Event Too O2 (original)

This piece is inspired by the fake news industry, which really took hold after the Telecommunications Act in 1996 signed by Bill Clinton into law. Basically corporate media lobbies secured the First Amendment for themselves and allowed mergers to consolidate corporate media into now just six major corporations. This piece is also inspired by Deleuze and Gauttari’s Anti-Oedipus, which takes an schizophrenic conception of reality based on the basic motive of desire. A third concept I wanted to illustrate here is the concept of approximation as I express it in my collage forms of art. I’m also reminded of that scene from Pulp Fiction where the agent is telling the two main characters what to do to cover up a murder scene. A huge credit goes to Immanuel Kant and what I learned about his philosophy centering on perception, a major philosophy from which contemporary cognitive psychology derives its concepts. 

The concept of approximation is expressed in this piece by my connection of disparate realities gathered together from different magazine sources and cutting out pieces from pages for usage in collage work. I put all the pieces together here in this landscape so that they’re seamless enough to pass as unnoticed (hopefully), but I’m emphasizing the disparate realities in hopes of creating an entertaining and enjoyable work of art for my audience. This associates with William S. Burroughs’ cut up technique, which associates with the media / film industry’s regular profession of editing and recombining clips and scenes so as to tell a story to audiences. It’s like they “make” anachronisms and turn them into linear stories.

I’m definitely inspired by cubist concepts of showing viewers different angles of view simultaneously of objects or scenes here. The grids of contours and lines crossing each other and ending with colored arrows and dots symbolize the often confused, fear-based, misleading directions that media tell people and society to go in. This is why I think of Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Gauttari. They discuss schizophrenia in that book as a mass of undifferentiated confusion, like found in nature. They also wrote about the use of things that don’t work, that are purposeless, and that break down in society as serving other purposes. 

I think of French philosopher Baudrillard’s concepts of signs and symbols in society, which frequently have no intrinsic value in themselves, but, because they are associated with societally accepted symbols and avatars of value, they then possess value in themselves, albeit as near holograms or illusions parasitizing from things of real value, potentially distracting audiences from things of real value and redirecting attentions to things of false value. Perhaps the collection and assimilation of many valueless items here in this collage build up into a gestalt of something that possesses value, which work synergistically to create something even greater than the sum of the items.

The title Event Too O2 associates with the historical Event 201, at which the world of western elites gathered together in 2019 to play out and discuss a hypothetical pandemic a year before the real pandemic took place. I feel that the confusion of conflating the pandemic with supposed manmade climate change, along with societal disparities among the different classes that politicians exploit with heart deceiving lies is sufficiently displayed here in this illustration with a kind of surrealistic madness as female heads on tanks (talking heads of the corporate media military industrial complex) battle it out as spectacles on manufactured landscapes for listeners and viewers to to come to conclusions approved of by the ruling classes.