9/11 Watch Party

It does not help to know whether the images are true or false. From now on and forever we will be uncertain about these images. Only their impact counts.

Jean Baudrillard

Join Verdurin for the as-seen-on-TV event of the year. Two decades after the attacks on the World Trade Center changed the course of history, experience again the fear, tears, and paranoia of the live news channel analysis and raw unedited footage of the disaster. 

9/11 Watch Party reformulates the live responses of the mainstream media, twinning them with conspiratorial commentators in a polyphonic installation of sensorially overwhelming scale. By the end of the evening, you will have been taken in by the ineluctable seductive power of conspiracy theories popularised by “truthers” on social media and inspired to rebuild New York City’s skyline by artistic responses commissioned by the Port Authority. 

Were the attacks of 9/11 “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos”, as the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen put it? If so, what part does art play in memorialising, investigating, theorising, or distorting them? How do the artefacts produced by artists and amateurs measure up to the experience of seeing the attacks on cathode ray televisions screens in 2001?

9/11 Watch Party launches a season of events examining the aesthetic dimension of conspiracy and conspiracy theories. The cycle responds to the increasingly seductive power of conspiratorial ideas over the populace at a time of a crisis of meaning. 

Note: attendees will be required to surrender their mobile phones for the duration of the event.