Home Sweet Home

Click here.

sex (idiot) booth

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.