perceived as a rewriting of recent history beyond the spectacle, beyond the oppressive grip of the panic and the catastrophic Cold War mindset. In this case, the video is a merry look back to the time when people tried to explain everything in media terms, a time when theorists thought that something only existed once it had been covered in the media. Perhaps we roar with laughter for just this reason when we watch the video. It then becomes a re-recording of a few moments from that age, and shows us that the moments have a meaning beyond the media. And it tells us that we can make a call to history.
Home is a failed idea, DeLillo says in White Noise, and Grimonprez repeats him. A place where we belong no longer exists in the age of the global economy, virtual geographies and telecommunication, where disasters penetrate our living rooms via the TV. This awakens our longing for an ultimate disaster and tarnishes our domestic bliss. But that's a Cold War story, because what does that mean, our domestic bliss? What's valid now is the story of longing for a community in the midst of the trans-national communication lines. When I watch Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, the feeling creeps up on me that the terrorists from the beginning of the seventies, those romantic, innocent freedom fighters, could fulfill that longing. Striving for the utopia of one's own place, for innocence and purity. Friendly hijackers instead of bomb packages and calculations.
The terrorist as freedom fighter, who can give us back that bygone land before the age of the media. The battle for feeling a sense of belonging somewhere, not in a virtual geography, but in a real place in the world. Tom Paulus writes that Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y is history's emergency hotline, a cynical prop and refuge for the lonely hearts who nostalgically pine away for an old world order of grand narratives and patriarchal hierarchies. As I see it, we can do without the grand narratives and patriarchal hierarchies. What matters is the pining away for a time of innocence, when history still existed, when it really seemed possible for human actions to change things, instead of things being changed by manipulation of series of numbers and computer networks. When there were still freedom fighters and countries which you still felt connected to. The longing for this world is perhaps indeed nostalgic, but is it also irrelevant, unimportant, senseless? I don't think so.
For me, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y is a visit back to my own history, and forms the occasion for an ego trip. A visit that winds up as disappointing, presumably because what I had initially hoped to find is not to be found in the video. But that's no great tragedy. Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y is a catalyst, it allows me forge connections in my head while itself remaining intact. What's important is what happens, not simply what it is. The journey along all of the questions which Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y raises, questions connected to the video even if they only sprouted up in my imagination, is worth the trip it in and of itself.
This design, a series of images which awaken a constellation of thoughts and feelings in the viewer, a constellation which upon closer inspection hardly seems possibly anchored in the work that it evokes, might well become characteristic of compilations and sample-based artworks. At its least, it is an aesthetic strategy which presents itself easily if you're making sample-based art. It is an effect that appears easily; you recognize something, then something else, and then you trip. Perhaps this experience replaces the aesthetic experience in a culture of samples. If that's the case, then Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y is also exemplary of what lies ahead.
I came across this quote from Herman de Coninck, the Flemish poet and poetry critic who died in 1997. He writes, You draw out the time that the film takes up in order to be allowed to be someone else. With poetry, you make available, on the basis of a text, the duration that you need in order to be yourself. The amount of time which I rather easily spent watching Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y is a discovery of another me, and of my secret history. More poetry than a film.
''it seems that people have the
acquired need
to demarcate their cultural identity
in territorial terms
by organizing their
local community, getting
a grip on their workplace and
home, love,
lust and happiness as well as
discovering anew in the abstraction
of this new, historical
landscape with the danger
that it is the parameters
of their 'specific identity'
needed to recharge the notion of place
with meaning
which become incommunicable
to the other tribes,
confused outsiders, in
the same situation, so to speak
Dirk van Bastelaere 'Zapruderstress', in Dietsche Warande en Belfort, October 1997
translation DOUGLAS HEINGARTNER
Bibliografie / Videografie
Herman de Coninck, Intimiteit onder de Melkweg, Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam, 1994.
Don DeLillo, White Noise, Picador, London, 1985.
Don DeLillo, Libra: Lester, Orpen, Dennys, Toronto, 1988.
Don DeLillo, Mao II, Viking Penguin, 1991.
Don DeLillo, Underworld, Scribner, New York, 1997.
Jeroen Olyslaegers, 'Let me take you higher jack!', in Dietsche Warande en Belfort, October 1997 p. 567-574.
Tom Paulus, 'Bezet, de terrorist als legitimatie van de wereldgeschiedenis: Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y van Johan Grimonprez', in: Andere Sinema 141 Sept-Oct 1997, p. 56-60.
D van Bastelaere, 'Zapruderstress', in Dietsche Warande en Belfort'', October 1997, p. 547-565
This text was published in Mediamatic Magazine 9-2, 1998, and on the website of V2_ in a special design by Zsa Zsa Linneman which has not been archived. If I remember correctly the text was displayed in the left frame of the browser, triggering links and images found on the World Wide Web in the right frame as you scrolled on. The text is also archived at Mediamatic: https://www.mediamatic.net/en/page/12843/hello-history-hello-1