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FREEE: HAVE YOU HEARD THE ONE ABOUT THE PUBLIC SPHERE?
2006, 11:00
Freee recycle the stand-up comedian Norman Collier’s famous broken microphone routine in a continually failing attempt to make a public announcement – the debasement ofthe public sphere has never been more evident. ‘If you paid to listen to me’,he says in his broken, frustrated voice, ‘you can not hear me’. We can blame the faulty microphone, but the tension between performer and audience dramatises the historical colonization of the bourgeois public sphere by bigbusiness. His comic technique is used to deliver, albeit intermittently, a political analysis of the state of the relationship between culture and its publics in the society of the spectacle.