Catalogue > At random

We have now entered into a new era some have called the post-truth society characterized by a deluge of fictive mediated stories dubbed Fake News. One of these stories, Pizzagate concerns the conspiracy theory, circulated at the end of the Trump-Clinton presidential election, that accused Hillary Clinton and other members of her Democratic election committee of running a childhood sex ring in the basement of Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant. As preposterous as this is, many people believed it and the story went viral. My PIZZAGATE: FROM RUMOR TO DELUSION as an experimental documentary which uses non-linear video editing techniques to collage extracted You Tube clips with real video taped footage collected on site at the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria investigates the conditions of our now planetary network existence to understand this event and its implications. I utilize the story of the delusional behavior of James Welch who drove up from North Carolina, shotgun in hand, to free the girls as an example of a generalized societal condition addicted to social media. I speculate that we have transitioned from Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle to what I am calling The Society of the Neuron in the Attention Economy.

- Theorist, film maker, composer and installation artist, Warren Neidich, who works between Los Angeles and Berlin, brings to any discussion platform a unique interdisciplinary position that he calls “trans-thinking”. The model explores the way cognition is mediated and acted upon by co-extensive cultural inputs consisting of an evolving socio-cultural-political milieu wherein various unequally distributed and contested discursive fields gather and entangle themselves with the plastic brain. The result being what Gilles Deleuze referred to as the image of thought. His works of art have been exhibited internationally including the Ludwig Museum, Cologne, The Whitney Museum, New York City, PS1 MOMA, Long Island City, The ICA London, LACMA, Los Angeles and many others. His one-person exhibition, Rumor to Delusion, premiered at the Zuecca Project Space, during the Venice Biennale, 2019. He is founder and director of the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art and is a recipient of the Vilem Flusser Theory Award, Transmediale, AHRB/ACE Arts and Science Research Fellowship, Bristol and The Fulbright Scholarship. Additionally he was former tutor in the departments of visual art, computer science and cultural studies at Goldsmith College London as well as recently serving at Professor of Art at the Weissensee Kunsthochschule, Berlin.