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Illuminati/witchcraft/paranoia

My Illuminati/witchcraft/paranoia "audio walk" (Download WAV file via Mediafire) project is meant to bring the domain of occult conspiracy theory (normally confined to a self-selected audience frequenting web sites such as Vigilant Citizen) into a public sphere. The audio track is meant to draw the listener into a state of paranoia in relation to the larger environment (the U.S. government, pop culture, etc.).

Participants on this "audio walk" would be equipped with a listening device (iPod, etc.) and closed-ear headphones (to minimize external sound), and placed within a public space - particularly one associated with some sort of consumer pop-culture spectacle. As suggested in class last week, a site associated with the holiday-shopping craze would be a particularly interesting location for this project; for this purpose, the ideal location in Philadelphia would be the Macy's (formerly Lord and Taylor and, before that, Wanamaker's) annual Christmas light show (c. 1955).



I hope that the contrast between these elements (occult- and mind-control-related recordings, holiday shopping spectacle) will help induce a confused or paranoiac state in participants, as well as creating something of a humorous counterpoint to these ideas. This contradiction will also serve to draw attention to the very real occult-conspiracy theorist/crypto-conservative/Fundamentalist subculture - which, in it's own way, is similarly fascinating, laughable and frightening.

A Diary Scattered in Time and Space.

That's what I am going to do on Wednesday...let you into selections from my diary from the time I came to the US. It does go to times before and beyond that. I am working with the notion of the dairy as a fragmented way of writing and experiencing. It is a place for my many little obsessions and the question I incessantly ask is why did those little things become obsessions?
The idea in many ways is similar to the one I shared with all of you in class.
Only that formally it has a different face than the one I imagined in class.
It is the idea of certain episodes from the diary embodying time, space, smell, touch, texture and color. What kind of presence those episodes have?
How does your body and mine suspend in a past made present.

Pop/Satanism/Masons/Illuminati/Whatever

For an introduction to the bizarre/hilarious/terrifying world of occult pop media conspiracies and Illuminati mind control programs, check out Vigilant Citizen, Pseudo-Occult Media, and Marco Ponce. John Todd's lectures on witchcraft, the Illuminati and rock'n'roll ("the Devil's music!") are available online as well. Apparently, the New World Order is coming - and Britney Spears is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Janet Cardiff's work seems to be so much about structure. It is really interesting, the way in which she talks about shifting structures, using and subverting them in different ways. I particularly enjoyed the way she talked about lines at the Disney World and using that structure at the Venice Biennial to talk about hierarchy in the structure of movie going or of waiting in line for entertainment. The structure involved in going to a movie is one that has become subconscious at this point, but it is a tradition that has its origin somewhere, like any other tradition. I suppose it is impossible for anyone to address all of these things in a work, every piece needs some structure to support itself. It seems a very interesting and complex problem to work through. It is hard for me to think of another artist who uses or calls into question a structure as basic as standing in line. I remember Mariko Mori highlighting a waiting period in her venice biennial piece Sharing a Brainwave in 2005. I waited in line for an hour to go inside this space that allowed three people in at a time. Unfortunately, the waiting outside was more memorable than the inside of the piece. This would have been incredibly interesting if she had taken a page from Janet Cardiff and the waiting itself had been considered, so that the outside became just as important as the inside of the piece.

Utopias and Heterotopias

I am trying to think why the place of nostalgia in my head and heart is so essentially a Utopia. And by that virtue, is nostalgia good or bad..I wonder.

It is this reminiscence of growing up in a 'Muslim ghetto' in New Delhi, India.

I for one am trying to find another word for this and don't get one.

For the function of words, in the traditional sense, is to make meaning.

So how do I make meaning of a place that is a ghetto and a cosmopolitan place in the same moment?

For whom do I make this meaning?

Between the word and the utterance is a sea of different words, images and meanings.

So how do I make sure that the one you pick is the one I mean.

I know there will be an endless remembrance of that place I grew up in.

It sights, sounds, smells and the face of that lovely woman refuse to go away.

As long as I lived there, I was witness to the ways and means by which the ghetto was allowed to be a ghetto.

No school buses to pick up children, no civic amenities, no government water supply, no language by which the inhabitants of that place were anything more than 'meat eating Mohammedans', no images by which the place was anything more than chaotic, no images of women as anything more than a black robe of cloth, no images of what they call is 'normal'...not that I care.

As long as I inhabited that space, as long as that space physically enveloped me, it was a Heterotopia in the sense that it was demarcated as a space where only certain kind of people lived. There was a border at the edges where the place merged with the wider city. People from the outside would never want to come in. A gardner I met on the 'outside' refused to come in because he feared that people on the inside roam about with knives. Now, when I look back with all the nostalgia that it evokes, I cannot figure out my sense of simultaneous comfort and discomfort as I negotiated that space. There was the comfort of not being alienated but there was the discomfort of restricted mobility.

The overarching Heterotopia had micro utopias and heterotopias of its own making.

There were places I could never go to-like the mosque just two steps beyond where I lived.

but there was the Beauty Saloon right in front of the mosque where those who went to the mosque could not go.

I would meet women there who would narrate the experience of being in a Utopia as long as they were there.

I like to think of spaces as also defined by spatial practices much like the spatial organization of the ant colony that challenges the City structure as defined by notions of planning and hygiene.

Spatial practices could provide the sites at which the Utopia-Heterotopia dyad is effectively ruptured-the moment of holding the mirror.

deceive me

The idea of a redesign of the on-screen/around-screen space interaction is probably then most stimulating point of the lovely Egoyan vs Cardiff conversation (and maybe Foucault hidden behind a plant as an interested voyeur). Two things struck me in this long exchange.
The first is that is no surprise that a director like Atom Egoyan could be excited and so intimately close to Janet Cardiff's work, and "The Paradise Institute" in particular, for he always tried to deal with deceptive perception and the forcing of the screen, in his movies. His idea of deception, of hidden truths, is the same drive (digging deeply into human nature and behaviors) that moves Cardiff's work, in the sense of fooling the spectator, making him/her feel the presence of other fake selves around him/her. Thoe presences alter, move, develop a narrative that revolves around impulses, reactions, noise (in its widest meaning).
Here, the identity Egoyan-Cardiff reaches its highest peak.
If we had to encapsulate this as a foucaultian scheme, we would end up seeing "The Paradise Institute" room as a real heterotopia, because of its being a deceptive rectangle, with its two-dimensional screen, on which we watch a three-dimensional story (projected), surrounded and broken by a three-dimensional sound that keeps grabbing us back into our former reality.
Many sites, here, are in conjunction; a big mirror (auditive mirror) challenges us to an exhausting confrontation made of whispers and ringtones and laughters.
But, another layer of this work is maybe subtler but still extremely curious.
What happens onto the visual apparatus of this work?
Which story has been told to us, on screen?
If the focus is, as we might imagine, on the deception of perception (and the test of its endurance), the idea of filmmaking, of lighting, of cinematography/videography as a secondary means kicks in. What are the composition, the framing, the drama of the images telling us, if not the very story of their creation?
If they've been conceived, planned, and shot as a second layer (and still be effective), what is all this telling us about imagemaking?

Layered spaces, layered meanings

The "Headmap Manifesto" proposes a new sense of space, a space of layered meanings - one in which, through the assistance of digital technologies, we can work to create our on "Temporary Autonomous Zones," areas freed from conventional power structures, ideologies and meanings. Technological measures all us to "respond" to these offical meanings with layered, alternative texts - a sort of (irreverent, oppositional) gloss on the world itself. In short, "location-aware devices" can serve to transform any place into one of Focault's heterotopias - spaces that re-define the ways we think about our place in society on a daily basis, and how that society is constructed.

Atom Egoyan, on Janet Cardiff's Whispering Room: "I was completely overwhelmed by the collision of technological artifacts — speakers, projectors, lights, wires — and narrative abstraction. I found myself drifting through the emotional residue of a personal trauma that was both immediate and distant, visceral yet disembodied. Whispering Room was an experience of installation art as a forum for dramatic storytelling. It made me feel inspired, and at the same time frustrated by the constrictions of traditional film practice... [her] characters occupy our physical space. The degree of interaction is profoundly respectful, yet extremely invasive."

Egoyan, in his conversation with Cardiff, sees this same idea (layering space with alternative meaning, through media) moving in a narrative direction in Cardiff's work. As she says, "the audience can’t just forget about their bodies for the duration of their involvement like we do in a film" - her work (as well as almost all experimental and installation work) does not allow the spectator to remain passive, instead inciting and active, questioning spectatorial mode. The spectator, in other words, moves through the film - not just passively sitting in front of it; this provokes a radical re-orientation of the spectator to the image, prompting these alternative meanings.

In this sense, Cardiff effectively combines cinematic (narrative) and installation (experimental) ideas in her work, with installations that can erase the boundary between the viewers and the film itself. In developing our own public installation and "relational" art projects - especially in the larger context of the "film school" environment - we would do well to consider this as a potential goal for our work.