working across a variety of fields including finance, marketing, fabrication, fine art, tech and fashion he embues the jack of all trades persona.
working across a variety of fields including finance, marketing, fabrication, fine art, tech and fashion he embues the jack of all trades persona.
ANTHROPOCENE
CONSPIRACY
DEEP INTERNET
DRAWING
CONSPIRACY
DEEP INTERNET
DRAWING
No conspiracy theory stands alone. Ideas at the fringes at the edge of discourse are frayed, splintered, meandering and recursive. Or are they?
I remember the first time I my professor presented the work of Mark Lombardi to me. Struggling in my “Modern and Contemporary Drawing” class with figures and still lifes I couldnt wait for the semester to end. That was until we were presented with the assignment “draw a system” with Mark Lombardi as a Key reference.
His work both highly researched and highly structural both facinated me and completly restructed the way I saw drawing at least in my own personal practice as a medium.
In the following days after the assignment I became obsessed with Mark’s work, studying it, his process, and the conspiracy itself behind his oddly timed suicide.
While mark focused on partially documented, often hidden and obscured allegations of fraud both in and out of sight with groundings in reality, I wanted to push another direction.
Rather studying the edges the extremes of conspiracy theories, in specific two particular individuals.
In graphing the system of their belief, the expansion of their thoughts would I find a central pillar? Find truth? Build a map of recursive obsession?
The two individuals were Alex Jones and David Icke. Two facinating charachters with long legacy histories in the conspiracy space. In those two weeks I created the framework for how I would go about the project presenting it in lew of pieces, setting myself up to spend months of my summer break on it.
The British royal family, Rothschilds, Bush Dynasty and even Angelina Jolie all belonging to this evil race. Ickes writing and by extenstion expansive world building was always something that facinated me. As far as conspiracy theories go it is at the extreme edge, truely absurd and without any tangible proof. In many respects it builds off of old Antisemetric tropes, Blood sucking, coordinated world control tropes solidified in the early 20th century. What piqued me about Icke beyond the fantastic absurdity was how his ideas have been filtered and watered down by successive less (relatively) fringe conspiraciest.
His view on on Reptilian Blood sucking to keep their youth derived from early Blood Libels was manifested by others into the Qanon Adrenechrome harvest or “Pizzagate”. To build these maps I had to read his source material, and while I did not wish to support his work directly unfortunately no library I could find stocked his books leading me to order copies where PDFs were not available.
Working a few hours a day I read through his work, taking notes and sketching pathways out, areas of repitition, cornerstones, then laid these out visually. First as spaghetti-like messes on notebooks, drawing and redrawing, ommiting and readding until an Aesthetically pleasing form came out, which are some of the final pieces you see here.
For Jones his worldview is admitedly less fantastical than Ickes blaming the “Liberal Hegemony” and “Deep State” yet still maintainng some degree of nacent support for the GOP party. With lynchpin issues being that of Gun Control, Reproductive and Gender Affirming Care. While hardly “edgy” by today’s standards Jones was very early to the radicalism of the enforcement of these ideas when the GOP was still tepid to them.
With 2015 and Trumps campaign this changed, Jones was early to embrace Donald’s candidacy, his outsider status removing him from Deep state influence. Trump too not buoyed by public opion also cozied up to Jones, joining his talkshow, inviting on the campaign trail and enteratining his ideas. No double becoming influenced by Jones.
Alex Jones’ legacy today if not for his Media Empire collapse under the settlement of the Sandy Hook lawsuit will be his slow adoption of conspiratorial ideas into the mainstream. It was under this understanding that I decided to work on making a systems map as best I could of his ideas.
Much like the notes done with Icke I too compiled these into node based systems, loose drawings, tangential connetions. Though I wanted to approach it differently, whereas with Icke I opted to make smaller discreet minature systems graphs for Alex I wanted something all emcompassing. For someone so recently influencial on Politics and with an impact the piece should too.
What culminated is the work shown above, a 16’x8’ drawing on a single sheet with large interlocking lines, vast open spaces, and minature clusters with names. At this scale the labels almost mattered less and I became drawn in by the forms they created, though I had the space to fit substantially more I decided to omit to let it strike an Aesthetic Balance.
This is the story behind this body of work PERM-line.