Traditions of graffiti have proven to be great agents of group consolidation, as they bear an ability to hold units together or create specters of infamy that linger and get slowly injected in the social framework, in the case of anonymous tagging that accrues value, even a fanbase, because of its mysterious authorship.
Many news outlets pointed out the picture collages covering his van, evidence of conspiratorial thinking and a self-induced paranoia. In the ensuing police work, all signs and collages were covered by a blue tarp as it moved through the highway, as if the police considered the signs so inflammatory that they should infect another’s vision, like the invisible monster in Birdbox that drives those who see it into violent suicidal frenzies.
There are hypersigils at work everyday, defined in chaos magick as symbols so worked over that they not only perform the basic operation of the sigil to summon an entity, but they adopt a power of their own, a form of virality and parasite of the mind. Their caustic use could be seen in the work of corporate branding, which function as a species of oppressive puppetry of desires.
Fear/desire (the pharmocopornographic) is incited by a montage of language and doublespeak.
The Omni Hack
64 x 80 x 48 in.
Cast acrylic plexi, tempered panel, silicone rubber, programmable LED’s, and Madrix software
Separately, on my daily commutes to work, I kept seeing what was seemingly the only Black Lives Matter sign left, inserted within a set of signs outside an automotive shop. I wondered how this daily, repetitive, and quiet act of protest would be felt if it was monumentalized.
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The text behaves oddly on the building’s surface. Because of gaps in between the floors, the inversion of Black Lives Matter is seen through the building as it snakes across to the back face.
The names of recent victims of police violence, Botham Jean, 15 year old Jordan Edwards in 2017, and later Atatiana Jefferson (whose death occurred the same day the Omni was exhibited publicly) were collaged into the program.
The serpent in Gloria Anzaldua’s text is a philosophical twin to Reza Negarestani’s solar rattle, both mapping a consciousness of reinscription and reauthorship through a use of productive noise disturbing the rational. Or like cut-up techniques, popularized by the beat generation, in which literary text is cut into pieces and reassembled, serpentine movement gives insight into unconscious patterning or divination. These reforming practices, in the words of Allen Ginsburg, “make the future leak out.”
I began to see my copy as the real thing and the real-life hotel as just an imitation of my work, or the model as a physical embodiment of grievance, a charge to change, to stop the hypnosis of the everyday.