Functioning as the opening “text” of a book, the visual intervention is an eight double-page spread of frames extracted from a CNN broadcast of the Romanian Revolution on December 22, 1989. It is a re-spatialization and critical, performative “re-reading” of the seconds that immediately precede the first live global broadcast of the televised Romanian revolution on CNN. This is the beginning of the end of the cold war as a televisual performance, and the inauguration of a new regime of visibility, which we subsequently see fully unfolding in the televisual production of the war in Iraq. There is a temporal coincidence of two geographies. The Romanian revolution (cast as the global victory of capitalism) is put into relation with the invasion of Panama: firstly, it is used to frame the invasion (functioning also as a visual “stand-in”, as Romania’s hypervisibility works to produce the invisibility of Panama ); secondly, they both function as the new frontiers of capitalist expansion.
