Steve Fagin in Person The mid-eighties struggle for power in the Philippines was as much a media presence as it was real and deadly. Marcos' regime existed in a peculiar electronic niche between images of illusory affluence and colonial dependence. Legitimizing favored images became a decisive strategy within the scuffle for control of the nation. Recent Philippine history then offered an exemplary arena for artist Steve Fagin's interest in the mechanisms of media. The Machine That Killed Bad People is a hybridized work that appears, cursorily, to be a stylized documentary about contemporary political and cultural history. And this first glance is rewarded through interviews with Filipino dissidents, the Marcos' home movies, discussions of the New People's Army, Alex "Faith Healer" Orbito, TV footage of, among other things, the Mendiola Bridge conflict, glimpses of folk customs and sundry other mediated events. Yet permeating this mock-doc is an inventive critique of how history and people are transformed into spectacle. The site for this examination is a news program complete with deadpan anchorwoman (Constance DeJong) and disenchanted correspondent (Ron Vawter). In a skewed manner, Fagin, known widely for his earlier The Amazing Voyage of Gustave Flaubert and Raymond Roussel, employs the grammar of TV-the impersonal voices, the segmentary formats, the graphic logos, the unmotivated segues-to interrogate representation. He does this not by emptying televisual language but by filling it to surfeit, by overwhelming cliché with meaning. An alternative discourse, The Machine That Killed Bad People suggests that just as Philippine history is a product of neo-colonialism, so, too, is the media. --Steve Seid