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This research will imput into my comic experimentation and my traditional posters and flyers.  These will display my own opinion on conspiracies  more clearly within a satirical piece that captures conspiracies  in a different tone to my other finale pieces  and experimentation.

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This artists minimalist  style aswell as fine refined lines resonates with the style I have demonstrated  within some of my experiments.  The experiments  show restraint and   I feel as though its highlighting my twist and exploring my own interpretation and stylised version of secret organisation  symbols. The use of this technique has also allowed me to reimmerse myself within a technique that I previously soley worked in . I intend on creating a series of finale pieces using this familiar technique  and combining it with different traditional  techniques  to create unique  objects . These objects will symbolise the normalisation of conspiracy  theories .

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These sources have inspired my medium for my finale pieces.  These pieces will use traditional photography, linoprinting and posters. The posters shall be made using digital tools . The use of relief printing is to get a refined combination of symbols. The photography shall heighten my alien dopplegangers to a  more refined outcome. The photography adds an element  of highbrow  to my pieces however the lowbrow collages will create a  forced amusing vibe to the piece. The aim is for my pieces to use traditional skills to  visually show  how conspiracy theories are becoming embedded in political history. While also highlighting my own opinion within the pieces.

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Alien 1998
This fabric textile alien links to my fabric experimentation and was an additional  artist that inspired my choice of medium and form.

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These felt and fabric aliens are inspired by my research into Qanon ,reptilian humanoids  and speculative design. The artists that inspired this piece the most is Jim shaw . The forms of these aliens are toy like to link to the child trafficking  ring within Qanon. There is a pizza on my larger scaled experiment that refers to how pizzagate started Qanon. The four experimental  pieces all use textile techniques.However my favourite  experimental piece is the minimal rock alien although it doesn't directly link to  the conspiracy theories I have researched. It does show a playful tone and appear more refined .

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"humans are treated as aliens on Earth, in 2009 he invited one hundred sixty of his neighbors from Tower 13 of his housing block in Bródno, Warsaw to dress in metallic gold space suits and board a gilded 737 airplane. " This piece by Paweł Althamer explores racism and racial issues.  This links to my exploration of the reptilian  humanoids conspiracy  but from a more logical approach to the idea of aliens among us. Instead of approaching the conspiracy as the aliens being extraterrestrial  I could focus on the critical reflection of racial issues. My overall work could become an avenue in which I display the lack of ethnic tutors, i could create a conspiracy piece that critically  visually exposes this racial issue .
The article explores multiple racial issues and critical reflections that link to alien and extraterrestrial space piece of art . This article from Eflux  was one of the books I read on a Friday lectures although not all books link to my work.This article made me question my future and the context im trying to display and consider what  I could explore.

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You're on the Spaceship Earth [...]
You'd better pay your fare now
You'll be left behind
You'll be left hangin'
In the empty air
You won't be here and you won't be there.

-Sun Ra, 1968

For some, contemporary art has become a kind of alt-science platform for research and development projects that offer alternatives to the corporate control and surveillance of outer space. Artists working on issues about access to space are at the front line of a critical investigation about the contours of the future, both in its material form and social organization. Many of these artists are challenging the current expansion of capitalist and colonial practices into outer space, particularly that of so-called "primitive" accumulation: the taking of land and resources for private use. They recognize that much of the tremendous capital amassed in the early 2000s e-commerce and tech boom is now being funneled into astronomically costly "New Space" projects such as SpaceX, a company funded by PayPal cofounder Elon Musk, and Blue Origin, the space enterprise of Amazon's Jeff Bezos.

In response, quite a few visual artists are exploring visions of "free" space, of outer space as a public commons and place of projective imagination. To contextualize and understand such work, this essay draws on R. Buckminster Fuller's (1895-1983) concept of "Spaceship Earth" and his "We are all astronauts" rhetoric of engineered bodies and technologized nature. In recent German and US curatorial projects charting the influence of Fuller on the work of contemporary artists-including MARTa Herford's "We Are All Astronauts: The Universe of Richard Buckminster Fuller as Reflected in Contemporary Art" (2011); Haus der Kulturen der Welt's "The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside" (2013); and the Walker Art Center's "Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia" (2015)-the manner in which Fuller's techno-utopianism is a touchstone in present day art practice has been examined. Fuller hoped to reorient mundane life towards a greater awareness of Earth as embedded in the wider cosmos, yet the eccentricity of his metaphor of Spaceship Earth, which characterizes architecture as an advanced technological vehicle that can supplant natural ecologies in sustaining life, has had lasting effects in how the future is envisioned as human-authored and technologically dependent.

Countering Fuller's optimism about humanity's orientation to outer space, a post-Apollo-missions generation of artists, born in the late 1960s to the 1980s, reckons with its own belatedness to a conception of space exploration as an aim of public culture in the current era of New Space privatization. Many of the artists in my discussion, who include Paweł Althamer, Halil Altindere, Frances Bodomo, Cristina de Middel, Larissa Sansour, Tomás Saraceno, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, engage in explicit criticisms of Fuller's techno-futurity. They register an elegiac sense that the era of space exploration as a program of knowledge acquisition, interspecies communication, and even intergalactic colonization-in short, the epoch of cosmic optimism-has receded if not ended. They join slightly older artists born in the 1950s, such as John Akomfrah, who reconsider how the applications of technologies in near and outer space, once billed as progressive, are rife with negative effects such as resource depletion and privatization, racial domination, and economic inequality. Given the fact that environmental damage, which is already prompting climate migrations, is being used to justify future off-planet colonization, space travel and space architectures have become central preoccupations of artworks made in the last decade or so.

As important as Fuller to artists today is the influence of musician and impresario Sun Ra (1914-93) and his influential space fascination in the 1960s and 1970s, a project that can be summed up as "We are all aliens." Ra's landmark afrofuturist works such as the 1972/74 film Space is the Place, and his albums and performances with his band the Arkestra, continue to be immensely popular, often-cited works in contemporary art, his experiments with modal polytonality and polyrhythmic beats looms large in contemporary culture. Space is the Place, scripted in part from lectures Sun Ra gave while teaching a course in 1971 at UC Berkeley titled "The Black Man in the Cosmos," follows Ra's attempts to recruit African-Americans to a distant planet he hopes to settle. The plot centers on the menace of white scientists eager to obtain Ra's interplanetary travel technology. Journeying back in time to a strip club in Chicago where he played piano in the 1940s, Ra meets a black "Overseer," a Cadillac-driving pimp played by Ray Johnson, who proposes a wager to offer black Americans "earthly delights" against Ra's hopes for their "altered destiny" in space. Ra eventually wins the bet and he raptures much of the black population of Oakland, California to join his space colony on Saturn.

In promoting a separatist vision of African-American culture as anticapitalist and technologically savvy, Sun Ra turned the function of black music and culture, traditionally exploited as entertainment, into a conduit for black advancement beyond white domination. For Ra, outer space became a utopian outside to segregation and white supremacy, a parallel dimension in which to model a life beyond discriminatory histories of colonization and injustice on Earth.

Just as access to technology is always fraught with power inequalities (when a Theremin refused to work, Ra joked, "Even machines can be racist. We got to be ready for the space age"), to Ra the many injustices committed against African-Americans by scientists, including unethical scientific studies on black bodies, also extended to dominant culture's diminishment of black accomplishments in acts of historical whitewashing. Ra led others to question the claims of universality in exploratory space travel and to make links between the history of slavery, the scarce resources available to the oppressed, and hopes for interplanetary travel: "What we never had for so long, space, outer space. Or no space at all. Squeezes so tight. From the slave ship to the shack to the tenement. No space to really move. No space to really function. Sun Ra & Co. herald Space to Come, Freedom, to move, to live again as ourselves. Expansion."

Like Janus's two faces, Fuller's euphoria about technologies expanding human access to the universe is inextricably linked to Ra's sense of whites having robbed others of a place on Earth, thereby necessitating the flight into outer space. One important proposal of neo-afrofuturist artworks is to temper the vision of the future as a frontier of exploration and technological progress with recognition that the loss of history for enslaved and subjugated peoples was the defining condition of previous colonial endeavors.

The Argentina-born, Berlin-based artist Tomás Saraceno invents DIY tools to actually physically access the stratosphere. Saraceno tests the capacity of individuals to lift off the Earth without the institutional apparatuses of once-dominant nation-based programs or the immense private wealth of tech oligarchs' current space enterprises. Fuller was fascinated with space capsules and space colony architecture, and the geodesic dome became the ur-object of his vision of the Earth as a mobile, streamlined, spherical media-receptive cabin. Like Fuller, Saraceno believes that a synthesis of humble, ad hoc prototypes and grand visions can generate concrete data for future experimental models. His Cloud Cities project (2009-present) is named after Fuller and Shoji Sadao's 1960 Cloud Nine, a speculative proposal for floating structures intended to rise above planetary surfaces. As part of Cloud Cities, Saraceno traveled to remote Salar de Uyuni in southwest Bolivia, the world's largest salt flat, to conduct trials of his Space Elevator, essentially a camping tent tethered to a clear plastic hot-air balloon. Though it goes beyond Fuller's proposal by actually taking flight, Saraceno's Space Elevator is a decidedly low-tech DIY bricolage construction, intentionally conjectural in its hope to keep the imagination of outer space open as a projective space for all.

Space Elevator is part of a project Saraceno initiated called the Aerocene Foundation, the aim of which is to construct airborne vehicles sustained by solar energy alone, to access "space without rockets ... free from borders, free from fossil fuels." Saraceno hopes these balloons will eventually be tethered together as floating cities, to "contest political, social, cultural, and military restrictions that are accepted today." For him, the paradigm of the floating city transgresses nation-state borders that, especially in the case of Latin America, reinscribe the power dynamics of colonialism onto the bodies of undesirable migrants, and reinforce land ownership as the criteria of citizenship. Saraceno's Space Elevator, though as implausible as Fuller and Sadao's speculative Cloud Nine in its current prototype form, echoes the immense heuristic potential of Fuller's project to fire curiosity about social and political forms beyond the geo-territorial norms of Earth-bound citizenship.

The "space race" of the 1950s to the 1990s unabashedly employed the language of competition. But what of the individuals and nations that did not qualify for the race? Had they no purchase on the vision of the future promised to the winners? Whereas Saraceno's Cloud Cities attempts to create institutions and infrastructures that bypass wealthy nations' and now billionaires' monopolies on space travel, two separate but related projects by Cristina de Middel and Frances Bodomo address earlier moments of DIY space exploration. De Middel and Bodomo use the same historical incident-the founding of the Zambia National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy in 1960-as a starting point for their investigations of non-Western space programs and the aspirations to self-determination following decolonization.

Edward Festus Mukuka Nkoloso, a school teacher who joined the Zambian resistance against British colonial rule, started the academy intending to beat the space programs of the US and the Soviet Union by sending a Zambian cadet there first. Nkoloso named the twelve Zambian cadets he selected for the mission the "Afronauts," from which both a 2014 film by Bodomo and a 2012 photographic series and book by de Middel borrow their titles. Eventually Nkoloso settled on a seventeen-year-old girl, Matha Mwambwa, and her two cats, as candidates for travel to the moon and Mars. He asked UNESCO for seven million Zambian pounds to prepare for a 1964 launch, and requested over a billion dollars from private foreign funders. He was unsuccessful on both counts. Without resources, he nonetheless improvised a launchpad and trained his Afronauts. Bodomo's film recreates Nkoloso's unsophisticated launch equipment and restages his decidedly low-tech training techniques, which involved rolling down a hill in an oil drum to simulate g-force, and swinging from a tire to simulate weightlessness. Alongside archival documents, de Middel's square-format color photographs restage scenes of Nkoloso's efforts and recreate the improvised costumes of the Afronauts, with actors donning motorcycle helmets paired with raffia collars, duct tape, vacuum tubing, and Kente cloth to present visually outlandish yet wholly impractical space costumes. De Middel's work emphasizes the artfulness of Nkoloso's endeavor, his appropriation of the visual codes of astronauts' suits and helmets, and the sleek look of rockets, all of which stood in for the actual journey. One can think of Nkoloso's project as a proleptic performance of sorts: creating elaborate props and putting on a play acts as a morale-building exercise towards a collective vision of outer space unencumbered by expensive, functional transportation technologies.

Nkoloso's unrequited quest for funding for Zambia to participate in the space age underscores the unequal allocation of global resources that stymies universal access to outer space, a zone legally unpossessable by international treaty but in practice monopolized by elites. Just as one could call for "socialized technology" to redistribute the benefits of advances among global populations, one can contest the ways racial exclusivity figures in the escape plans of "New Space" private enterprises. The big funders of all New Space companies are white men. Given the lack of diversity of powerful figures then and now in science research, exploration, and entrepreneurship, it isn't surprising that socialist, not capitalist, countries put the first woman (Valentina Tereshkova, Russia, 1963) and black man (Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez, Cuba, 1980) into space. In this sense the racial and gender dimensions of the Afronaut proposition are striking in that all the actors used by de Middel and Bodomo are black, as were the original Afronauts, creating a cast of space travelers akin to Sun Ra's all-African-American Arkestra, one never seen in actual space voyages.

Ra deployed the image of an ancient Egyptian ark as the vehicle for reaching outer space; any vision of future travel relies on elements of material culture available today and in the past. In John Akomfrah's fifty-three-minute, three-channel film installation The Airport (2016), the central character is a besuited and helmeted astronaut, who, at various moments, is seen through his helmet visor to be a black man. He wanders through an abandoned airport in Athens, comingling with waiting passengers in Edwardian garb as well as those in postwar 1950s fashions. The anachronism of these travelers, all stranded in the ruin of a transportation hub, suggests the instability caused by the exodus of capital during the Greek financial crisis that began in 2010, and also older histories of migration. Akomfrah argues that the airport is a site of both memory and futurity. The film, according to Akomfrah, explores "the sense that there's a place that you can go where you're free from the shackles of history. The airport can stand for that because it's a kind of embodiment of national-maybe even personal-ambition. The space where flight, or dreams, or betterment, can happen." Akomfrah's astronaut moves not only between spaces but between eras-one of his sources for The Airport's palimpsest of historical references was Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, whose concluding "stargate" sequence depicts the astronaut Bowman existing in various moments of the past and future simultaneously. Cultural theorist Tisa Bryant has stated of afrofuturism that it is "about space in the most literal of terms, just actual space, a continuum of boundary-less space where there is encounter and exchange across time." Though these vectors across space and time often have to do with colonial legacies of slavery and the middle passage, afrofuturism is also a lens by which to refract unresolved contemporary struggles of domination and repression, and an argument for equally distributed resources.

Two works by Paweł Althamer- Astronaut 1 (1995), filmed in Bydgoszcz, Poland, and Astronaut 2 (1997), performed during Documenta X in Kassel, Germany-have also explored the estrangement from contemporaneous time and space that the figure of the astronaut represents. In Astronaut 1 the artist traversed the city of Bydgoszcz in a homemade space suit, recording the local scene with a video camera as though it were an extraterrestrial civilization. In the follow-up piece Astronaut 2, Althamer engaged an itinerant man, costumed as an astronaut, to live in a trailer on the grounds of the Orangerie Palace, one of the central venues for the Documenta exhibition. On view in the trailer was a reperformance of Astronaut 1 filmed in Kassel. Continuing to explore how socially ignored or undesirable humans are treated as aliens on Earth, in 2009 he invited one hundred sixty of his neighbors from Tower 13 of his housing block in Bródno, Warsaw to dress in metallic gold space suits and board a gilded 737 airplane. They traveled to Brasilia, Brussels, Bamako in Mali, and Oxford, England as though they were representatives of another planet. The project, titled Common Task, was partly a celebration of the twenty-year anniversary of the 1989 victory of Polish solidarity, and the "alien landing" in Belgium served as a reminder of the continuing outsider status of Poles in Europe, in spite of Poland's 2004 inclusion into the European Union.

Reminiscent of Althamer's space-suited homeless person living in a mobile home as though it were a space capsule, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's eight-channel film and sculptural installation Primitive (2009-11) also employs a roughshod spaceship, in his case to probe now-repressed political events in Southeast Asia. A follow-up to his 2006 film Faith, in which two Asian astronauts, each allotted his own channel of a two-screen projection, suffer the isolation of a blinding white spaceship, Primitive brought Weeresethakul's interest in outer space to the improbable location of the small community of Nabua in remote northeastern Thailand. In 1965, Nabua was the site of the first confrontation between communist fighters and Thai Army forces that began a long and bloody insurgency, and the village suffered enormously during the brutal anti-communist mass killings in 1971-73 that left countless thousands dead and many tortured. Weerasethakul noted how the eradication of significant numbers of the population during these actions created a generation gap between teenagers and village elders, and he was struck by how the violence became shrouded in traumatic silence. He expresses doubt that recent discussions of species extinction have sufficiently accounted for the tremendous intra-human slaughter of recent wars and violent conflicts: to him, Primitive is in large part "about the elimination of many things, of species, of ideologies, of beliefs."

The films document life in Nabua from the perspective of the town's young: their joyrides on pickup trucks and their game with a flaming soccer ball, for example. Two of the films portray the construction of a domed "spaceship" in the village that eventually lifts off the ground. "What better time to be able to leave Thailand?" Weerasethakul asks, pondering the driftlessness and confusion of the teens' lives in a place that has tried to bury its past. The teens use the completed spaceship as a place to play music, drink, and get high, changing the interior into a blood-red crash pad. Elders in the village want to use the ship to store rice. Like Bodomo and de Middel's work recovering the history of the Afronauts, Weerasethakul underscores the cultural meaning of the spaceship as more than a vehicle capable of transporting bodies across space, instead seeing it as a mnemonic architecture that sutures past to future, like an ark bridging traumatic histories to future hopes.

For nations like Thailand, Poland, and Zambia, lacking resources to participate in the space age compounds perceptions of technological "backwardness" already present in stereotypes of third-world nations as primitive or folkloric. Exploring the "frontier" in space exploration-a project pioneered largely by whites from wealthy nations with racist colonial histories-can easily be read as a form of domination that substitutes the distraction of "conquest" in the future for responsibilities to the "conquered" of the past. Artists are finding ways to address the uneven distribution of technological advancement by examining progress both geographically as well as temporally, returning to precolonial histories and readdressing legacies of colonial violence.

In contrast, New Spacers like Musk and Bezos treat outer space, ostensibly free of indigenous peoples, as a new frontier exempt from the exploitation that characterized earlier colonial projects. And yet voluntary, touristic travel remains an experience of privilege; for many around the globe, travel is undertaken in forced and dangerous circumstances. Halil Altindere's 2017 installation Space Refugee focuses on cosmonaut Muhammed Faris, who became the first Syrian to travel to space in 1987. The work is anchored by a curving wall-sized photo mural of Faris, replete with 1980s bushy mustache, performing a space walk outside the Mir space station, the scene embellished with colorful nebula and planets. Facing the mural is a small oil and acrylic portrait of Faris with two Russian cosmonauts, fully suited but for their helmets in their laps. The painting is framed by a blue neon-like LED light that lends the painting a garish, retro-futuristic look reminiscent of Ridley Scott's 1982 movie Blade Runner. Shown alongside these works is the twenty-minute film Space Refugee (2016), elaborating Faris's plight as a stateless exile and envisioning outer space as the ideal sanctuary for homeless and refugee populations.

A Russian-trained cosmonaut who traveled to the Mir space station in 1987, Faris spoke out against the Assad regime and joined the armed opposition in 2011. Eventually, he and his family fled Syria, illegally crossing into Turkey. In the film, Faris describes the discrimination against refugees he and others experience, and reveals his hope that "we can build cities for them there in space where there is freedom and dignity, and where there is no tyranny, no injustice."

The film intercuts shots of astronauts-later revealed to be kids in child-sized space suits-walking amid rovers in rugged terrain, with talking-head interviews with NASA/JPL scientists, an aviation lawyer speaking about colonizing Mars, and an architect designing underground shelters for the harsh Martian climate. In a talk addressing a group of schoolchildren, Faris proclaims that "space belongs to whoever wants to learn and has power. Space does not belong to anyone. But whoever has the technology can go, and those who don't, can't."

Three of the child-astronauts teleport into a red cave. One of the scientists explains that life on Mars will take place in shelters and underground, and the film pans across a colony of barracks complete with three geodesic domes silhouetted against a distant Earth. The architect speaks about how to build such habitations to avoid surface radiation, lauding 3-D printing as a means to construct entire buildings, and his digital renderings show the elegant, spacious interiors, verdant with greenery. Suddenly Mars has become a tidy but sterile corporate atrium. As the film ends Faris proclaims, "I will go with [the refugees] to Mars, to Mars, where we will find freedom and safety ... there is no freedom on Earth, there is no dignity for humans on Earth."

Larissa Sansour's work A Space Exodus (2009) likewise portrays space travel as a means to process the nachträglichkeit, repression, and displacement of now stateless migrants in the Middle East. Sansour's five-and-a-half minute film depicts the artist as an astronaut taking off in a shuttle and eventually landing on the Moon to plant a Palestinian flag on its surface. Seen in a white space suit with bulging visor, a close-up of her face shows her waving goodbye to the distant Earth. As she turns to hop away in the low-gravity environment, an Arabic-inflected version of the heroic Richard Strauss orchestral work "Also sprach Zarathustra," famously used in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, plays. Evoking afrofuturists' yearning to find in outer space freedom beyond histories of racial subjugation, Sansour's outer space is also a haven, a place to establish a state for Palestinians who have been denied reparations for the loss of their land and resources.

Outer space, where so few have been, remains a preeminent projective space in the cultural imagination: the place wherein reside fantasies of rebirth, of reinvention, of escape from historical determinations of class, race, and gender inequality, and of aspirations for just societies beyond the protection of the Earth's atmosphere. The imagination of space itself frequently exceeds any known spectatorial experience, and therefore envisoning it is a speculative political project in the sense that Frederic Jameson has written of science fiction:

The apparent realism, or representationality, of [science fiction] has concealed another, far more complex temporal structure: not to give us "images" of the future-whatever such images might mean for a reader who will necessarily predecease their "materialization"-but rather to defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present, and to do so in specific ways distinct from all other forms of defamiliarization.

Rather than dismiss "imaging" the future as a form of literalization, however, it is important to consider how visual artists use images and material to effectuate the defamiliarization about which Jameson writes. We don't often speak of visual art using the language of science fiction in this critical sense. Yet the visions of our future in space in the projects I have addressed are self-aware about how the problems of the present may blossom into the possible triumphs or catastrophes of tomorrow. Though scarce resources may be used in better ways than for moving bodies into space for tourism or colonization, space provides a speculative zone to imagine how to organize resources on Earth, including those used to fund scientific projects of exploratory character.

In considering how space exploration is treated in visual art, Fuller's call to explore near and outer space using the rhetoric of "Spaceship Earth" has fascinating repercussions, both for visualizing the Earth as a technologized object as well as conceptualizing its "evolutionary" development as merely the first among several future human colonies in the universe. Reclaiming the civic and utopian project of space exploration in art, in the current era of privatization, tourism, and surveillance technologies, is one of the key stakes for those returning to Fuller's vision. To this, Ra's demand to diversify access to space and space fantasies opens up Jameson's project of defamiliarization to the hope of a more equal tomorrow: "Hold it people, I see a flying saucer comin', guess I wait and see. Yeah, a spaceship comin', guess I wait and see. All I know they might look just like me."

×

Eva Díaz has taught at the Pratt Institute in New York since 2009. Her book The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College was released in 2015 by the University of Chicago Press. She is currently at work on a new book titled After Spaceship Earth, analyzing the influence of R. Buckminster Fuller in contemporary art. Her writing has appeared in magazines and journals such as The Art Bulletin, Artforum, Art Journal, Art in America, Cabinet, The Exhibitionist, Frieze, Grey Room, Harvard Design Magazine, and October.

© 2018 e-flux and the author

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You're on the Spaceship Earth [...] You'd better pay your fare now You'll be left behind You'll be left hangin' In the empty air You won't be here and you won't be there. -Sun Ra, 1968 For some, contemporary art has become a kind of alt-science platform for research and development projects that offer alternatives to the corporate control and surveillance of outer space.

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Similarities between Blue Mustang and Martian Portraits consist of conspiracy themes and how both pieces where created and later exhibited in a public space. These spaces are both documented online within articles that explore conspiracy theories and economic issues. Critical exploration of these economic issues and politics is documented within the piece’s compositions. These pieces also explore issues through subliminal messages. These messages are the otherworldly forms of the Martian heads and the red eyes and rearing form of Blue Mustang. The creation of other worlds is not just from the forms within the composition but the audience’s reflection and opinions based upon the pieces. Created in similar time periods that were affected by the economic issues within the 90s to present day. They’re both displayed in America which means that American politics and cultural disarray in the country feeds into both pieces and is displayed in both the public art at Denver International Airport and the Exhibition Everything is connected.  “around 12 million people in the US BELIEVE THAT INTERSTELLAR LIZARDS IN PEOPLE SUITS RULE OUR COUNTRY.” This shows that a portion of the American population believes in the reptilian conspiracy theory. This can link to the disarray and lack of trust in the American government. This distrust can stem from the government doing unspeakable thing such as “The government, for example, does sometimes conspire to do the unspeakable, such as the infamous 1930s TUSKEGEE STUDY, initiated by the US government to examine untreated syphilis in African-American men.”. These two pieces both have analytical audiences that question and criticize both the pieces themselves but also the location and context behind the pieces. These similar and critical responses from the audience may not have been intended by the creators of the pieces but have become more relevant and give the pieces more significance.

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My current mind map created on the 28th September is not certain and the research doesn’t really correlate to the questions given. However, sticking to the conspiracy theme and staying near the research base board I have created in my opinion can spring board into a deep critical essay once I understand the direction and question I intend on using. Debating on my question and deciding on a structure is going to be organised for the session commencing on the 5th of October to ensure I stay on a tight timeline.

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Mindmap and ideas .
Essay notes and ideas 20th September 2020
6. PATTERN OBSERVING
7. Creating new questions to how things repeat not necessarily providing answers.
8. Compare /contrast
9. Extra analytical
10. Use insights from one to apply to the other.
11.
12. Pattern observing, I could analyse all different conspiracies that re appear through time. The word conspiracy can relate to a movement by a secretive group. Conspiracy can also mean you have knowledge of a crime. E.g. conspiring to murder.  Understanding language and the way it works.
13.
14. Compare contrast.
15. Expose similarities or differences in the way it is understood. Compare the illuminati to more recent conspiracies and not the contrasts and similarities.  Compare Ted talk on the illuminati and the red pill Blue pill 💊 theory.
16. Screenshot the lay out for an essay for both, pattern observing and compare contrast. Annalise both source relevant research and brainstorm on what may be the best analytical and critical approach. Thinking about sculptures, speculative design and the intended audience.  Consider the practice work that interlinks to the written work, evaluate how these intertwining bodies of work appear and create an overview of the entire body of work (28/09/2020).
17.
18. Consider comparing artwork e.g. blue mustang and another conspiracy art piece. Observe the patterns in conspiracies and think about the artwork and time periods surrounding them.
19.
20. Questions for Science and technology
21. How does speculative design change the way we live or behave?
22. Explore the art of artists or designers who create other or alternative worlds.

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“Once designers step away from industrial production and the marketplace, we enter the realm of the unreal, the fictional, or what we prefer to think of as conceptual design—design about ideas. (Dunne, A and Raby, F Speculative Everything, 2014 1st ed page 33-34) F”
Critical designs are testimonials to what could be, but at the same
time, they offer alternatives that highlight weaknesses within existing
normality.”

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This sketch  is a surreal soft pastel drawing of a positive literal composition based on pizza gate. To further experiment on sketches I intend on doing collages of Qanon ,Pizza Gate, Bill Clinton and imagery that connects to the pizzagate conspiracy theory such as satanic symbols, children's toys ,pizzas etc.

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When documenting my work swell as creating this digital log . I intend on collating my research for current experimental work and any photographic documentation into a collage. This is to enable me to better organise my work within the university building without  disrupting the physical work or research im doing on the day. This series of A1s will be a good addition to my portfolio  for any future interviews or work experience.

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This is a photograph documenting the first stages of me creating clay pizzas which I intend on connecting with wire and installing on a gate. Then photographing .

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This work was published on my Instagram were I archive and publicly display my portfolio of work.

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This is the start of a experimental  series of alien heads. Im thinking of creating masks that are alien like for tutors to wear. Then maybe making a life cast with plaster.

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Layering the image of My tutor with  my sketch and alien heads.

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These varying mixed medium sketches were the basis of the digital collages I later created on Auto sketchbook.

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The colour scheme has been changed to a Blue monochromatic colourscheme  this links to my research into blucifer. The medium is a mixture of pencil, watercolour  and felt tip pens to get varying shades of blue.

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This first experimentation for the pizza gate idea has been made using the traditional technique  of photography. The composition of a food wedged in a University gate/fence creates contrast between the cold educational location and the warm food. On a surface level it may seem jovial and jestful but the deep meaning of the conspiracy theory behind this piece brings depth and when documented alongside a quote explaining pizza gate it becomes a very dark context.  The reason of the location is so that I can explore and create the educational location for conspiracy theories that link to political leaders, Educational settings and educate the audience and aim to get them questioning reality beyond face value.
To improve and further experiment with this piece I could use a professional camera and use clay pizzas or fabric sculptural pizzas to ensure less waste and wider range of mediums.

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Created on the 15/10/2020 these experimental piece’  where inspired by my research into Jim Shaw and Luis Jiménez.  The composition  of my Classical portrait pieces have the focal point of my tutor to document the power structure within university.  The point of using a tutor as my focal point is to analyse and question the structures in place surrounding me. The focal point has been distorted into an alien doppelganger similar to how Jim Shaw’s Martian portraits uses alien doppelgangers. These sketches were  then altered and collaged using my photograph of my tutor that inspired my previous experimental pieces. These collages combined alien doodles through layers. These layers were altered  in scale and composition. Analysing all these pieces I published the traditional portraits as they were the most refined and technically elevated pieces .This publication was done on my Instagram which archives and publishes all my art work. The experimental pieces range in medium  from photography, collages ,sketching and Photoshop.

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https://www.reddit.com/u/maysons1inkedlily?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

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Publishing the work on reddit and organisation for future work.

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Publishing the work on reddit and organisation for future work.

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Publishing these Symbolic experiments on reddit has meant that I can have the conspiracy work documented on a site that’s aimed towards people that like unusual areas of research. This documentation looks refined and sleek however I think another public platform e.g. a website would be more effective at reaching a wider audience.  Creating a physical place in which my sculpture could read a wider audience could be through making art pieces and leaving them in locations of power . This means people who are higher in the power system may see the work and begin to question there own roles in organisations that they work for. On the 29t  of October I intend on creating more sculptures and a website. The sculptures will be left in places with the website link to gather more attention from the public.
These ideas are initial ideas and areas that I can further explore in the upcoming weeks . This week I want to photograph the buildings of my interest and find elements that inspire me . Also photograph my sculptures on clean plinths in the room to refine the archiving of these pieces.

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The green back drop was less affective as it distracted from the object.

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, experimenting with the backdrop

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Experimenting with the display of artifacts.Using the bowl and testing it functions. However later use of this experimental  piece showed that the clay had cracked when being transported rooms.

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Analysis of experiments up to the 22nd  of October. 

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Analysis of experiments up to the 22nd  of October. 

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These pieces were created inspired by my research into the freemasons ,the knights Templar and the illuminati.  The intention for these sculptures was to play with documenting secret societies in a blunt manner. This was done through the sculptures forms being of everyday objects. However when conducting a critical I realised the sculptures aimed audience and place would be outside governmental buildings thus having an everyday object as the form would not be as evoking . Further more it would inaccurately relate to the real motive and message of the piece. Ideas on how to create further work consist of relics, gavels and tools being the form of the pieces . Exploring sculptures and photographic collages to achieve a more meaningful   approach would result in the pieces/piece   to be increasingly relatable to the public and its instillation environment .Creating a clearer link through the symbols and different secret societies  that I have researched  is another aim of upcoming  physical pieces of explorative work.
The process of making these experimental symbolic sculptures made me consider bringing gloves to enable me to comfortably  Do dexterous  tasks considering my wrist injury and needing a support to enable this. Another note is that ensuring  I have  the required tools to roll out clay more efficiently. Photographing and filming my making could be staged with a white backdrop to make the documentation more effective and professional as I continue creating practice work in the future. Organising equipment  is a new priority furthermore the previous slide to this documents the more professional  white backdrop pieces .The white backdrop makes the pieces have a more catalogue  and archival appearance making them more striking .

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Based on my investigations into Blue mustang . I intend on creating a sculptural instillation that I get the public /student body come up with a conspiracy theory  for the piece.

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The Secret organisations symbols created into relics  . This avenue is the first experiential pieces I did and these experimental pieces link to my other avenues through the theme of conspiracies. Inspired by the freemasons, the illuminati  and the knights Templar I combined there symbols to create a stronger  symbol that can be modernised and incorporated into speculative design sculptures. Speculative Everything  is a book that I have read and critical design is what my experimental pieces shall incorporate as I want to create functional but futuristic objects .Drawings ,paintings and classical sculpture are the first initial experimental mediums I used however I think sculptures capture the context and research more visually.

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The pizza gate idea stemmed from my research into QAnon I wanted an avenue in which I can create work that has a fun energy. The experimental idea I started with was to take a piece of pizza and compose a photograph  of the pizza on a gate .Then using clay I intended on expanding the experimentation through varying forms ,scales and compositions.

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Alien doppelganger conspiracy . This avenue will be explored through digital and physical collages.  The main focal point will be tutors from the university and inspired by Jim Shaw I shall take traditional portraits and recreate them in an extra-terrestrial  doppelganger.

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The secretive handshakes are in my opinion  downplayed by the BBC , the secret masonic rituals which have  damaged the reputation of The three masons making them questionable. The article states that the freemasons are one of the UK's biggest charitable donators. The money, reputation  and influence the society has could mean all information published has to adhere to how they want the freemasons  portrayed.  Considering former members such as Sir Winston Churchill have been in charge of the country any reliable broadcasting corporation  would downplay and misconstrue information to enable a better relation to the freemasons’ .The freemasons  are from what I can tell from my overall research connected loosely to the knights  Templar due to the temple of Solomon and members stating connections.  There connection to the illuminati  however is through the knights Templar and is not direct .

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Opposing Views on conspiracy theories analysis 

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Opposing Views on conspiracy theories analysis 

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“does filtering out conspiracy theorists help public discourse – or can it strengthen their paranoia that they are being suppressed? And can these ideas be fought with education? We spoke to experts to see whether it will work.”
“That’s very threatening to our ability to understand the world and to democratic politics. Because anything people retweet enough times seems true – regardless of whether or not it is,” he says.”
“Dr Whitney Phillips, author of This is Why we Can’t Have Nice Things, points out that a “marketplace of ideas approach” to misinformation (which posits that if you combat problematic speech with more speech, the truth will eventually prevail) doesn’t work in our current online environment.”
“That ideal does not take into account algorithms; the various affordances of digital media that float and incentivize certain types of sensationalist content – it is simply not the case that all voices carry equally on social media; or that all information carries equally,”
Does suppressing online conspiracy theorists work?

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“The second is Plandemic, a 26-minute “documentary” video featuring Dr Judy Mikovits, a former research scientist and inveterate conspiracy theorist who blames the coronavirus outbreak on big pharma, Bill Gates and the World Health Organization.”
“Mikovits claims that wearing masks is dangerous because it “literally activates your own virus”.”
“The video went online on 4 May when its maker, Mikki Willis, a hitherto little-known film producer, posted it to Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo and a separate website set up to share the video.”
“Later that evening Plandemic popped up on a large-scale political page on Facebook.”
“when a Covid-19 vaccine does eventually arrive, conspiracy theorists will have a field day. Assuming they haven’t all died of the virus first. "How the 'Plandemic' conspiracy theory took hold.

This shows the current conspiracies questioning the government  and weather covid is real . This links to other avenues  i have researched such as Qanon, Denvor Airport, Everything  is connected and my research into the illuminati. There's a common thread of critical thinking and questioning .

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Children of the world dream of peace.(1995).

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The first image is taken from the article (https://www.westword.com/arts/denver-international-airport-conspiracy-theories-are-taking-offagain-10403564) this article goes into how the piece has been taken down and questions weather its a conspiracy or coincidence?. The other article is the denvor Airport article I previously  analysed.

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At the denver Airport, Art fuels conspiracy

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At the denver Airport, Art fuels conspiracy

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The city of Denver is considering deaccessioning one of the most ambitious installations at its airport, but its art collection has long served as a source of inspiration and consternation.

A major transportation hub just about smack in the middle of the country, the Denver International Airport (DIA) offers an interesting layover to travelers willing to explore its bustling terminals. DIA and the art in its collection have been the subject of conspiracy theories dating back to the airport's construction, while new technical difficulties have emerged in the maintenance and display of its ambitious permanent installations. From the so-called " Blucifer" sculpture that greets visitors as they drive up to the terminal, to the newest acquisition - a futuristic installation by Anibal Catalan - it's hardly surprising that the DIA was deemed the " best US airport for art." But don't expect cottage paintings or pleasant abstraction here. The DIA art collection stands out for shunning the niceties of conventional airport décor and embracing the weird, with a focus on permanent installations.

The airport's art has been in the news recently because an installation by Michael Singer, "Interior Garden" (1995) - commissioned for the opening of the airport itself - was flagged by management as an expensive liability. This led to outcry against the proposed deaccessioning of the work, with the public weighing in on the piece's value for the airport and the city. The collection is collectively valued at over $14 million, but the DIA communications department told the Denver Post that some $800,000 has gone into the maintenance of "Interior Garden" in the 22 years since the airport opened. DIA allocated a whopping $650,000 for the removal of the installation, which mimics ancient ruins alive with plant life and flowing water in the airport's C concourse. According to airport officials who want to be rid of the needy artwork, the installation leaks, attracts pests, and "creates a hazardous situation for passengers." The final call as to whether to destroy "Interior Garden" has fallen to Denver Arts and Venues director Kent Rice, who has yet to make a decision.

Catalan's new installation, which was facilitated by Mexico City gallerist Brett W. Schultz, makes the DIA collection even more diverse and shows a commitment to permanent installations - even if they involve more work and long-term costs for the airport. The cluster of sculptures by Catalan, " Vorticity " (2016), is beautifully out of place among the C concourse's fast food chains. The suspended swarm of yellow, black, and silver geometric mobiles might be abstracted bees, but more likely they're spaceships or intergalactic settlements forming the spiral of a new galaxy. The artist's background in architecture is evident in the installation's industrial forms and its integration with the hectic airport environment.

The DIA art collection is managed by the city's public art program and a cultural commission, who provide counsel to the airport about which works to purchase using funds from the city's Percent for Art program, which sets aside 1% of the budget for any major municipal capital-improvement construction project for public art. Denver's public art officials may be knowingly fomenting the conspiracy theories surrounding the airport by filling its concourses with works that are so anomalous; DIA senior public information officer Heath Montgomery told the Denver Post that the conspiracy theories add up to "hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars" in free advertising.

Take, for example, two murals by Leo Tanguma that have long been cited by conspiracy theorists as " evidence" of either a secret masonic apocalypse shelter, an alien colony, or a secret CIA base beneath passengers' feet. (Most of the conspiracy theories surrounding DIA claim that there are up to six additional levels concealed beneath the airport.) Tanguma's murals, "In Peace and Harmony with Nature" and "Children of the World Dream of Peace," have been at the center of conspiracy theories because of their apocalyptic imagery, which allegedly references Freemason iconography.

In the left panel of " Children of the World Dream of Peace," children from many cultures come together to destroy swords and daggers that are sheathed in the flags of many nations. In the smaller right panel, a menacing soldier impales a dove with a saber while brandishing a machine gun. " In Peace and Harmony with Nature," which also spans two panels, features one scene showing the bountifulness and diversity of natural life, while the other depicts the extinction of animals and cultures at the hands of modern humans. The murals, which were commissioned for the airport during its construction, certainly contain multilayered images of a mysterious (perhaps even apocalyptic) nature, but clues to a secret alien-illuminati plot? I doubt it. More likely, conspiracy theorists are seeing what they want to in the compositions' charged imagery, rather than Tanguma's overt allusions to the dangers of war and climate change.

Conspiratorial "experts" like Jay Weidner assert that the airport's murals and capstone prove the existence of a secret government plan for a "New World Order." Others implicate the airport in the murder of JonBenét Ramsey. One local Evangelical Christian group, Cephas Ministries, claimed that the DIA was built as part of a plot to murder the "people that Lucifer hates."

The misreadings by "paranoid doomsday theorists," as Rachel Cole Dalamagas put it in her interview with Tanguma for Zing Magazine, point to an important facet of the conspiracy surrounding the DIA that has rarely been discussed. Tanguma is an important Denver-based Chicano artist who, throughout his career, has combined symbolism from history and mysticism with the techniques of the 20th-century Mexican muralists. His work at the DIA is part of a larger body of work that deals with American socio-political issues from his uniquely hybrid perspective.

The DIA was planned and built during the administrations of Federico Peña and Wellington Webb, the first Hispanic and African American mayors of Denver, respectively. These two men made a point of hiring immigrant workers and minority-owned businesses, which resulted in uproar among the state's conservatives. DIA was deemed a disaster during Peña's administration and Webb was accused of corruption, but the airport became one of the most efficient and profitable in the country. The success of the airport as a transportation and cultural hub more than 20 years later is a testament to the legacies of the former mayors, whose vision for a diverse and provocative Denver can still be seen in the airport's art collection.

Like all airports, DIA contains its fair share of bland, cookie-cutter art that won't inspire many jet-lagged travelers to look up from their phones. The statue of astronaut Jack Swigert in concourse B, murals of the Old West, and the word " Relax" in giant, glowing letters fit snugly into typical airport art conventions. Many airports, like Houston's, have big, expensive, and not especially memorable or noteworthy art collections that blend into the background of departure time monitors, advertisements, duty free stores, and fast food chains. DIA's works that inspire controversy and conspiracy are a special exception.

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At the Denver Airport, Art Fuels Conspiracy Theorists

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The city of Denver is considering deaccessioning one of the most ambitious installations at its airport, but its art collection has long served as a source of inspiration and consternation. A major transportation hub just about smack in the middle of the country, the Denver International Airport (DIA) offers an interesting layover to travelers willing to explore its bustling terminals.

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Blue mustang ,Luis Jimenez (A major transportation hub just about smack in the middle of the country, the Denver International Airport (DIA) offers an interesting layover to travellers willing to explore its bustling terminals. DIA and the art in its collection have been the subject of conspiracy theories dating back to the airport’s construction, while new technical difficulties have emerged in the maintenance and display of its ambitious permanent installations. )
Leo Tanguma, “Children of the World Dream of Peace” (1995)
“In the left panel of “Children of the World Dream of Peace,” children from many cultures come together to destroy swords and daggers that are sheathed in the flags of many nations. In the smaller right panel, a menacing soldier impales a dove with a saber while brandishing a machine gun.”
“The murals, which were commissioned for the airport during its construction, certainly contain multi-layered images of a mysterious (perhaps even apocalyptic) nature, but clues to a secret alien-illuminati plot? I doubt it. More likely, conspiracy theorists are seeing what they want to in the compositions’ charged imagery, rather than Tanguma’s overt allusions to the dangers of war and climate change.”
These quotes were taken from this source as I feel they are relevant to my work for the Sculpture idea and relates to my essay.There all located within or around Denver Airport. These paintings are all available to a mixed audience and many conspiracy theorists believe that Children of the world dream of piece is depicting the Nazis taking over the world. The piece Mustang is referred to as” bluesifer” and crushed the artist creating it to death. The colour of mustangs eyes seem to glow and due to the design of the airport looking like a swastika from an aerial view the art pieces and airport itself gets conspiracy theorists creating many theories. This relates to my mind map and idea generation considering the airport allegedly has links to the illuminati and is overall questionable.

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These artists are all related to the freemasons . They all specialise in painting . They may be relevant for my essay or just for inspiration. The source is reliable as its an official freemasons website . However this can make the list biased as there a secretive group.

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These artists are all related to the freemasons . They all specialise in painting . They may be relevant for my essay or just for inspiration. The source is reliable as its an official freemasons website . However this can make the list biased as there a secretive group.

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This documentary by the BBC explored the 5G conspiracies  that circulated when the pandemic began. It goes into depth about this conspiracy . Documenting this  documentary felt relevant as this was one of the conspiracy theories that sparked my questioning and deeper research. The BBC can be seen as a reliable source as they have accurately documented  many areas of facts relating to the pandemic. However this could be biased as members who produced and shot this documentary likely didn’t believe in the 5G conspiracy to begin with this information  shown could be inaccurately edited to make the conspiracy  less believable.

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What links the freemasons and the knights Templar 

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What links the freemasons and the knights Templar 

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The knights of Templar were believed to have built the temple of Solomon however it was actually the Three masons, they also link  unreliable through word of mouth from current freemasons . The knights Templar were crusaders  , the knights were founded in 1118 and destroyed in 1307. Examining this article lead me to note direct connections through current freemasons  word of mouth and historical roots. The connection to the illuminati is due to the freemasons which the illuminati  was based of off and there connection through  relics and masonic rituals. This website may not be reliable as it is a source I have never heard of before however it does give varying insight to multiple aspects  of history.

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This  Lost symbols website debunks alleged connections to the knights Templar . However due to negative reputation the knights Templar gave the freemasons . Any information debunking there connections can become questionable.  Especially when it is in regards to a secretive  society. This source is also not a source I would deem reliable however  due to the uncertainty  surrounding  the freemasons  it could be true. I included this to show that any of my research can be unreliable given the context I am researching. Through showing in-depth research I hope to give enough information and sources to conclude and compare what I believe to be accurate.

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QANON is a conspiracy that first appeared when trump took office, It started on fringe message boards .Adherends allege that the president is  the target of deep state actors high ranking officials against him. The FBI labeled the movement a potential terror threat. Some congressional candidates supported it to the media but then back tracked. The conspiracy has links to Pizza Gate a previous conspiracy. Trump and the Q-team are working to destroy a global capable of satanic worshipping pedophiles. Current conspiracies like this demonstrate the power and control conspiracy theories can have on politics and the global population's beliefs.

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This what if idea generator made me consider symbols and tools in relation to the composition of my experimental sculptures. Exploring medias and techniques such as sculpture, photography ,collating and instillation art .

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I created this minimal  on the 24th September 2020.When creating this mind map I used the colours green and red to link to the contexts within the mind map. Green links to the wealth from aristocrats and red links to the danger and caution surrounding conspiracies. The form of  a web mind map relates to   how conspiracies are interlinking ideas and how it is a community that has thin connections .The thin pieces of ribbon was a great media choice to visually represent connections .The video documenting my creation of this mind map is to show how I started with basic ideas and expanded .

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‘PizzaGate’ Conspiracy Theory Thrives Anew in the TikTok Era (Published 2020)

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The false theory targeting Democrats, now fueled by QAnon and teenagers on TikTok, is entangling new targets like Justin Bieber.

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In June, Justin Bieber went live on his Instagram account. Among the countless questions and comments directed at the pop star was one from a social media user who asked Bieber to touch his hat if he were a survivor of child sex trafficking. Bieber did subsequently adjust his beanie, but it's entirely likely that he'd never even noticed the request. However, for followers of the Pizzagate conspiracy, it offered proof of their belief in a powerful cabal of pedophiles who not only traffic kids for sex, but also physically abuse and even murder and cannibalize them in horrifying Satanic rituals.

The fact that no evidence supports this thoroughly debunked theory hasn't stopped Pizzagate, which first went viral in 2016 before making a resurgence in recent months, from spreading. Here's what you should know.

What the hell is Pizzagate?

It all started in early November 2016, when Clinton campaign manager John Podesta's email was hacked and the messages were published by Wikileaks. One of the emails, according to The New York Times, was between Podesta and James Alefantis, the owner of D.C. pizzeria Comet Ping Pong. The message discussed Alefantis hosting a possible fundraiser for Clinton.

Users of the website 4Chan began speculating about the links between Comet Ping Pong and the Democratic Party, according to the BBC, with one particularly vile connection burbling to the surface: the pizzeria is the headquarters of a child trafficking ring led by Clinton and Podesta.

Seriously?

Yes. The conspiracy theory that prominent members of the Democratic Party are somehow involved in a global child-trafficking ring took root on far-right conservative websites. According to the BBC, the conspiracy theory linking this very false theory to Comet kicked around 4Chan until someone posted a long document with "evidence" to a now-banned alt-right section of Reddit several days before the U.S. election. The alt right is a fringe group of far-right extremists-comprised, mostly, of white supremacists and old-fashioned racists-who share their views and various forms of propaganda online.

Also, the nation of Turkey is involved in the spread of Pizzagate.

Around mid-November, the BBC explained, a pro-government media outlet in Turkey started tweeting the conspiracy theory using the hashtag #pizzagate. The reason, according to The Daily Dot, is that supporters of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan were trying to accuse opponents of hypocrisy. An actual child-abuse scandal had rocked a foundation connected to the Turkish government, and Erdogan's supporters were asking why people weren't also outraged over Pizzagate. In other words, it was meant as a distraction.

How does this involve Comet Ping Pong?

The 120-seat restaurant opened in D.C. in 2006 years ago and, according to The New York Times, is considered a kid-friendly place, with ping-pong tables and craft rooms. It's also played host to concerts by local musicians, including the band Fugazi.

Comet Ping Pong's owner, James Alefantis, is an artist and D.C.-native who was a Clinton supporter but had never met her, according to the Times. Alefantis has prominent friends in the Democratic party. Tony Podesta, brother of John Podesta, frequents the restaurant.

Alefantis was also in a relationship with David Brock, the founder of the website Media Matters for America. The Times described Brock as "a provocative former right-wing journalist who became an outspoken advocate for Mrs. Clinton."

The restaurant's staff and customers have come under frequent assault online because of this nonsense.

As fake news stories on far-right conservative blogs began to pile up and spread online, the Facebook page and Instagram feed of Comet Ping Pong began filling up with comments to the tune of "we're on to you." It quickly spiraled out of control, with threatening messages pouring through. "I will kill you personally," one message read, according to the Times.

Alefantis and his staff of 40 people received threatening phone calls and text messages. Photos of customers' children posted online were taken and used in articles as evidence of the child-abuse ring. Many of those customers, the Times noted, hired lawyers to have the pictures removed.

As the threats mounted-including one person who showed up at the restaurant to investigate for himself-Alefantis contacted local police as well as the FBI. He also got in touch with Twitter, Facebook and Reddit in an effort to remove the posts and stories about the conspiracy theory.

None of it worked. The social media posts, texts and phone calls continued to mount.

The situation finally boiled over into real violence.

On the afternoon of Sunday, December 4 2016, 28-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch, of Salisbury, North Carolina, walked through the front door of Comet Ping Pong and pointed an assault rifle in the direction of an employee, according to the Associated Press. The employee fled and called police, but Welch fired his gun, possibly striking the walls, door, and a computer. No one was hurt.

Police surrounded the pizzeria, according to The Washington Post, which said Welch emerged about 45 minutes later, his hands in the air, to surrender to authorities. He told police he'd gone to the restaurant to "self-investigate" reports of the child-trafficking ring. He was carrying a Colt AR-15 rifle, a Colt .38 handgun, a shotgun and a folding knife. Police charged him with assault with a dangerous weapon, other weapons offenses and destruction of property.

Earlier, Welch allegedly drove his Buick LeSabre into a teenage pedestrian in North Carolina, according to Slate. The 13-year-old "suffered head, torso, and leg injuries, WBTV reported. Welch stayed at the scene until police arrived, WBTV added, although a witness said it appeared Welch didn't try to avoid striking the pedestrian.

In a statement after the incident at Comet, Alefantis called out the dangers of fake news. "What happened today demonstrates that promoting false and reckless conspiracy theories comes with consequences," he said. "I hope that those involved in fanning these flames will take a moment to contemplate what happened here today, and stop promoting these falsehoods right away."

Welch wasn't the only would-be vigilante to target Comet Pizza.

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Welch, who told that he believed that Hillary Clinton had personally murdered children, isn't the only person to target the pizzeria in person. In 2019, Ryan Jaselskis walked into the restaurant and set a curtain on fire. Employees and a customer were able to put out the flames before the fire spread. Jaselskis, who had a history of mental illness, was sentenced to spend four years in prison in April.

The shooting didn't stop someone close to Trump from inflaming the situation.

Shortly after the incident at Comet Ping Pong, Michael Flynn, Jr., the son of Trump's former national security advisor Ret. Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, tweeted his support of the conspiracy theory:

The story Michael Jr. shared on Twitter suggests Welch's actions were meant as a "false flag" and will now be leveraged to push for censorship of independent media, according to Politico.

Michael Jr. isn't just Flynn's son, he was his chief of staff and, according to The Washington Post, his closest adviser. But he might be taking after his dad in spreading baseless rumors. The elder Flynn, who led chants of "lock her up" at the Republican National Convention, tweeted a link to a fake news story claiming police in New York had found a link between Clinton, her staff and the child-sex ring.

So why didn't Pizzagate go away?

Many aspects of Pizzagate were eventually folded into the broader QAnon conspiracy theory, which posits that Donald Trump is secretly engineering the downfall of the deep state and its cabal of elite pedophiles. Obviously, non of that is at all true.

But Pizzagate came roaring back in 2020, when the theory, once associated primarily with older Trump supporters, found a new, younger audience on platforms like TikTok. And while the theory has spread, it's become less overtly political, morphing to falsely accuse celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres and Chrissy Teigen, and brands like Wayfair.

Wait, what does Wayfair have to do with this?

In July, a Reddit user sparked a viral conspiracy theory with a post about, of all things, cabinets being sold by the online furniture retailer Wayfair. The cabinets, which all cost more than $10,000, had been given female names as their product titles on the website. Soon, the theory that Wayfair was trafficking children disguised as furniture was spreading around the internet. Wayfair refuted it by explaining that the items earned their high prices because they are industrial-grade cabinets, and that an algorithm had named the products. Still, that didn't stop believers from doing their signature deranged deep dive into attempting to connect the company to child abuse.

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And because Ellen DeGeneres has a partnership with Wayfair, Pizzagaters decided that she's somehow in on the kid smuggling. Chrissy Teigen attracted the conspiracists' attention after some of her old tweets surfaced, while Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel, who took breaks from their late night shows this summer, were interpreted by the Pizzagate-addled as attempting to dodge their involvement in the conspiracy.

So people really take this idea seriously?

New York Times reporter Sheera Frankel said in an interview that pandemic lockdown-induced boredom may be helping to fuel some of the interest in Pizzagate on TikTok. Teens she spoke to said that they'd shared conspiracy videos just because it seemed like fun.

But some, like Welch, take Pizzagate dangerously seriously. At one Trump rally, a woman tearfully told writer Jeff Sharlet that the Clintons literally eat children-there are plenty of true believers. And in 2019, the FBI identified extreme conspiracy theorists as a domestic terrorist threat.

Luckily, some platforms are moving to squash the spread of this viral mythology. Reddit banned its Pizzagate subreddit in 2016 and a QAnon group in 2018. And in July, Twitter purged thousands of QAnon associated accounts, and implemented measures to prevent the amplification of QAnon content. TikTok followed by blocking QAnon hashtags.

It's unclear just how effective this will be in stopping the spread, as conspiracists tend to hop ship for rival platforms in the wake of crackdowns. But hopefully, vigorous moderation can help confine Pizzagate to the margins of the web.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Years After Being Debunked, Interest in Pizzagate Is Rising-Again

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In June, Justin Bieber went live on his Instagram account. Among the countless questions and comments directed at the pop star was one from a social media user who asked Bieber to touch his hat if he were a survivor of child sex trafficking.

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When it comes to Denver International Airport (DIA), there are many conspiracy theories floating around. Everything from the barbed wire fence along the perimeter facing inwards (supposedly to keep hypothetical prisoners within), to the dark subliminal messaging that could be extracted from the murals painted on larger walls scattered throughout the terminals, has been theorized.

However, at least one of the stories that has arisen since the inception of DIA is complete fact; the story of Blue Mustang, more notably dubbed by residents Blucifer, is 100% true. The same sculpture that cannot be missed by visitors to and from DIA, which sits proudly in the median on Pena Boulevard linking the airport and the city, is most renowned for its act of patricide. More simply, in the process of being made, Blucifer unsuspectingly killed his maker.

What's Up With The Blue Mustang Statue at D.I.A.?

The statue was originally commissioned to be built by the City of Denver in the mid 1990s when the current Denver International Airport was being established. The airport itself was thought unneeded by some, completed unreasonably over budget and woefully behind schedule. The statue was completed behind schedule and unveiled at the airport in 2008.

As the story goes, while the artist Luis Jiménez was working on his now famous Blue Mustang, his largest commissioned pieces to date and a commission from the City of Denver to be placed outside its recently built airport, a section of the 32 ft tall, 9000 lb. cast fiberglass sculpture fell on him severing an artery in his leg. The wound ended up unfortunately killing Jiménez and the sculpture had to be finished posthumously by his family, friends, and professional lowriders and racecar painters Richard LaVato and Camillo Nuñez.

Despite the sculpture having to be finished by those close to Jiménez, the piece was actually very near completion upon the artist untimely death. Only some of the painting needed to be finished, then it was sent to California to be assembled and sent back for its final placement.

The vivid blue coloring all over the animal anatomically correct figure is a clear nod to Jiménez's love for traditional Mexican muralist and the bright colors he would have encountered as a boy growing up and working in his father's sign shop in El Paso, Texas.

However, the unique texture and the use of stylized exaggeration in the piece is something that Jiménez is most known for and has better yet imparted upon a new generation of artist inspired by his style. He was a forefather in the Lowbrow and Urban Art movements with those styles showing through in Blue Mustang. Even the rearing of the horse is used to symbolize the freedom that the Southwest has to offer all who come to visit.

Still, Blucifer is most well known for its luminous red eyes juxtaposed against its blue body and deeply set into the head of the horse looking out towards the Rocky Mountains. When driving past, Blue Mustang's gaze cannot be missed; he seems to be an all-seeing gatekeeper for those heading towards or away from the city. Even in the dead of night when the body of the sculpture is invisible against the roads surrounding, the eyes of Blucifer are unwaveringly lit bright red to see all who pass by.

The name Blucifer was bestowed upon Jiménez's sculpture by locals shortly after its unveiling. A combination of the names 'Blue' from its official name 'Blue Mustang,' and the name 'Lucifer,' from the archangel who fell from heaven and now rules the underworld, seemed fittingly appropriate for the unveiled demon horse who rears tall outside Denver's airport.

Although there was initially loud and outspoken distaste online and in the media for Blue Mustang following its unveiling in February 2008, commissions in the City of Denver are typically guaranteed to be on display for 5 years. Only then after that 5 year waiting period can works even be brought before the city's Commission on Cultural Affairs with a legitimate request and petition for the piece to be removed. No such petition has been brought forward since the 2013 end to the first 5 years of Blucifer being on display at the airport and it seems as though none will be brought forward altogether.

Thus, Blue Mustang is here to stay. He might have even grown on residents more regularly at the airport who would be put off by his ceaseless gaze and could seek to uproot him. Besides, like all great art pieces, Blucifer has at least been able to get the people of Denver talking again about what public art should and should not be. An important discussion for city residents to have as more people flock to the city, and it grows its funding for local artist and art commissions.

For the last eleven years, Blucifer has kept an eye on Denver International Airport and all who travel through it. Despite being an eyesore and known as a demon early on in his life for his patricide, he has since been accepted as another majestic public art piece in the great city of Denver. Willing to welcome all who come and to stare at those who leave.

Finally, Blucifer is a beautiful tribute to the late Luis Jiménez, a sculptor who truly lived to create pieces such as this and who died doing just that. Jiménez's style and influence will be on display in Denver and similarly many other cities around the country for years to come with his plethora of commissioned work.

Everyone passing through take a closer look at Blucifer next time you're driving out to Denver International Airport. He'll certainly be looking at you, but you just might see something new and different in him this time around.

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Blucifer: The Story of the Deadly 'Blue Mustang' Sculpture from Luis Jimenez | Denver Airport

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However, at least one of the stories that has arisen since the inception of DIA is complete fact; the story of Blue Mustang, more notably dubbed by residents Blucifer, is 100% true. The same sculpture that cannot be missed by visitors to and from DIA, which sits proudly in the median on Pena Boulevard linking the airport and the city, is most renowned for its act of patricide.

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DailyArtMagazine.com - Art History Stories

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Creating art is not usually a very dangerous endeavor, but for Luis Jimenez it unfortunately was. This is the story of a misunderstood piece of art and the untimely death of its creator.

Luis Jimenez was born in El Paso, Texas in 1940. His family was originally from Mexico and his art focuses on Hispanic themes. He grew up working in his father's electric sign shop which taught Jimenez to use neon lights, spray paint, and welding. He was also influenced by the low rider culture of brightly painted fiberglass bodywork. Jimenez moved to New Mexico were he sculpted outdoor art. He received both positive and negative reactions to his art. Some critics said it was too garish and outlandish, while others said his art championed Chicano culture and the working class.

The city of Denver commissioned Jimenez to create an outdoor sculpture for their new airport. Jimenez worked on it for almost a decade. He decided to create a 32 feet tall horse out of his signature polychromed fiberglass. This sculpture was to portray the wild spirit of the West. It was blue, standing on hind legs and with glowing red eyes. The neon red eyes were a tribute to his father's electric sign shop. Tragically in 2006, a heavy portion of the statue fell on Jimenez and severed his artery. He died an untimely death and the work of art was left unfinished. Fortunately, his sons finished it for him and Blue Mustang was installed at the Denver International Airport in 2008.

While the original plans allowed for people to park and admire the sculpture up close, the terrorist attacks of September 11 causes a rethinking of this idea. Instead the sculpture is quickly driven by without context or explanation. I was living in Denver when this sculpture was installed and found myself unnerved by the bucking blue horse with glowing red eyes. It quickly became renamed Blucifer and most residents wanted it taken down. Denver has a 5 year waiting period before the city's Commission on Cultural Affairs would even consider removing a piece of public art. This five year period was effective because it still stands pawing and angrily snorting at cars quickly driving past. Over time Blue Mustang became an endearing sight as I wearily passed it on my way home after a long flight. Knowing that the artist died while creating this piece of art as makes it more poignant.

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Death by Art: the Untimely Death of Luis Jimenez - DailyArtMagazine.com - Art History Stories

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Creating art is not usually a very dangerous endeavor, but for Luis Jimenez it unfortunately was. This is the story of a misunderstood piece of art and the untimely death of its creator. Luis Jimenez was born in El Paso, Texas in 1940. His family was originally from Mexico and his art focuses on Hispanic themes.

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Everything is connected exhibition.

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The Met Breuer - host to the exhibition 'Everything is Connected: Art and Conspiracy' - is located at 945 Madison Avenue, New York. By applying a basic alpha-numeric cipher we find that the numbers 9, 4 and 5 tally to the letters I, D and E in the alphabet. Swap the 'I' with the 'D' and we have the word 'DIE'. It can be no coincidence that this Marcel Breuer-designed building was completed in 1966. Turn the '9' upside-down and we get Satan's numerical ID, '666': 1 + 666 means Number One, Six Six Six, aka First or Premiere Demon, also the year of the Great Fire of London and Isaac Newton's discovery of gravity. (Surprising that a more sophisticated encoding system was not used by the George Soros-funded operatives who buried a copy of the Necronomicon in the foundations of the museum during its construction.) Now consider that trapezoid-shaped single window on the museum's upper facade. Turn it 90 degrees counter-clockwise and you'll notice it forms the middle section of a triangle, which corresponds to the mid-section of the Masonic hierarchy pyramid; a list of secret societies including the Illuminati, the Ordo Templi Orientis, and The Order of the Trapezoid. Avant-garde filmmaker and occulist Kenneth Anger is a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis. His work was shown at the Breuer in 1975 when the building was masquerading as the so-called 'Whitney Museum of American Art.'

Educated observers will note that in order to enter the Breuer, visitors must cross a bridge over what is clearly a moat, easily fortified by filling it with toxic water, pre-poisoned for such purpose by Islamist cells operating in Flint, Michigan. Why does this museum have so few windows and such thick concrete walls? How many art works have you seen on view here, but never witnessed actually leaving the museum after the show has closed? Could it be that a collection of priceless artworks is being brought in under the guise of a temporary exhibition, then hoarded in a bomb-proof storage facility beneath the building in preparation for the New Civil War, when Manhattan will be closed off and turned into a heavily-defended enclave for the global elites, who will be able to enjoy masterpieces of global art in safety whilst everyone else perishes in lawless zones beyond the banks of the Hudson and East Rivers, overrun by illegal immigrant warlords indoctrinated into radical socialism by Hilary Clinton at the Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant? I mean, you only have to take a map of the island and draw a line linking the locations of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Neue Galerie, Frick Collection and the Jewish Museum, to reveal a reversed 'L' shape. And what does the 'L' stand for? That's right. Liberals. Leftists. Luciferians. Also, Led Zeppelin, whose recording of 'Stairway to Heaven' transmits the message 'Here's to my sweet Satan' when played backwards.

Raymond Pettibon, No Title (Coup d'etats were...), 1984, ink and coloured pencil on paper. Courtesy: Collection of Bridgitt and Bruce Evans

The organizers behind 'Everything is Connected' are masters at hiding in plain sight. Douglas Eklund's Swedish last name means 'oak grove'. His job is in the arts. So, obviously, Eklund = Bohemian Grove i.e. an occult ceremony for the Bilderberg Group aka Illuminati held in California every year. The last name of his co-curator, Ian Alteveer, is an anagram of 'revelate' i.e. Book of Revelation therefore the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse thus you will D.I.E., or I.D.E., ie. 945 Madison Ave, to whit, the IDEs of March = 15 March, aka the Roman deadline for settling debts, i.e. the murder of Julius Caesar which is the archetype for all state assassinations. JFK, anyone? The Met alleges that Eklund and Alteveer were 'assisted' in putting this show together by Meredith Brown and Beth Saunders. Assistants, or powers behind the throne? You decide. I'll take the fact that these curators have made no attempt to contact me since I started writing this piece as a coded warning that I should watch what I say and write a straight-up exhibition review instead. If the Met chooses to advertise in frieze following publication of this piece, it's clearly a sign that they're scared and think they can control me through money. This is the kind of shit that happens when the forces of Big Museum flex their muscles.

The story that Eklund and Alteveer want us to believe is that their exhibition is the first major show to examine the batteries of paranoia that fuel Western democracies, specifically the US. It plays to Richard Hofstader's 1964 essay 'The Paranoid Style in American Politics', which argues that the US has always made room for 'heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.' The history of this country has been shaped by fears that outsiders will infiltrate it or insiders will bring it down from within. 'Us' versus 'them,' and you name them, someone's blamed them: Indians, French, British, Irish, Mexicans, Iranians, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Rosicrucians, Mormons, freemasons, hippies, bikers, black revolutionaries, gays, atheists, communists, Nazis, bankers, socialists, satanists, witches, aliens, advertising companies, rappers, rock'n'rollers and Dungeons & Dragons players. (In 1987, Tipper Gore claimed in her book Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society that D&D was 'linked to nearly fifty teenage suicides and homicides.') Understand the history of American paranoia and how it legitimates violence, and you will understand how Donald Trump's lies gain traction, steroid-boosted by Sean Hannity, Alex Jones and other credulous, craven conservative loudmouths. But I've said too much already. 'They' still think that I think that Fox News is news targeted specifically at Dan Fox. Fools.

Emory Douglas, The Black Panther (back cover), September 21, 1974 (I Gerald Ford the 38th Puppet of the United States), 1974, offset lithograph. Courtesy: Joyce F. Menschel Photography Library

'Everything is Connected' - or is it? - broadly splits its 30 artists into two sections. (Divide and rule. Classic seditionary tactic.) The first looks at how artists have used research and information in the public realm to work as citizen journalists, revealing secret business interests and ideological alliances that the powers-that-be would prefer to remain hidden from view. Here are Mark Lombardi's elegant and frightening 'narrative structures'; spider diagrams which show links between figures in finance, government and the military-industrial complex. Jenny Holzer's digital ticker-tapes use language taken from classified government documents, and Trevor Paglen's photographs depict CIA 'black site' prisons - images all the more sinister for their banality. Hans Haacke's Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971- (1971) is here too. Haacke shone his interrogation lamp on slumlord ownership in New York, which infamously led to the cancellation of his exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum that year, along with the dismissal of curator Edward Fry. The section also features illustrations made by Emory Douglas for the Black Panthers, and ACT UP's iconic poster SILENCE = DEATH (1987). ACT UP brought to attention the Reagan administration's refusal to acknowledge the AIDS crisis. Arguably both of these are less 'about' conspiracy than engaged in real struggle against it.

It's tin-foil hat time in the second half. Rachel Harrison's installation Snake in the Grass (1997) pulls photographs taken on the 'grassy knoll' in Dallas into a web of taut ropes, which look like the work of feverish Kennedy assassination theorists trying to figure out lone gunman ballistics. Jim Shaw connects JFK's death to little green men in his UFO Photos: Zapruder Film (1978-82), which finds flying saucers in Abraham Zapruder's footage of the Kennedy shooting. Mike Kelley satirizes the 'Satanic panic' child abuse rumours of the 1980s in his 'Educational Complex' (1995). On a long display table are architectural models of every educational institution the artist attended: underneath the table, as if locked in a hidden basement or the subconscious, lurks a small, grubby mattress. But these are almost affectionate play-acts of paranoia. Darker stories of real exploitation lurk in Sarah Anne Johnson's disturbing sculpture House on Fire (2008-09), and the suite of hand-doctored photographs which accompany it. Johnson evokes the terrible psychological distress suffered by her grandmother who was duped into the CIA's MK-ULTRA project in the 1960s - an experiment in using psychotropic drugs to control minds - under the pretext of being treated for post-natal depression.

Mike Kelley, Educational Complex, 1995, acrylic, latex, foam core, fibreglass, plywood and wood. Courtesy: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

The idea to stage 'Everything is Connected' came from a 1991 interview between John Miller (also included in the show) and Kelley. According to the Met, Kelley had seen an early version of the checklist for the show before his death in 2012, enthusiastically suggesting additional artists and ideas. Kelley's art detailed the landscape of the American Weird like no other, and his spirit of imaginative, playful skepticism, his fondness for the far-out, permeates this show. It suggests that the most imaginative acts of art-making are those that are willing to make tangential leaps of faith and counter-intuitive connections.

In the video Winchester (2002) by Jeremy Blake, the artist attempts to get inside the fearful, paranoid mind of Sarah Winchester. Widow of the heir to the Winchester rifle fortune, she spent almost four decades from the end of the 1800s in never-ending construction on her California mansion, believing this would appease the spirits who had cursed her family. Historical photographs and ink drawings float and merge into one another. Visual connections appear then evanesce, leaving you to wonder if you had seen or merely imagined them. An uneasy idea, easily intuited from Winchester, is that the suspicious, superstitious or conspiratorial mind, ever vigilant for new dots to connect, is also a creative one. The Comte de Lautréamont's line about 'the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table' is both a Surrealist maxim and a fair description of the conspiracist theorist's imaginative short circuits.

Jeremy Blake, 1906, 2003, digital animation. Courtesy: Henry Nias Foundation Inc.

Close followers of the art world might detect stranger, sadder resonances in 'Everything is Connected.' The deaths of Blake and his partner Theresa Duncan in 2007 were shadowed by rumours of harrassment by the Scientologists. Lombardi took his life in 2000, in circumstances that his biographer Patricia Goldstone has argued were suspicious; in the weeks following Kelley's suicide, there was ghoulish speculation that the pressures of art market success had led him to take his. The reasons for all these deaths are too complex and tragic for anyone to know the real truth. But the art world still loves to write its own micro-conspiracy theories about money and careers: if you feel unrecognized by the industry, then it's natural to try and rationalize your lack of agency by intuiting invisible forces ranged against you. 'Gods always behave like the people who make them,' said Zora Neale Hurston. The truth behind an overlooked or scuppered career is often more depressingly banal than fiction wishes, yet in the instances where gender and race are a factor in someone's disempowerment, a belief in invisible forces of oppression is usually well-founded.

As if to literally illustrate the exhibition title, the end of the second, wilder, section of 'Everything is Connected' takes viewers back to the more sober start of the first. But make a repeat circuit around the show and you will drag behind you, like LSD-laced chemtrails, the idiosyncractic, folkloric, macabre, fringe fascinations of Kelley, Shaw, Miller, Johnson, Sue Williams and others. Now the sensibilities of the first and second halves of the exhibition don't seem so different from each other. Questions emerge and the curators aren't giving up any answers. Why do we believe what artists say, and always presume them to be on the side of progressive values? Why do 'research-based practices' that never get peer-reviewed, and citizen-journalist works about politics that never get passed by editors or fact-checkers, be given credence as journalism? Do artists receive the benefit of the doubt because, deep down, we still cling to a Romantic belief that the artist is the conduit for higher truths? Or is it because to risk the idea that an artist could be wrong in their assertions might jeopardize all the systems that support them, and accidentally plunge art into the Bermuda Triangle of 'fake news'?

Jenny Holzer, Red Yellow Looming, 2004, LED displays. Courtesy: The Heller Group

Then again, what if artists are right? Haacke was. ACT UP were. The Black Panthers too. Quite possibly, so was Lombardi. In her 2015 biography of the artist, Art, Conspiracy and the Shadow Worlds of Mark Lombardi, Goldstone reveals that months after the artist's suicide in 2000, and following the 9/11 attacks, the FBI visited the Whitney Museum asking that it remove one of his drawings linking the Bank of Credit and Commerce International to Saudi-funded terrorist networks. Where do the responsibilities of creative people lay? Conspiracy theorists today derive their ideas and language from culture, especially movies and television. Neo-fascists describe their conversion to the right as being 'red-pilled', a reference to The Matrix movie trilogy in which Keanu Reeves' character Neo is given a tablet that, when swallowed, shows him the true nature of reality. The quasi-military jargon that conspiracists employ in order to give legitimacy and the appearance of expertise to their speculations - talk of agents, deep state operatives, false flag operations, disinformation campaigns and so on - is more likely learned from episodes of The X-Files and Homeland than it is from real sources in the intelligence community. The register of language in which individuals such as Robert Bowers write to justify their vile ideology - he is currently charged with 29 federal crimes relating to the murder of eleven people and wounding of seven others at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh - reads as if it is straight out of an action film. 'I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics. I'm going in,' was his final posting to the social network Gab before the shooting. Histrionic, macho one-liners learned from the movies but delivered by nobody's hero.

I could continue, but I've just noticed a dot of red light moving across my window. A sniper's laser-guided telescopic sight? It's gone now. Must have been the reflection from a passing car tail-light. Probably a Mossad surveillance vehicle. Or MoMA. In any case, I guess you're wondering who's paying me to write all this, so let me map the money trail for you. The cover story is that I get paid by frieze with money generated from advertising, subscription and newsstand sales. Truth is, the ads money is made to appear as if it comes from multiple sources - galleries, museums, consumer brands - but these are merely front organizations processing payments made by a centralized funding source controlled by - wait, there's that red laser dot again, hovering over my chest ...
Main image: Peter Saul, Government of California (detail), 1969, acrylic on canvas. Courtesy: Collection of KAWS

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Everything is Connected: Art and Conspiracy at the Met Breuer

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The Met Breuer - host to the exhibition 'Everything is Connected: Art and Conspiracy' - is located at 945 Madison Avenue, New York. By applying a basic alpha-numeric cipher we find that the numbers 9, 4 and 5 tally to the letters I, D and E in the alphabet.

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Since long before The Lost Symbol, Freemasons have been accused of everything from conspiring with extraterrestrials to practicing sexual deviancy to engaging in occult rituals to running the world-or trying to end it. Detractors include global conspiracy theorists and religious organizations, including the Catholic Church.

Released today, The Lost Symbol isn't likely to squelch any rumors, beginning as it does with a wine-filled skull, bejeweled power brokers, and a dark Masonic temple steps away from the White House.

But what if Freemasons-the world's largest international secret society-are just a bunch of guys into socializing, non-satanic rituals, self-improvement, and community service?

To separate Freemason fact from Lost Symbol-style myth, National Geographic News went inside the centuries-old order with two Masons and a historian of the ancient Christian order from which some claim the Masons sprang in the 17th or 18th century.

MYTH 1: Masonic Symbols Are Everywhere

It's true that Masonic symbols are anything but lost, said Freemason and historian Jay Kinney, author of the newly released Masonic Myth.

Freemasonry is rich in symbols, and many are ubiquitious-think of the pentagram, or five-pointed star, or the "all-seeing eye" in the Great Seal of the United States.

But most Masonic symbols aren't unique to Freemasonry, Kinney said.

"I view the Masonic use of symbols as a grab bag taken from here, there, and everywhere," he said. "Masonry employs them in its own fashion."

The pentagram, for example, is much older than Freemasonry and acquired its occult overtones only in the 19th and 20th centuries, hundreds of years after the Masons had adopted the symbol.

Likewise, the all-seeing eye saw its way to the Great Seal-and the U.S. dollar bill-by way of artist Pierre Du Simitiere, a non-Mason.

The eye represents divine guidance of the U.S. ship of state, or as Secretary of the U.S. Congress Charles Thompson put it in 1782, it alludes "to the many signal interpositions of providence in favour of the American cause."

There was one known Mason on the committee to design the seal, Benjamin Franklin. His proposed design was eyeless, and rejected.

MYTH 2: Masons Descend From the Knights Templar

Much has been made of the Freemasons purported lineage to the Knights Templar. The powerful military and religious order was established to protect medieval pilgrims to the Holy Land and dissolved by Pope Clement V, under pressure of King Phillip IV of France, in 1312.

After modern Masonry appeared in the 17th- or 18th-century Britain, some Freemasons claimed to have acquired the secrets of the Templars and adopted Templar symbols and terminology-naming certain levels of Masonic hierarchy after Templar "degrees," for example.

"But those [Knights Templar] degrees and Masonic orders had no historic connection with the original Knights Templar," Kinney explained.

"These are myths or symbolic figures that were used by the Masons. But because the association had been made with these degrees, and the degrees had perpetuated themselves, after a time it began to look like there had been a connection."

Helen Nicholson, author of The Knights Templar: A New History, agrees that there is no possibility that Freemasons are somehow descended from the Knights Templar.

By the time of the first Masons, the Cardiff University historian said, "there were no more Templars."

MYTH 3: Masons Are Hiding Templar Treasure

One of the Templar-Mason theory's many veins suggests that some Templars survived the order's 14th-century destruction by taking refuge in Scotland, where they hid a fabulous treasure beneath Rosslyn Chapel (as seen in The Da Vinci Code).

The treasure, and the Templar tradition, were eventually passed down to the founders of Freemasonry, the story goes.

In fact, there was Templar treasure, Nicholson said, but it ended up in other hands long ago.

"The most likely reason [the Templars were dissolved] is that the king wanted their money. The King of France was bankrupt, and the Templars had lots of ready cash."

MYTH 4: Washington, D.C.'s Streets Form Giant Masonic Symbols

It's long been suggested that powerful Freemasons embedded Masonic symbols in the Washington, D.C., street plan designed mainly by Frenchman Pierre L'Enfant in 1791.

The Lost Symbol is expected to prominently feature "Masonic mapping," detecting pentagrams and other symbols by connecting the dots among landmarks. Pre-release clues released by author Dan Brown, for example, include GPS coordinates for Washington landmarks.

"Individually, Masons had a role in building the White House, in building and designing Washington, D.C.," said Mark Tabbert, director of collections at the George Washington Masonic Memorial in Alexandria, Virginia. "And [small scale] Masonic symbols can be found throughout the city, as they can in most U.S. cities."

But there's no Masonic message in the city's street plan, Tabbert said. For starters, Pierre L'Enfant wasn't a Mason.

And, Tabbert asked, why would Masons go to the trouble of laying out a street grid to match their symbols?

"There has to be a [reason] for doing such a thing," said Tabbert, himself a Mason. "Dan Brown will find one, because he writes fiction. But there isn't one."

MYTH 5: Freemasons Rule the World

Maybe it's the impressive list of prominent Freemasons-from Napoleon to F.D.R. to King Kamehameha (IV and V!)-that's led some to suggest the group is a small cabal running the globe. But Kinney, the Masonic historian, paints a picture of a largely decentralized group that might have trouble running anything with much efficiency.

"I think the ideals that Masonry embodies, which have to do with universal brotherhood, are shared by Masons around the world [regardless of] religious, political, or national differences," he said.

"But having shared ideals is one thing-having some sort of shared hierarchy is something else altogether."

Kinney noted that the U.S. alone has 51 grand lodges, one for each state and the District of Columbia. Each of these largely independent organizations oversees its many local blue (or beginner) lodges and has little real coordination with other grand lodges.

Internationally, Masonic lodges not only don't speak with a single voice but sometimes refuse to even recognize each other's existence.

Also, many Masons are independent minded and tend to resist edicts from above, Kinney said. "There is no way that they could be run by a single hierarchy. There is no such entity."

MYTH 6: Freemasonry Is a Religion-Or a Cult

But Masons stress that their organization is not a religion, that is it has no unique theology and does not represent a path for believers to salvation or other divine rewards.

Even so, to be accepted into Freemasonry, initiates must believe in a god-any god. Christians may be in the majority, but Jews, Muslims, and others are well represented in Masonic circles. At lodge meetings religious discussion is traditionally taboo, Kinney and Tabbert said.

But some religious leaders believe that Masonic rituals and beliefs-with its temples, altars, and oaths-do constitute an opposing faith. And the Masonic refusal to rank one religion above the others hasn't always been popular.

A 1983 Catholic declaration approved by Pope John Paul II, for example, said that "Catholics enrolled in Masonic associations are involved in serious sin and may not approach Holy Communion."

MYTH 7: Freemasons Started the American Revolution

Prominent Freemasons like Ben Franklin and George Washington played essential roles in the American Revolution. And among the ranks of Freemasons are 9 signers of the Declaration of Independence and 13 signers of the Constitution.

But Freemasonry-born in Britain, after all-had adherents on both sides of the conflict. Tabbert, of the George Washington Masonic Memorial, said Masonic groups allowed men on both sides of the revolution to come together as brothers-not to promote a political view, which would be against Masonic tradition.

"For many years [Masons] claimed in their own quasi-scholarship that all of these revolutionaries and Founding Fathers were Freemasons," Tabbert said. "A fair number of them were, but they weren't doing these things because they were Freemasons."

MYTH 8: Membership Requires Shadowy Connections

Contrary to The Lost Symbol, you don't have to drink wine from a skull to become a ranking Freemason. In fact, tradition dictates that Masons don't recruit members but simply accept those who approach them of their own free will.

When Freemasonry hit its peak in the U.S. during the late 1950s, Kinney, the Masonic historian, said, almost one of every ten eligible adult males was a member-a total of some four million and hardly a tiny elite.

Today membership numbers, like those of other fraternal organizations, have declined dramatically, and only about 1.5 million U.S. men are Masons.

But with The Lost Symbol already igniting interest in Freemasonry, Masonic centers are bracing for tourists-and maybe a few new recruits.

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"The Lost Symbol" and the Freemasons: 8 Myths Decoded

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Novelist Dan Brown's new book, The Lost Symbol, is doing for the Freemasons what its predecessor, The Da Vinci Code, did for the Catholic Church's Opus Dei-showering new fame, and new fictions, on a brotherhood that's already catnip for conspiracy theorists.

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What is QAnon? How the conspiracy theory gained traction in 2020 campaign

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SPECULATIVE SCIENCE

Why is water wet?

None of the answers given to this question so far quite gets to the chemical explanation for water's 'wetness.' Wetness is here synonymous with 'clingingness' - water wets because it clings. Water, of course, is molecularly H 2 O and this compound of hydrogen and oxygen is electrically neutral. However, there are also in water many free charged hydroxyls (-OH-, negatively charged) and hydrogen ions (H+ positively charged). These charged particles retain the ability to attract other charged particles (with the opposite charge) just as magnets do. In this way they stick or cling, involving other neutral H 2 O molecules at the same time. If water was made up entirely of neutral particles it would not cling, or wet, because the component elements would 'prefer' to stick to each other rather than to make bonds with other substances.

Ian Flintoff, London SW6.

Back in the old days, when water was where we needed to spend our time, touch was a lot more important than it is now. We as beings had to be immediately aware if we were going in or out of water. Therefore, the feeling of wet is a primal sensory reminder.

However, thereafter once we ascended onto the land and trees, the feeling of wet became a sensory reminder of something out of the ordinary; it is raining - get shelter, you fell in a creek - start swimming.

The reason it feels as it feels when water touches the skin is actually a complex electro-chemical reaction which works at amazing speeds. The sensory inputs are a combination of:

1. Your body's pH at that moment
2. The water's pH
3. Your body's temperature at that moment
4. The water's temperature
5. The atmospheric pressure
6. Molecular polarity

Ewan Sweeney, Swindon, UK

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Why is water wet? | Notes and Queries | guardian.co.uk

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SPECULATIVE SCIENCE Why is water wet? None of the answers given to this question so far quite gets to the chemical explanation for water's 'wetness.' Wetness is here synonymous with 'clingingness' - water wets because it clings. Water, of course, is molecularly H 2 O and this compound of hydrogen and oxygen is electrically neutral.

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Last week Twitter announced it would stop promoting content associated with QAnon - a baseless internet conspiracy theory that has had an outsized impact on political discourse, causing real-world harm through targeted harassment campaigns.

But does filtering out conspiracy theorists help public discourse - or can it strengthen their paranoia that they are being suppressed? And can these ideas be fought with education? We spoke to experts to see whether it will work.

Russell Muirhead, who co-authored the book A Lot of People Are Saying, which digs into how misinformation spreads online, says that social media work to validate and legitimize conspiracy theorizing and misinformation.

"On a platform like Twitter, and to some extent on Facebook and YouTube, repetition comes to substitute validation. If enough people like the tweet, or watch the video, or like the video on YouTube, it confers a kind of legitimacy," he says.

He gives the example of a common refrain of Donald Trump's to exemplify this: Trump will say "I don't know if it's true but a lot of people are saying it " - as if people simply repeating misinformation means it must have some truth to it.

"That's very threatening to our ability to understand the world and to democratic politics. Because anything people retweet enough times seems true - regardless of whether or not it is," he says.

Muirhead points out that before social media, it was the norm for media outlets to have a gatekeeping function. Editors, the gatekeepers of traditional media, are tasked everyday with deciding what makes it on air or into print - and an established first criterion is truthfulness:

"The more likely a claim is to be judged false, the less likely the editor will decide to put it in the paper or on the air. What's happened with Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter is the gatekeeping function has been displaced: anybody can say anything to anyone in the whole world, pretty much for free," he says.

Dr Whitney Phillips, author of This is Why we Can't Have Nice Things, points out that a "marketplace of ideas approach" to misinformation (which posits that if you combat problematic speech with more speech, the truth will eventually prevail) doesn't work in our current online environment.

" That ideal does not take into account algorithms; the various affordances of digital media that float and incentivize certain types of sensationalist content - it is simply not the case that all voices carry equally on social media; or that all information carries equally," she says.

But one problem is that misinformation and conspiracy have generally found fertile ground on social media, according to Phillips.

"Twitter has made a concerted effort in the last few months to [tackle misinformation and the harm caused by it], but, generally speaking, the ethos of these platforms is protecting the rights of users to say essentially what they want." In her view, that focus has allowed these conspiracy theories to flourish - making it harder to now try to dispel them.

"If they had been taking responsibility appropriately up until this moment it wouldn't be such a break with tradition and you wouldn't see this discourse about how Twitter is suddenly pivoting towards censorship, [which it is not]," says Phillips.

But does refusing to publish misinformation and baseless conspiracy feed into the conspiracist mindset, making conspiracists more determined in their worldview?

Muirhead suggests not. He mentions Spotify's decision, followed by subsequent outlets such as Apple, YouTube and Twitter to take conspiracist Alex Jones' radio show Infowars off its platforms. Jones spread a debunked conspiracy theory about the Sandy Hook massacre, suggesting it was staged by actors. He was held liable for defamation in US courts for those claims that also led to real-world, palpable harm: a grieving father was subject to death threats, and the woman who hounded him was given a five-month prison sentence.

"[Taking him off air] hasn't amplified Infowars, but diminished it. It has rendered Jones a peripheral figure and has branded him a liar, a purveyor of misinformation. So sometimes this gatekeeping function can be effective," says Muirhead.

Phillips explains that the conspiratorial mindset does, of course, affect the ways that conspiracists take in information, but argues that the cost to society of letting these ideas flourish is too great to ignore.

"For some people who see the world through [a conspiratorial] frame of course it could be used as evidence that Twitter is part of the deep state or out to get us. That is the risk you run," she says.

"But QAnon is not just a random narrative with no consequences - for years it's been bubbling up and people have been conducting violence under its auspices ... For Twitter to take that stance, that they are acknowledging harm and predicating moderation decisions based on harm; I think that's good," she says.
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Does suppressing online conspiracy theorists work? Experts weigh in

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Last week Twitter announced it would stop promoting content associated with QAnon - a baseless internet conspiracy theory that has had an outsized impact on political discourse, causing real-world harm through targeted harassment campaigns. But does filtering out conspiracy theorists help public discourse - or can it strengthen their paranoia that they are being suppressed?

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How shitty are men really? The question hung in the air, invisible but omnipresent, like the smell of a garbage fire from a nearby town. By 2016, a series of catchphrases had come to dominate the chaotic state of gender politics - "male privilege", "rape culture", "men's rights" - but confusion reigned. And in the middle of this confusion, a group of anonymous men retreated to The Red Pill, an online community hosted on Reddit, to revel in their loathing.

The name derives from a scene in the 1999 film The Matrix, in which Laurence Fishburne offers Keanu Reeves a choice: "You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."

The rabbit hole, in this case, is the "reality" that women run the world without taking responsibility for it, and that their male victims are not permitted to complain. This makes The Red Pill a continuous, multi-voiced, up-to-the-minute male complaint nestled at the heart of the so-called manosphere - a network of websites preoccupied with both the men's rights movement and how to pick up women.

The manosphere's most hateful opinions tend to generate the most attention - like Roosh V's notion that it should be legal to rape a woman on private property (a bit of hateful stupidity which he later claimed to be parody). In February, Roosh V attempted to organise a meet-up of like-minded men on the grounds of the provincial legislature in Toronto, but he had to cancel the event when a local band of female boxers threatened to disrupt the event with violence.

But judging The Red Pill by the most extreme statements of its members is, if not unfair, then at least inaccurate. There is plenty of vileness, to be sure - elaborate conspiracy theories formed out of pure misogyny and outright hatred of female independence. But the bulk of the comments are much more muted and, frankly, pathetic.

In the hours upon hours I spent wandering this online neighbourhood, I saw mostly feral boys wandering the digital ruins of exploded masculinity, howling their misery, concocting vast nonsense about women, and craving the tiniest crumb of self-confidence and fellow-feeling. The discussion threads are a mixed bag of rage and curiosity: screeds against feminists, advice on how to masturbate less, theories on why women fantasize about rape, descriptions of arguments with girlfriends, guides to going up to strangers on the street, and, most of all, workout schedules and diet regimes.

Reading The Red Pill, then, offers two possible answers to the question "how shitty are men really?"

The first situates The Red Pill as another toxic technoculture on a spectrum of digital misogyny: on Twitter, any woman who says anything even moderately controversial will receive torrents of direct physical threats as a matter of course. Sites such as 4chan exist mainly to post thousands of revenge porn images without consent. Gamers on Xbox Live will be sexually harassed, inevitably.

The answer to the question of how shitty men are, from this perspective, is "really pretty shitty".

But an entirely different approach emerges with a slight shift in emphasis: how shitty are men really? That is, how does these men's behaviour online translate into non-digital life ? The Red Pill poses one of the absolute conundrums of our time: are we our real selves on the internet, or are we not?

The head moderator of The Red Pill goes by the handle Morpheus Manfred, and when he agreed to give me an interview it was only by online chat. Anonymity is sacred; facelessness is the sacrifice it demands. He moderates the community's 141,966 (and counting) members, and like most of them, describes himself as white, early 30s, male and conservative (he would have preferred Rand Paul to Donald Trump, but he likes Trump's "watch-it-burn" style).

I ask him what event led him to The Red Pill (his answers have been edited for length).

Morpheus Manfred: Having spent my 20s looking for female companionship, I noticed that the dating game wasn't what I was taught - what my parents prepared me for, and what I learned from movies. It was stacked against guys, and it was a very unpleasant experience.

Me: Can you give me an example?

Morpheus Manfred: Over the past 10 years, the flakiness of women has gotten worse. You'd meet a girl, hit it off, get her number and agree to a date. And either she'd no-show, or cancel right before. I found myself putting in all this effort for nothing, it was very defeating. It's not the way courting worked when my parents met.

What I saw in movies - where having a good heart and being yourself is all you need - that's not what happens now. Good and nice aren't attractive any more. The manosphere fundamentally became a surrogate father for the life lessons I never got.

We wanted a place where men could discuss masculine topics without facing the same public shaming outcry that happens on social media sites - feminists are quick on the trigger to try to take down anything they consider wrong ... Milo Yiannopoulos lost his verified status on Twitter because of his views on masculinity. It's a big topic that has become taboo in our culture.

Me: But surely there's a line somewhere. I mean, the real feelings being expressed here are hostility to women.

Morpheus Manfred: We're accused of misogyny almost daily. I won't deny that the language is colorful and there's a lot of emotion expressed by the men on the forum. But [before The Red Pill] there wasn't really a way for guys to express these feelings.

Let's say there's a guy who just says "I hate women" - I think that's textbook misogyny. We let them say that. Because there's nowhere else for a man to blow off steam. But they stay, they learn, they vent, they get advice, they get back on the horse. The endgame of our advice isn't to hate women. It's to understand them so you can stop being so darn frustrated by them.

Morpheus claims that The Red Pill helped him find a longtime girlfriend, and that The Red Pill is ultimately little more than an online version of locker-room talk.

It's funny, because Jessica, my editor at the Guardian, had the same idea. Wasn't The Red Pill just an updated version of locker-room talk? No, I said, it's nothing like locker-room talk. Well, she asked, what's locker-room talk like, then?

Locker-room talk goes like this: you say to your friend, my God, did you see the tits on that yoga instructor, and your friend says, it hurts you, doesn't it, and you say it does, it does, and he says you know I've sucked tits like that before, and you say yeah right and he says really and you say who and he says in Brazil and you say of course it would be an unverifiable claim, and he shrugs and you laugh and he laughs.

The quantity of locker-room talk is inversely proportional to familiarity with women. So, as you fall in love, maybe even get married, it no longer becomes feasible to talk with friends about women's bodies in such specific detail because, say, your friend works for your wife, and you don't want him thinking about her cleavage when she's firing him.

But very quickly - mid-30s, really - a new locker-room talk emerges. The new locker-room talk goes like this: you ask your friend what summer programming do you have your daughters in, and your friend says I'm trying to find something with science in it, and you say, yeah, you gotta fight those cultural assumptions about girls and STEM, and he says totally, and you say I'm just trying to do little things like nature walks and trips to the science center, and he says we should go together some time, and you say totally.

And then you're taking your daughters to the science center and a gorgeous woman walks by, and you look at your friend, and your friend looks at you, and you don't have to say a thing.

I'm not saying this is the way it should be. Frankly, it's humiliating for everybody involved. But there is a truth there: if you have a working dick and a working soul, you'd better get used to living with contradictions.

It is exactly this capacity for contradiction that the boys of The Red Pill lack so utterly. Their humourlessness is impressive, given that they mostly post comments about the minutiae of sexual dynamics, which is the substance of almost all comedy.

Under "I fucked up. How to fix?" Red Pill member AspireToBeGreater requested some advice from the group. He had met a girl. She was all smiley during their initial conversation. But then "I horribly botched an attempt to ask her out for drinks because I got nervous. I pulled back and tried to rebuild my frame over a couple weeks." She was still giving off signs of interest, notably showing him pictures of her dogs. "I have since asked her to get coffee in a much more casual way, she had a legit excuse and I couldn't read much from her response." Should he keep pushing?

The Red Pill poses one of the absolute conundrums of our time: are we our real selves on the internet, or are we not?

The replies came to a rapid consensus. A commenter noted: "She's turned you down twice, which means she's almost certainly not interested." Another added: "Most likely she's just not that into you if she doesn't even suggest an alternative date."

The above is a fairly typical post. The Red Pill grinds away at the confusions of contemporary masculinity, both real and imagined. The intellectual foundation of The Red Pill is its glossary - a shared language of complaint and insight. So we have, for example:

Alpha - Socially dominant. Somebody who displays high value, or traits that are sexually attractive to women.

SMV - Sexual Market Value. A shorthand statement for "what you bring to the table", whether for a one-night stand or for a longer relationship.

HB - Hot Babe (often followed by a ranking on a 1-10 scale).

AF/BB - Alpha Fucks/Beta Bucks. AF/BB, as an idea, is closely related to AWALT ("AllWomen Are Like That"). All women, in this argument, divide men into two types: alpha males they want to fuck, and beta males they use for financial and emotional support in exchange for sex.

Definitions like these run into the dozens. Their primary purpose is clarity, obviously. More than lust or hatred, the boys of The Red Pill hunger for clarity. They desire escape from confusion. They desire a system with which to comprehend desire itself.

Don't we all?

In real life, I knew a man once who was the exact opposite of The Red Pill in every regard, and he shattered everything that I believed I knew about men.

Never did he say the least inappropriate thing, at least around me. No locker room talk for him. He had graduated from York University, the most politically correct university in Canada, with a minor in women's studies. He proudly called himself a feminist, and he was called a feminist proudly by others. In his job as the most prominent radio host at the CBC, the national broadcaster, he had become an icon of the new multicultural and egalitarian Toronto.

That man was Jian Ghomeshi, who was on 25 March acquitted in three cases of sexual assault and choking after the testimony of the complainants collapsed.

Before Ghomeshi, I thought I knew more or less how men worked. I thought - it's embarrassing to say - I thought I was a close observer of people.

I liked Jian; I cannot deny it. We weren't close - we met during the time in life when you don't form new friendships so much as respectful allegiances - but he was fun, pleasant.

And yet I remember a lovely spring wedding in Toronto where the guests, mostly media people, sat around bitching and gossiping as media people do. I made some flip remark about Jian dyeing his hair. Then I saw The Face pass over one of the young women at my table.

I would see The Face several times with several different women when the subject of Jian came up - a half-suppressed deflation, a furtive darkening. The other women told me nothing; The Face simply came and went. But at this wedding, the young woman with The Face did not let her suffering fade into the general background; she leaned in and told me the story of how he had said to her " I just want to hate-fuck you to wake you up " while at work.

I certainly remained friendly with Jian after I heard this story. Why? I have no good answer. The best answer I have is that I have been trained not to judge people on the basis of their sexual tastes. That's my inclination but it's also been my education. I refrained from judging him, half-consciously.

Throughout Ghomeshi's trial, as his lawyer Marie Heinen ripped apart the accusers, I found myself recalling a line from Philip Roth's The Human Stain, set during the halcyon years when America's biggest problem was the president's joint taste for cigars and interns.

More than lust or hatred, the boys of The Red Pill hunger for clarity

"I myself dreamed of a mammoth banner," Roth wrote, "draped dadaistically like a Christo wrapping from one end of the White House to the other and bearing the legend A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE."

That phrase should have been draped over the Toronto courtroom. The accusers responded like human beings, so they forgot to tell things to the police. They forgot their Hotmail passwords. They communicated with each other and with Jian. One of them wrote: "You have beautiful hands." They responded in a way consistent with the inconsistency of human sexuality, caught in the mess of desire and its justification.

Much has been written about how the Ghomeshi trial has revealed various aspects of our culture and society - the failures of the criminal justice system, or the reality of rape culture, or the impotence of fourth-wave feminism. The Ghomeshi trial has revealed nothing. It has only obscured.

"Rape culture" is a nebulous term, but it remains that men who want to treat women as if they are nothing have ample scope to express that desire - online and offline both. Culture, insofar as it is popular, poses the same question over and over: how cool does a guy have to be before he can treat women like they're nothing?

When Kesha tried to escape her contract with Doctor Luke, the producer whom she claims raped her, the judge gave the ruling which applies to the music industry as a whole in 2016: "My instinct is to do the commercially reasonable thing."

Kanye West was able proclaim Bill Cosby's innocence and release The Life of Pablo with the line "I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / I made that bitch famous." And it didn't matter; Kanye was way too cool. It was performance. Or it was subversion. It was something, anyway, that made it totally different than some ordinary guy saying that Taylor Swift was a bitch he made famous and so could have sex with her. A critic for the New Yorker described the Swift line as "a throwaway boast on an otherwise good song".

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The Weeknd is cool enough to treat women like nothing, too, at least for now. Sure, he has videos in which he shoots his girlfriend, and yes, his song Initiation is a hymn to using the promise of social acceptance to gangbang vulnerable young women. But the man is friends with Drake. He won two Grammys, and the same people in Toronto who loathed Ghomeshi cheered on the victory.

Not that this was in any way a new arrangement, the deal by which cool men treat women like they're nothing. The Rolling Stones? Led Zeppelin and the mudshark?

David Bowie faced rape allegations in the 1980s, but we've all forgotten about that. One of his fans, Lori Maddox, has claimed in interviews that she lost her virginity to him after he gave her champagne and hash when she was about to turn 15. But before we ask ourselves what ought to happen to a grown man in a position of power who gave an underage girl drugs and alcohol and then took her virginity, we should just remember that he dressed really neat and wore makeup and stuff. Bowie was Ghomeshi's idol, the man he most wanted to interview.

A few years before Morpheus Manfred started up The Red Pill, Ghomeshi blurbed the Guy's Guide to Feminism. He wrote:

"An admirably accessible guide for guys to understand and embrace the other (often more incendiary) F-word. And it's even funny. Quite remarkable. Everyone knows feminists have no sense of humour!"

Jian appeared on the back of the book alongside Gloria Steinem and the editor of the online feminist site Feministing.

Where are Morpheus and Ghomeshi now? Morpheus is in a long-term relationship, and developing a sense of humour about himself and his project. Ghomeshi is currently awaiting his second trial. Who is really shitty here?

Again to return to the our conundrum: are we our real selves online or off? Is the screen the place where we indulge the fantasies that our offline selves would never dare? Or is the screen where we perform the truth of our being that that world of faces and consequences does not permit?

Among men today, there is violence hidden under the virtue, and virtue hidden under the violence.

The only constant is the hiding.

In The Red Pill's glossary, you can find those two entries:

Oneitis - When a guy has fallen in love with a woman in the same way a boy loves his mother. He obsesses about her, but she does not reciprocate.

The Unicorn - Mystical creature that doesn't fucking exist, aka The Girl of Your Dreams.

If you dig through the misogyny and the bravado, the boys of The Red Pill want The One. They are as lost in that pursuit as every generation of men has been before them.

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The Red Pill is hatred of women in the context of men who want nothing more than to please women, and who are living in a world with a sexual marketplace they find deeply anxiety-provoking. Briffaut's Law, another of the key concepts of The Red Pill, encapsulates male powerlessness as an eternal truth: "The female, not the male, determines all the conditions of the animal family. Where the female can derive no benefit from association with the male, no such association takes place."

But Redpillers are responding to a much more novel and contemporary reality that such biological imperatives: they are responding to women having financial and sexual power over their own lives and bodies. And they haven't dealt with it yet. The term "manosphere" is really a misnomer. "Not-quite-a-manosphere" would be better.

What the boys of The Red Pill need, in all honesty, is a massive dose of Romantic poetry. They need a dedicated course of treatment in the novels of Jane Austen and Dostoevsky, combined with significant therapy in negative capability.

They need to learn that love is awful, in the both the ancient and modern senses of the world - that love is infinitely more powerful and real than any marketplace, sexual or otherwise.

They need to read Freud, who wrote that every man wants to murder his father and sleep with his mother and that the only way to be civilized is to recognize that everyone is barbaric way down deep inside.

They need to know that desire is a mess, and that everyone suffers from its mess.

Instead of culture, the world offers the boys of The Red Pill contempt. Instead of education, outrage.

But it's not just the boys of The Red Pill who need to begin again to learn from the fiasco that is men and women. It's everybody. It's the whole world.
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Swallowing the Red Pill: a journey to the heart of modern misogyny

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How shitty are men really? The question hung in the air, invisible but omnipresent, like the smell of a garbage fire from a nearby town. By 2016, a series of catchphrases had come to dominate the chaotic state of gender politics - "male privilege", "rape culture", "men's rights" - but confusion reigned.

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Inspired by the current pandemic I ventured towards current conspiracy theories .

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To have one viral sensation, Oscar Wilde might have said, is unfortunate. But to have two smacks of carelessness. And that's what we have. The first is Covid-19, about which much printer's ink has already been spilled. The second is Plandemic, a 26-minute "documentary" video featuring Dr Judy Mikovits, a former research scientist and inveterate conspiracy theorist who blames the coronavirus outbreak on big pharma, Bill Gates and the World Health Organization. She also claims that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (which is headed by Dr Anthony Fauci) buried her research showing vaccines weaken people's immune systems and made them more vulnerable to Covid-19. Just to round off the accusations, Mikovits claims that wearing masks is dangerous because it "literally activates your own virus". And, if proof were needed that the pharma-Gates-scientific-elite cabal were out to get her, the leading journal Science in 2011 retracted a paper by her on a supposed link between a retrovirus and chronic fatigue syndrome that it had accepted in 2009.

The video went online on 4 May when its maker, Mikki Willis, a hitherto little-known film producer, posted it to Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo and a separate website set up to share the video. For three days it built up a head of steam on Facebook pages dedicated to conspiracy theories, many of which linked to the video on YouTube. By 11 May it had been viewed more than 8m times on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and had generated countless other posts on websites and social media. Later that day YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook took down the video, and in theory it disappeared from the internet - only of course it hadn't, in the time-honoured way of subversive material in the networked world. The cognitive pathogen had escaped into the wild and was spreading virally.

Conspiracy theory sites are the most powerful engines of disinformation around

As it did so, a number of journalists and network scientists began to map the route by which this niche obsession made it into the big time. A New York Times team traced it back to a Facebook page dedicated to QAnon, a rightwing conspiracy theory, which has 25,000 members, headed with the clickbait injunction "Exclusive Content, Must Watch". The video went from being viewed directly on YouTube to people linking out to it on Facebook, Twitter and other social media channels, with each link increasing the possibility that it would make the next big jump.

On the afternoon of 5 May, the link was shared by a celebrity medic who had appeared on Oprah and had half a million followers on Facebook. Later that evening Plandemic popped up on a large-scale political page on Facebook. The page, reports the NYT, "was for Reopen Alabama, which has over 36,000 members and was part of the movement by Americans who wanted to lift shelter-in-place orders. Once the video appeared on that page, which was linked to dozens of other Reopen America groups, it quickly began spreading to the pages of those other groups in a kind of forceful multiplier effect."

The next day it was shared by a Republican politician in Ohio with her 20,000 Facebook followers. "If you watch ANYTHING on my page," she wrote, "it needs to be this." This then brought the video into the Republican mainstream, which meant that it was everywhere in semi-polite rightwing society.

The NYT reconstruction of Plandemic's meteoric rise was complemented by the different approach taken by Erin Gallagher, a social media analyst who used analytical and graphical tools often used by data scientists. She looked for public Facebook posts containing the keywords "Plandemic" or "Judy Mikovits" and then started to draw the network graphs that emerged from those data sets.

The most interesting thing about the resulting social media networks is the centrality of certain conspiracist Facebook pages and groups and YouTube channels in them. For example, QAnon looms large and central. So do Collective Action Against Bill Gates, ChemtrailsGlobalSkywatch, Fall of the Cabal, Truth Revolution, and even our old friend David Icke and his YouTube channel.

This confirms something we've known since at least 2016, namely that conspiracy theory sites are the most powerful engines of disinformation around. And when they have a medical conspiracy theory to work with, then they are really in business. "Medical and health conspiracy theories do well," said Prof Eric Oliver, a scholar who studies them, "because oftentimes they're not explicitly ideological in the way that other conspiracy theories are. They tend to cross ideological domains." In public opinion surveys in the US, he found that 40% of those polled agree with the proposition that "the Food and Drug Administration has been deliberately withholding natural cures for cancer because of secret pressure from the pharmaceutical industry." And support for it comes from across the American political spectrum.

All of which suggests that when a Covid-19 vaccine does eventually arrive, conspiracy theorists will have a field day. Assuming they haven't all died of the virus first.

What I've been reading

Big tech muscles in
How Google and Apple outflanked governments in the race to build coronavirus apps - an excellent report by Politico 's European edition.

Vintage lockdown diaries
"The Very First Pandemic Blogger". A lovely essay on Samuel Pepys, by Andrew Sullivan in N ew York Magazine 's Intelligencer column.

History in the making
A fascinating insight in the London Review of Books into how the great historian Keith Thomas goes about his work.
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How the 'Plandemic' conspiracy theory took hold

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To have one viral sensation, Oscar Wilde might have said, is unfortunate. But to have two smacks of carelessness. And that's what we have. The first is Covid-19, about which much printer's ink has already been spilled.

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Viral: The 5G Conspiracy Theory by @BBC Stories - BBC

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Branching off from the initial research I began to look into different theories  and avenues in which I could take my research.

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Red Pill/Blue Pill? How to Change Negative, Limiting Beliefs Forever | Aida Memisevic | TEDxRyersonU

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The knights templar and how the three conspiracy organisations  link .

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Is there any link at all between the Knights Templar and Freemasons? I have recently been filmed for an episode of The Curse of Oak Island - Specials - Season 7, episode 2. I was asked to comment on the links between the Masons and Templars.

As you know, the Knights Templar were in existence between their founding in 1118 and their destruction in 1307 - a period of nearly two hundred years. The Freemasons as we know them today are largely a construct of the 18th century though with roots going further back.

How far back and whether they link to the Knights Templar is the big question. Freemasons seem to vary between those that are quite happy to state an explicit and firm link and those who say it's part of the masonic mythology but not to be taken too literally.
Templar infiltration of the Freemasons?
The linkage between the Freemasons and Knights Templar is difficult to prove but there's no shortage of theories. One goes that after they were suppressed by Pope and the King of France, the Templars infiltrated stone mason guilds.

These were then refashioned to embrace Templar ideals and rituals. In effect, the masons and Templars over time became one and the same thing.

Freemasons came to full public view in 1717 with the foundation of the Grand Lodge of England. The organisation's website traces the history of the order back to the stone masons of the Middle Ages who built Europe's great cathedrals and not to the Knights Templar. It doesn't recognised the aforementioned merger of masons and Templars.

The website cites evidence of people becoming Freemasons throughout the seventeenth century such as a gentleman called Elias Ashmole in 1643. Then in the eighteenth century, grand lodges were formed in England, Ireland and Scotland and the order grew significantly to include top politicians and establishment figures. But as its lodges spread throughout government and business, the conspiracy theories proliferated.

From the eighteenth century to the present day, there were Freemasons happy to state that their rituals and organisation were directly descended from the Templars. Equally, there have always been Freemasons irritated by these claims. However, the creation of an occult mythology around masonic activity was largely created by Freemasons and not their detractors.
Baron Gotthelf and the Knights Templar - Freemasons link
The prominent eighteenth century Freemason Baron Karl Gotthelf von Hund was forever hammering home the link between masonry and the Templars. The baron founded The Rite of Strict Observance within Freemasonry, as series of degrees through which members would pass including the degree of "knight".

Michael Haag details in his book The Templars that a crusader connection was first expounded by Andrew Michael Ramsay, a Jacobite who headed up the French Grand Lodge around 1737. He said in a speech that the crusaders had wanted to create a global spiritual confraternity. While attempting to rebuild the Temple of Solomon, he believed they had developed secret signs and rituals to protect themselves from Saracen infiltration.

When the crusades collapsed, these spiritual crusaders left the Holy Land and returned to their European homes setting up the first Freemason lodges. But these were neglected over time and the secrets forgotten. Only in Scotland was the flame kept burning.
Holy Blood Holy Grail - and the Knights Templar - Freemasons connection
The authors of The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail in 1982 wrote about the alleged flight of Knights Templar to Scotland when the order was suppressed by the King of France in 1307, repeating an old claim that they participated in the Battle of Bannockburn against the English.

They claimed to have discovered "what seemed to be" a Templar graveyard in Argyllshire with 13th century Templar gravestones and eighteenth century Masonic gravestones. The authors asserted that the later stones had mixed motifs suggesting a fusion at some point between the Templars and Freemasons.

The alleged link between Freemasonry and the Templars has often been used to damage the reputation of masons. Stephen Knight authored The Brotherhood in the early 1980s claiming a link to the Templars and arguing that Freemasons were running the United Kingdom.

Knight had also written a book on Jack the Ripper claiming that his murders were part of a conspiracy involving masons and the Royal Family. If that sounds familiar, it's because it influenced the later work From Hell by Alan Moore.

John Robinson's 1989 book Born in Blood claimed that Knights Templar fleeing arrest and torture in England and Scotland formed a secret society of mutual protection that eventually revealed itself as the Freemasons.

The symbols and rituals we associate with the masons in fact dated back to the Templars. He credited this secret society with the Protestant Reformation and included among its members the first US President George Washington.

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What links the Freemasons and Knights Templar? - Beardy History

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Is there any link at all between the Knights Templar and Freemasons? I have recently been filmed for an episode of The Curse of Oak Island - Specials - Season 7, episode 2. I was asked to comment on the links between the Masons and Templars.

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Art provides an expression of the spiritual life of man and it prophetically establishes what is to be expected in that respect in the future. Moreover, art enhances the beauty of life and the joy of man. Freemasonry has always been greatly attractive to visual artists.

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From secret handshakes and rolled-up trouser legs to accusations of nepotism, bullying and the repression of reform, the Freemasons' reputation has not always been positive.

But with six million members worldwide, including more than 200,000 in the UK, negative publicity has not dampened people's desire to join.

"At first I thought it was a bit odd, but then you start to understand what it's all about," says Anna, a senior Freemason from one of England's two women-only masonic societies. "It can be quite addictive."

Freemasonry in England was, for 200 years, only open to men. That changed in the 20th Century.

The first female lodge opened in 1908 with a male Grand Master. His successors have all been female, however, and men are no longer permitted to join the lodge.

Anna - not her real name - has been a member for 21 years and has completed all three Freemasonry degrees, making her one of England's most senior female members.

"We do the same rituals, we do the same ceremonies but we are completely separate to [the men]," she says.

Loyalty

Anna is a confident, intelligent woman who neither looks nor sounds like someone who would want to join an organisation often thought of as a stuffy, elitist boys' club. So why did she?

"My husband's a mason and he said 'I think you'd like it, why don't you join?' I think partly so I wouldn't moan at him going off to meetings!"

Michael, a man in his late forties who has been a member for six years, says, like Anna, he joined on the recommendation of somebody close to him.

"It was an invite from a friend," he says. "I didn't know anything about it.

"I like to trust people, I'm very loyal - that kind of thing [being part of a community] appealed to me. That's what it is all about."

Unsurprisingly, many Freemasons are vague when discussing the fraternity's purpose, but two things crop up repeatedly when you ask why they enjoy being members.

Social network

Michael says the Freemasons are among the biggest charitable donors in the UK, with £33m raised last year by more than 180 masonic groups.

Anna, too, lists the charitable side of membership as something she enjoys.

"[My job] is such a shallow profession so it's nice to do something worthwhile," she says.

Admirable though charity may be, people donate all the time without joining secretive societies.

What else, then, compels people to not only join but remain committed members?

For many, Freemasonry is a social network.

"Over the years you build up relationships with people," says Michael. "We become friends.

"One person invites someone in and they generally know each other anyway.

"It's a bit like Facebook in that way. You will come across people you've met in the past, certainly if you've lived in the area for a number of years.

"We come from all walks of life and professions but it becomes a network.

'Complete myth'

"I use that expression carefully because the network is not to be used for your own personal benefit - that is something they stress."

But what is a network for if it does not operate for the benefit of those involved?

"The perception is that Freemasons pat each other on the back and look after each other in ways other friendship groups don't, that is a complete myth," explains Michael.

"It is frowned upon. It is not to be used for your own personal benefit. It really is for others."

Anna adds: "I don't know a single other woman who's worked in [my industry].

"It has never helped me [in my career].

"I think in the past there probably have been cases of [nepotism] but I've never known of a single case in the women's Freemasons. I know people think there is but that's true of any society, isn't it?"

Secret ceremonies

Each lodge meets four times a year officially to welcome new members in ceremonies, the contents of which have always been a closely-guarded secret.

"It's all based on King Solomon's Temple," says Anna. "It's an allegory, slightly grounded in religion."

While members are discouraged from discussing politics or religion, belief in a higher power has been, historically, a requisite to join.

"The best way to explain it is that it's like a play, which everyone has a part in," she continues.

"The Worshipful Master is like the lead actor, who has the most to say in it.

"When you go through your three ceremonies there are things you have to learn - you have questions you have to learn answers to.

"When you're the master, when you host the ceremony, which can take an hour or so, you do the majority of the talking."

The scripts themselves are never revealed publicly - but not, Michael says, because of any "skulduggery or anything weird".

"Weird" or not, does a secret society that can trace its history back to the Middle Ages really have a role in modern society. And if so, what is it?

"I couldn't answer for the men but for us it's to show us [women] in a favourable light," says Anna. "It's all about self-development. It's a journey to learn about yourself."

Michael adds: "It gives you a moral code in terms of bringing out the best side of human nature."

There are about 4,700 female Freemasons in the UK and 200,000 male Freemasons in England and Wales with more under the Grand Lodge of Scotland.

Freemasons meet in a temple, which they call a "lodge", as that is where ancient stonemasons met when working on a church or cathedral

Lodges are grouped by region, roughly in line with the old county boundaries

Freemasons wear aprons, because of the supposed evolution of freemasonry from the stonemasons

The "third degree" is the final stage before becoming a fully fledged Mason. The ceremony involves close questioning, which is where the expression "giving someone the third degree" originates

Famous Freemasons have included Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling and Oscar Wilde

*The names of interviewees have been changed to protect their identities.

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Freemasons explain the rituals and benefits of membership

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From secret handshakes and rolled-up trouser legs to accusations of nepotism, bullying and the repression of reform, the Freemasons' reputation has not always been positive. But with six million members worldwide, including more than 200,000 in the UK, negative publicity has not dampened people's desire to join.

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The illuminati is a classic conspiracy theory so to start my research i watched this Ted talk . Then from this Tedtalk I began to dig deeper into the freemaysons and how the knights templar connects the two .

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Mind map /starting point

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Marshmallow People 1-3: The Series Thus Far

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This is one of thirty posters published in a entitled Guerrilla Girls Talk Back by the group of anonymous American female artists who call themselves the Guerrilla Girls. Tate's copy is number twelve in the of fifty.

Since their inception in 1984 the Guerrilla Girls have been working to expose sexual and racial discrimination in the art world, particularly in New York, and in the wider cultural arena. The group's members protect their identities by wearing gorilla masks in public and by assuming pseudonyms taken from such deceased famous female figures as the writer Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) and the artist Frida Kahlo (1907-54). They formed in response to the International Survey of Painting and Sculpture held in 1984 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition included the work of 169 artists, less than 10% of whom were women. Although female artists had played a central role in experimental American art of the 1970s, with the economic boom of the early 1980s in which artwork prices rose steeply, their presence in museum and gallery exhibitions diminished dramatically. Dubbing themselves the 'conscience of the art world', in 1985 the Guerrilla Girls began a poster campaign that targeted museums, dealers, curators, critics and artists who they felt were actively responsible for, or complicit in, the exclusion of women and non-white artists from mainstream exhibitions and publications.

Like American artists Barbara Kruger (born 1945) and Jenny Holzer (born 1950), the Guerrilla Girls appropriated the visual language of advertising, specifically fly-posting, to convey their messages in a quick and accessible manner. They pasted up their first posters on SoHo streets in the middle of the night. Combining bold block text with lists and statistics that were compiled by the Girls themselves or reinterpreted from existing sources such as art magazines and museum reports, the posters named New York galleries that showed no more than 10% women artists (Tate ) and listed successful male artists who allowed their work to be shown in galleries showing little or no work by women (Tate ). Other posters, such as 'We Sell White Bread' (1987, Tate ), first appeared as peel-off stickers on gallery windows and doors, while the 1989 poster that asked 'Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?' (Tate ) first appeared as an advertisement on New York City buses. With such posters as 'The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist' (1988, Tate ) and 'Relax Senator Helms, the Art World is your kind of place (1989, Tate ) the Girls used wit and irony to point a critical finger at double standards prevalent in the art world and elsewhere.

The group gradually widened their focus, tackling issues of racial discrimination in the art world and also made more direct, politicised interventions. They organized forums at the Cooper Union where critics, curators and dealers could tell their side of the story (1986, Tate ), inserted flyers inside the covers of all the books in the Guggenheim Museum's bookstore, and, concurrent with the 1987 Whitney Biennial, made an exhibition of information exposing the museum's poor record on exhibiting women and artists of colour (Tate ). In 1992, at the opening of the Guggenheim Museum SoHo, after instigating a postcard-writing campaign attacking the museum for proposing to show only white male artists, they organized a demonstration, handing out bags with gorilla heads printed on them for protesters to wear over their heads. To date they have produced more than ninety posters, three books, numerous stickers and other printed projects and have undertaken actions about discrimination in art, film and politics. They make presentations and run workshops at schools, museums and various organisations. Their individual identities are always concealed behind the signature gorilla masks.

This is based on a poster created in 1989. It refers to the art collections of the American artist Andy Warhol (1928-87), the collector Emily Tremaine and the auction house Sotheby's, all of which include virtually no work by women, or none at all. It humorously employs two bananas lying head to head and tail to tail to represent the figure zero.

Further reading:
Helena Reckitt and Peggy Phelan, Art and Feminism, London 2001, pp.12, 17, 42, 153 and 268
Liz McQuiston, Suffragettes and She-Devils, London 1997, pp.11, 114-15, 122-3, 140-1, 150-2 and 158
Whitney Chadwick, Guerrilla Girls, Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls, New York 1995, reproduced p.55 in colour

Elizabeth Manchester
December 2004/February 2005
Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.

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‘women artists in the andy warhol and tremaine auctions at sotheby’s’

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'Women Artists In The Andy Warhol And Tremaine Auctions At Sotheby's', Guerrilla Girls, 1989 | Tate

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Artwork page for 'Women Artists In The Andy Warhol And Tremaine Auctions At Sotheby's', Guerrilla Girls, 1989 Formed in 1985, the Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous activist group who highlight discrimination in the art world. Their targets include museums, dealers, curators and art critics.

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This research shows artists that inspired me to experiment  with traditional  sculting materials . These artists although they don't link in context I like the exhibition and style in which they have used clay or plaster within there work .

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This is a group of five sculpted and painted plaster figures mounted on free-standing plaster supports. The figures are semi-abstracted, combining human and animal characteristics. They are based on a smaller version, L'Echiquier, petit (Chessboard, Small Version) 1955 (reproduced Barbero, pp.102-3), that comprises five figures modelled in clay and plastiline standing on a board made of a piece of scrap iron and worked over in clay, all finally cast in bronze. In this work Richier's intention was to represent the theme of the game of chess and its pieces, which for her was the possibility of moving the figures around the board (Barbero, p.102). The large version was modelled in clay by the sculptural technician Robert Haligon soon after Richier returned to Paris from southern France in April 1959, before being cast in plaster and painted by the artist. In the larger size, the board of the original was completely dispensed with and the stumpy supports of the small figures were translated into much taller individual bases of varying heights, conferring an increased sense of the potential for mobility.

Richier's Chessboard comprises the five principal pieces in a game of chess: the King, the Queen, the Bishop, the Knight and the Castle. Each is a roughly humanoid figure, standing on two legs, apart from the Castle, which has three and is the most abstracted of the figures, its body an elongated conglomeration of horizontal and vertical surfaces that extend upwards in four stick-like protruberances with bulbous ends. The head of the King recalls a symmetrically branching plant form; the callipers he holds in his left hand were essential sculpting tools for Richier, who used them in transferring measurements from her models to the clay she normally worked on. His protruding belly sports an enlarged belly button which in the case of the Queen has become a hole that pierces the width of her body. She has realistic human buttocks, but the head of an abstracted cow, while her arms are extended into verticals, one of which reaches high above her head, constituting the tallest element of the group (over 2 metres). The Knight, appropriately, has a horse's head; his arms disappear into a perforated insectoid thorax mounted on stick-like legs without feet. Finally the Bishop - known as the Fool ( le Fou) in French - sports a stylised jester's cap above a face that, though distorted, is recognisably human. His body, on human legs, is an egg-like form with a short protruding tail.

After being modelled in clay and cast in plaster, the majority of Richier's sculptures are cast in dark patinated bronze, resulting in the dark grey shades of works like Water 1953-4 () and Diabolo 1950 (), or the polished natural bronze that resembles gold of The Bat 1946 (L02176). In 1959 the practice of applying paint to her sculptures was a new one for Richier, although she had been moving towards it in the preceding years. In 1952, she invited the artists Maria Vieira da Silva (1908-92) and Hans Hartung (1904-89) to paint the backdrops on two of her sculptures - La Ville and La Toupie respectively (reproduced Germaine Richier, pp.134-5). She herself began applying painted colour to her sculptures in 1956, when she painted on the polished natural bronzesurface of some of her Personnages. Later that year she began experimenting with the possibilities for enamelling some of her bronzes.During a holiday at Juan-les-Pins in the summer of 1958 she briefly took up painting on canvas and commented during that year: 'With this business of colour, I may be wrong or I may be right, I don't know. Anyway, what I do know for sure is that it pleases me. Sculpture is serious. Colour is gay. I want my statues to be gay, alive. Colour on a structure is usually distracting. But after all, why not?' (Quoted in Barbero, p.116.) Between April and June 1959 she painted seven bronze sculptures and the five plaster figures that make up . When they were first exhibited at the Musée Grimaldi-Château d'Antibes in July-September that year, their colours were brilliant and distinctive, characterised by the combination of vertical and horizontal line (combined with circular and triangular forms) that were for Richier the essentials of sculptural composition and structure, and which she often drew onto her subjects as part of the process of mapping form from the original onto her clay.

After Richier's death, two weeks into her exhibition at the Musée Grimaldi-Château d'Antibes, moulds were created from the plaster figures that make up Chessboard, Large Version for the purpose of producing an edition in bronze (reproduced Barbero, p.117). In the process of this, the figures were coated with a shellac varnish to seal them, contributing a yellowish shiny surface and a dulling of the paint colours, resulting in the appearance they have today.

The rough and pitted surfaces and frequently emaciated limbs of many of Richier's sculptures recall the aesthetic of such sculptures by her friend Alberto Giacometti (1901-66) as Man Pointing 1947 () and Standing Woman 1948-9 (). However her exploration of hybrid human-animal or -insect and anthropomorphic forms has its precedent in the imagery created in the 1940s by such surrealists as Max Ernst (1891-1976) and Wifredo Lam (1902-82). Ernst's sculpture The King Playing with the Queen 1944 (Museum of Modern Art, New York) presents a male upper torso with an abstracted square-shaped horned head fixed to a section of chessboard, on which the Queen, Bishop, Knight and Castle face three pawns, over which he presides. While Ernst was concerned with a personal mythology, woven from tribal cultures combined with moments of mystical and emotional intensity in his own life, Lam painted groups of hybrid figures, such as The Jungle 1943 (Museum of Modern Art, New York), as a way of reconnecting with his Afro-Cuban roots. In a similar way, Richier appears to have been drawn to human-animal-vegetable hybridity by a nostalgia for her childhood in rural southern France and its connection to archaic myths and fables. She explained:

Although unpremeditated, my 'subjects' belong to the world of metamorphosis ... to this animal that is more than animal, within or after the form... the fantastic creatures of an age that we are incapable of recognizing, but which is ours, since the world of forms intervenes unceasingly during our research and observation. Everything depends on the drama perceived. In fact, it is discovered along the way, from the elements. Exact science, human science - the value of sculpture depends on this dual relationship, between observation and creation; between truth and imagination ... the being seized takes on value from its organic density, from the play and interaction of the elements. If one were to speak of sculpture's superlative function, one would say that it rediscovers the meaning of the world and of the hybrid.

(Quoted in Andrew Carnduff Ritchie (ed.) The New Decade: 22 European Painters and Sculptors, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Modern Art, New York 1955, pp.35-7.)

Chess as a subject for art was famously introduced by Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), for whom the logic of the game was a central attraction, generating the production of several designs for chess sets as well as the claimed the abdication of artmaking in preference for playing the game. Ernst's sculpture The King Playing with the Queen was created for an exhibition conceived with Duchamp and the surrealist dealer Julien Levy in 1944-5 on the theme of the chess set. While it is normally associated with analytical rationality, Richier subverts this in her version of the chessboard in which magic and mystery predominate. She said: 'for me, sculpture is something intimate ... It's above all that which one has inside one.' (Quoted in Barbero, p.56.)

Further reading:
Germaine Richier: Rétrospective, exhibition catalogue, Fondation Maeght, Paris 1996, reproduced pp.184-5.
Germaine Richier, exhibition catalogue, Akademie der Künste, Berlin 1997, pp.138-51.
Luca Massimo Barbero, Germaine Richier, exhibition catalogue, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 2006, pp.116-7.

Elizabeth Manchester
November 2009
Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.

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large version (original painted plaster)’

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'Chessboard, Large Version (Original Painted Plaster)', Germaine Richier, 1959 | Tate

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Artwork page for 'Chessboard, Large Version (Original Painted Plaster)', Germaine Richier, 1959 on display at Tate Modern. These five figures represent the core pieces in a game of chess: the King, Queen, Knight, Castle and Bishop. The game stages a war in which the aim is to attack and capture the opponent's pieces.

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This series of posters captures my vast research and combines it into a playful ,sarcastic series. This series displays my opinion of conspiracy theories through pun like names that give my sculptural head character. These characters have different traits and there birth dates link to my research. The overall combination of these posters gives a story like appearance. The refined gloss paper highlights the fine details with the sculptures and compliments the bold monochromatic  colourscheme.