Crushed Stunned Cats Beheaded

Crushed Stunned Cats Beheaded is a small, hand sewn book that documents this project, containing a CD with 12 tracks–16 minutes of sung, spoken, whispered, and screamed words with an occasional great rattling of pots and pans.

Starting with a collection of Evening Standard news-stand posters taken from the streets of London the artist Eva Weinmayr set up a recording studio at Matt’s Gallery in London. For a series of workshops she invited teenagers from local schools to replace passive news consumerism with an active playful approach to the tabloid medias’ daily assault by responding and exploring different dynamics and rhythms of their voice.

The activity was about to create, to improvise and interact. Some students started

to rush around the structure while shouting out the words that caught their eyes. A

playful cacophony of sounds and words floated through the bunker-like room. Spontaneous chants swelled and receded allowing people to step back from the

aggressive modus operandi of mass media today.

Chinese whispers came into play. One of the students reported a fictional “scoop”,

an exclusive news story, in the ear of another pupil, who whispered the story into t

he next ear ... and so forth. The stories travelled to be creatively distorted by individual

imagination. It was a striking illustration of how modern media works.

Journalists tend to copy from each other and to add own colour to stories in order

to make them more sellable. It was more than an intellectual exercise. It was

about to explore the creative potential and to let imagination fly.