articles

Factory 2000

By Chris Darke, 10 September 2000

In the 60s, Andy Warhol’s Factory manufactured celebrities out of self-obsessed nobodies but did so at a jaundiced distance from Burbank. Big Brother takes Warhol’s model and, in a surveillance-rigged encampment, creates Factory 2000. At a dispassionate level, it’s intriguing to see how media and technology seemlessly converge around the rhetoric of celebrity. Wanna be famous? Ya gotta pay. The gladiatorial character of BB’s media-saturated survivalism tells us a lot, not just about the technocrat-mandarin TV execs for whom psyche-shredding is ‘good tv’, but about ourselves as well. I keep telling myself “It’s only a game show”. But the words ring as hollow as Davina McCall’s soul. So how to fuck up BigBro? Let me know.

Big Brother, Channel 4

Chris Darke