Paranoia

The symposium will examine art’s role in the germination of conspiracies, art as a tool for decoding conspiratorial behaviour, and the artistic as inherently conspiratorial. It will bring together rational reflections, provocations, and dispatches from the depths of unreachable paranoid network minds.

Dancing about Conspiracy

The choreographer Rosie Kay’s research collaboration with the filmmaker Adam Curtis gave rise to MKULTRA, a dynamic, pulsating work of ‘dancing about conspiracy’ which weaves truthful and illusory narratives with the confidence of the documentary and the ambiguity of movement. This 2017 work preempted the emergence of many of today’s social attitudes to conspiracy, turning its exploration of taboo in the mainstream into an act of conspiracy itself. 

Trash Mysticism

The artist Karin Ferrari’s practice has been both an investigation and embodiment of conspiracy theories. From systematic decoding of visual materials like music videos and news reports, to the practice of Trash Mysticism, a kind of DIY-spirituality emerging from screen cultures, and, more recently, the examination of ’urban legends’, Ferrari has kept conspiracy theorising on the agendas of mainstream art institutions for over a decade.

The Sermon

In his performance-lecture, Aaron Moulton pitches conspiracy theory as the apex contemporary communication technology. Surpassing fiction, nonfiction, or history, this mode of storytelling falls within an evolutionary trajectory of the epic alongside mythology, folklore, science fiction, and prophecy. The authorless nature of conspiracy theories grants them a tensile capacity to grow and, indeed, memetically aligns them with sacred channeled texts. Given that today, it takes an average of six months for many widespread conspiracy theories to be proven right, Moulton considers the role of hyperstition and the false flag. 

Reading between the lines 

Thomas Peermohamed Lambert and Justin Smith-Ruiu are two writer-scholars who will discuss the strange affinity between literature and conspiracy theory. Lambert will consider his doctoral research on the relationship between conspiracy theory and literary modernism: the preponderance of paranoia in the work of writers like Kafka and Borges, and the fact that, since Paul Ricoeur, literary studies have been dominated by a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion.’ He will also consider the death the ‘inductive’ novel, and the question of whether readers have become rather too trusting. 

Smith-Ruiu, a philosopher of science, will consider how conspiracy-quashing slogans like ‘trust the science’ are, in fact, only possible under very specific conditions – and how the procedures invoked by fact-checkers and disinformation specialists may already be in the first phase of their obsolescence. He will also touch on his recent dabblings in metafiction – in particular their experimentation with pseudonyms and heteronyms via his publication The Hinternet – and the ways in which the writers can induce readers to suspect that the most basic anchors of a text, like the name of its author, might just be a lie.

A Long Thread

Sam will speak about what is arguably the first conspiracy theory in Western intellectual history: Gnosticism. In particular, he will consider how the growing belief that “interpretation” of scripture was a vital part of faith created an ethos of digging for subtextual or hidden meaning that culminated in the doctrine of gnosis. From Renaissance occultists to moderns like Pynchon, and Phillip K. Dick, writers have turned to Gnosticism as a secret undercurrent in the history of Western literature.