Military Technology

You know, of all the military technologies every invented, I think I like the internet the best. It was invented in 1962 out of the US Department of Defense’s DARPA program. They needed a way to transmit information even in the event of a nuclear war. So they created this web of information, with servers ALL over the world. And it was designed really well, because it had to resist attempts to control it or shut it down. And it was originally just going to be used for military secrets, and then that expanded to using it as a library.

Some people say that in a matter of years the internet is going to be the world’s first true artificial intelligence.

So it went to the academics, it was really good for publishing scientific studies. And then the nerds got a hold of it, because you can play dungeons and dragons on it and so forth, and talk about stuff. And then amateur pornographers got a hold of it. And on and on it went until today, when pretty much everyone uses it. And some intensely dark sides of human nature were naturally able to show up on it, along with light things like spiritual growth. And I think the military eventually realized that they had inadvertently created a truly democratic publishing forum. And so all kinds of laws started coming in to place, stuff under all kinds of more neutral names, because that’s how those laws show up. And people were whipped up into supporting the governments again, and they did.

But they still talked online. Only this time they were open and upfront about themselves, especially if they were part of the majority. And suddenly it was in vogue to hate minorities again, because the older generation honestly didn’t know that people had started being honest on the internet. They thought people still lied all the time. And I’m sure some of the time they do. And that’s why these wars are failing.

It’s different though, the internet is still primarily an American phenomenon, so shameless confession just automatically was kicked off in an entire generation of American youth. The soldiers now going to war have never known a time when the internet wasn’t used to tell the truth. And of course, if you’re doing it through a military technology, then the soldiers obviously are in constant internet access.

This may be the first time in history that war crimes have been exposed by the criminals themselves in real time.

Panopticon

I know one thing which has always worried civil liberties folks is the issue of surveillance. And surveillance has been used for a long ass time to figure out what’s really going in in various groups. I mean, look at all the bugs and so on invented by the CIA. When my cousin went crazy he kept being terrified of being surveilled by the government. I realized it was an interesting use of force.

The Panopticon is a model for a prison proposed by Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. It was designed with a central observatory post surrounded by cells which could be seen at all times theoretically. This constant surveillance was supposed to provide moral guidance. If you are always being watched, then you will always be “normalized.” Foucault expanded on this concept by using it to discuss surveillance. He saw that this kind of All Seeing eye was a replacement for God. If God can see everything you do he can judge you, and if you know God is watching then you won’t do bad things. But that was subverted, suddenly someone else became God and surveillance became a disciplinary force.

Do you know most cameras in public don’t even connect to a VCR? I mean, who actually wants to sit around watching an ATM all the time? Some cameras are connected to real people, like the ones at the Sky Train in case someone looks like they’re going to jump. You just never know.

So I decided to put myself under surveillance for ten years. I mean, if they really wanted to know what I was doing, why not? I was just doing stupid shit anyway. And I knew they wanted thoughts, so I told all my thoughts. Why not? And the funny thing is, nothing I said mattered because by definition I was the lowest on the totem pole in this society. I was a person of colour, queer, a girl, poor, etc etc. It didn’t matter if I was intelligent or not, by virtue of my identity I was a nobody. And by virtue of my identity I was everything people are supposed to be ashamed of.

So I thought fuck it, why should I be ashamed? And I spent my time under surveillance being shamelessly me. And yet, since I was a nobody, no one really cared what I thought. But they did care that I wasn’t ashamed, and if someone as worthless as me wasn’t ashamed then why did they have to be ashamed. And so the internet became one big reality show.

And the mainstream caught on, suddenly reality shows were the big thing, because they didn’t really know why so many people were interested in mundane daily life things. So we got goofy reality television, shows like Big Brother and Survivor and so on. And people really liked it, because suddenly ANYBODY could be a star just by exposing themselves on television . . .

Or on the internet, where there were no corporate censors.

The problem with a world that loves reality shows is if you do it in a country which is also war mongering and celebrates war, then war itself becomes one big reality show. It was exciting for the people involved, because war always excites people, I’m not sure why. So then you send out soldiers who are trained to believe the world is a reality show, and they didn’t honestly know that they were doing illegal things. Because their community encouraged it. Their spiritual leaders preached hate. Their government preached hate. Their friends preached hate. They recieved orders which didn’t conflict with their hate ideology either. And so realistically, they were showing the reality of war to people who were encouraging it. They became surveilled, by their own hand. And there wasn’t that moral compass of the fear of being surveilled anymore, because how can you fear surveillance if you’re the people doing it?

Places to find me

Publications

Fireweed Fall/Winter 1997 “revolution girl style.”
Home on the Plains – prose
My Dog’s Piercing Intellect – cartoon
Untitled – (back cover) cartoon
text:
“I was drawing this really righteous girl who was gorgeous and kicked butt and held deadly weapons, but the only part I could draw decently were her legs.
Realizing this would be seen as objectifying and fetishizing kick ass grrl legs, I decided to write this disclaimer.
The rest of her, although you can’t see it, is entirely fierce and intimidating, and instills in you a sense of empowerment, and hopefully will cause you to run amok in a fit of underage female N-R-GY. Yeah! You go girl!”

Lazy Bibliography (I didn’t feel like finding them all)

Ken Eisner, “Light and Shadow,” Georgia Straight, 15 March 1999

Magnetic North – Walker Art Center
Stills from “Untouchable,” photo response to Untouchable by Catherine Opie, “For and in conversation with Thirza.”

Transference, Tradition, Technology: Native new media exploring visual & digital culture.
“Thirza Cuthand” by Shawna Dempsey, originally published in Poolside.
“Indigenous Experimentation” by Victor Masayesva
“Re:Wind” by Dana Claxton

The Romance of Transgression in Canada
Queering Sexualities, Nations, Cinemas
By Thomas Waugh, Foreword by Bruce La Bruce
McGill – Queen’s University Press
Bio pg 397, Still from Working Baby Dyke Theory on pg 398 brief mention somewhere but I don’t feel like looking it up. This is actually like the yearbook I always wanted.

Happy things

I think I’m just going to talk about art now. I love art. Everyone loves art. I mean who wouldn’t? Just sometimes some things are thought of as art and some aren’t.

Guernica by Picasso is art. Actually, various historical art works focus on the issue of war.

I always wanted to see Guernica in real life. The painting I mean.

It’s about the Spanish Civil War under the leadership of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. Incidentally this is also the time period shown in Pan’s Labyrinth, with the evil Captain Vidal. Apparently people appealed to Picasso to make a statement about fascism in Spain and elsewhere. Picasso didn’t like politics, but after a massacre which killed 16 000 civilians he went to his studio and painted Guernica. It opened at the Paris Exposition and got critical reception, typically people said it looked like a three year old could paint it. But it began to tour Europe and became one of the strongest indictments of fascism. Today it stands as a masterpiece.

Saturn Eats His Son by Goya is also art.

Goya started out as a court painter to royalty. During the Napoleonic invasions and Spanish war of independence he was so shocked by the horror of war that he devoted a series to it in his off time.

Claude Cahun was also an activist artist. Apparently she shocked Duchamp, who was already running around in ladies clothes anyway. She did a lot of self portraiture and played with gender roles. She lived with her partner in Paris and they held cultural and political meetings in their studio in Montparnasse. During Nazi occupation they made agit-prop art as part of their resistance activities. From Wikipedia:

“Following the outbreak of World War 2 and the German invasion, they became active as resistance fighters and propagandists. Fervently against war, the two worked extensively in producing anti-German fliers. Many were snippets from English-to-German translations of BBC reports on the Nazi’s crimes and insolence, which were pasted together to create rhythmic poems and harsh criticism. The couple then dressed up and attended many German military events in Jersey, strategically placing them in soldier’s pockets, on their chairs, etc. Also, fliers were inconspicuously crumpled up and thrown into cars and windows. In many ways, Cahun and Malherbe’s resistance efforts were not only political but artistic actions, using their creative talents to manipulate and undermine the authority which they despised. In many ways, Cahun’s life’s work was focused on undermining a certain authority, however her specific resistance fighting targeted a physically dangerous threat. In 1944 they were arrested and sentenced to death, but the sentences were never carried out. However, Cahun’s health never recovered from her treatment in jail, and she died in 1954.”

Private Life

I’m happy to have a private life again. You might be surprised to know I’m actually a ridiculously private person, in fact the only reason this blog wasn’t anonymous is because I knew people needed to start sticking their real names to the ideologies they were espousing. But also, I dunno. It was funny. I’m kind of glad I’m private again though because certain people in my life don’t want their shit everywhere. And I get that, totally, I was doing this for art. Art!

When I got my psychic reading she said “Do you boss people around?” And I thought pshaw, no way, otherwise I would have control over my life. And then I said “Well, I’m a director.” I guess I hadn’t anticipated being this good of a director. But she did note that I was getting help from others now instead of doing it alone all the time. And that’s true, I can’t do everything on my own. I don’t know though, if I had to write report cards I sometimes worry it might say “Does not follow instruction.” I was really worried I’d end up being like Charlton Heston at the end of Planet Of The Apes.

But I think people have held on pretty well. It does get overwhelming though, when horrid stuff seems to take precedence over the nice things. But I mean, yeah, that’s human history in a nutshell. I guess people were just really good at turning a blind eye to these things, and so in a way it had to get really in your face. I wish it didn’t, I wish people could have just gone to see movies and art and listened to music to play out these stories and actually looked at history. I mean, that’s the decent thing to do. But I also know psychiatry as it stands today has really got a stranglehold on society, I mean, even I was duped into taking pills two months after I felt my root chakra being activated. But again, like I say, the light can be too trusting.

I honestly don’t think I’ll be coming back to this planet, some really fucked up shit lives here. But who knows, maybe it will turn into a nice place. Maybe. At least people finally know who other people really are.

I’m not really mad at certain other people in Montreal who sent me to the ward, because they honestly had no idea what happens there. I hope they do now.

People think prophecy is all about someone knowing the future. But I am starting to think that the people who tell prophecies are actually people who are making a promise that they’ll fulfill in a future life.

I don’t know what people are going to do now. I know what they’re going to do, but other people, hmm, not sure. I think people need to start having small discussion groups with eachother about things they’ve noticed, things that need to change, and ideas they have for changing them. A lot can happen at kitchen tables with a couple of friends. And I think we need to have way more art in the world. Basically, we have to stop letting the darkness run everything, and we have to stop feeling bullied by them, because they’re the ones with the secrets to worry about.

Shamanic Episodes

I guess I should describe what a shaman actually does out there in the desert, which I wish I had when I went through mine. They suddenly see everything in really dualistic terms, God Devil Life Death Man Woman Hate Love Pain Pleasure Hot Cold etc etc. It’s a natural growth process. It looks really fucked because suddenly the world becomes divided into simplistic terms. But it’s a release, you have to get it out. When you aren’t frozen into this state by medication, you can move beyond it to a transcendent wholeness, where everything becomes the same thing, it’s this amazing feeling. I didn’t get there for four years after I started my process. A shamanic episode on it’s own usually resolves itself in about six weeks. That’s six weeks of needing community care though, and in various cultures world wide there are specific spiritual retreats for people to safely undergo this process with people who have been there.

I didn’t get to be cared for by people who have been there. I went through it in the company of ritual abuse survivors who took it WAY more seriously than I did. I always knew it was going to pass, but I had to throw myself into it to get it out. And part of that was doing rituals over and over and over so it could work it’s way out of my body. And that freaked out the R.A. survivors more because they didn’t honestly know you could do a ritual without killing something or hurting someone. And I tried to get them to go away, I kept telling them to leave me alone because I knew it was triggering them and I knew they were going to fuck it up because they were trained to fuck it up. And sure enough they did, I was already worrying people because I made all these long distance calls, but now I had people around me who started saying all the stuff I said like I meant it, although mostly I said things that were almost immediately left behind after I got them out. And I was just remembering how Venice looked in the morning and what kind of scary things lurk in ruins of great civilizations when I stopped. I didn’t get to remember my past life. And I was told I was disturbed for even remembering a past life, or for going there.

And I was cared for in the hospital by people trained to find pathology in just about ANY behaviour.

But I always remembered that past life, even when I was a little kid. I didn’t want to know much about Sarain because I was worried I would just be him again and I didn’t want to get stuck in an old life. So I kind of half listened to stories about him. And I kind of always assumed my parents knew I was Sarain, I think they did but it seemed kind of silly or something, because it meant he picked them for a reason. And I don’t think any of us really wanted to think too much about what that reason was. I know I used to talk funny when I was a kid, I would say stuff like “Do you remember when . . .” and then I would mention something from the late 60’s – early 70’s, and people would be like “You don’t remember that, you weren’t there.” And I’d remember I had to keep a cover story going.

My father went to Venice and made work about Sarain Stump’s life the same year I became a video artist.

I think I thought I would be cheating if I owned up to remembering at least two past lives right off the bat. And maybe I should have owned up, because as time passed I watched people lose faith in anything. And it just got worse and worse over the years until today, of course, when spirituality by definition connotes sickness. I keep seeing people lurk around whispering “I think I’m God” and it’s like well duh! That’s the fucking point. It doesn’t mean you go sit in a bloody cloud or wave around a nuke calling yourself Shiva. It just means accepting that there is no spoon!

The book of revelations isn’t a prophecy about what’s really going to happen. It’s a story of one person’s shamanic episode, and how they came to terms with themselves. You don’t follow it like some stupid manual. And that’s not even your shamanic episode, yours might have totally different symbols. This why they warn about the dream becoming real. The apocalypse is SUPPOSED to be all in your head, I mean look at what happens when it isn’t! And the reason you go through that crisis is so that you can come back with an idea of how to deal with the real world.

I mean come on, would you rather people work it out on their own in their head with some inanimate objects, or do you actually like watching it work out in the real world with George W. Bush at the helm?

Eliciting War Crimes Confessions

You know, when I started using the internet to confess all my thoughts, it was mostly because I wanted to elicit confessions from others. I wanted to know what people were really thinking about, because that’s how you know who they really are. And so in my online persona I presented myself warts and all, just to see what showed up. And I encouraged people to confess too even if I totally disagreed with them, because I wanted people to see who they really were.

And then Sept 11 hit and I withdrew from the internet because people turned really malevolent. And I had no way of dealing with that. I think I talked about My Lai the night it happened, because I wanted to say, “You know you guys, Americans have some heavy duty war crimes in their past and you might not want to agitate for war right now.”

The funny thing about war crimes is the people who do them LOVE souvenirs. And more than that, they love showing them off. And if you can encourage people to confess their real feelings, you can make a safe place for war criminals to reveal themselves. I don’t think that’s what I was intending in this ten year project. I wanted to meet the nice people. But how the hell can you ignore shit like this?

The Ashley Treatment

Sometimes I worry we aren’t ashamed that these things happen, we’re only ashamed when people don’t feel like they should hide it.

Through the Looking Glass

This was my ode to Alice, as a biracial girl negotiating a colonized landscape. With good costumes, again. I made Lori Blondeau stay up for two days with me making these outfits. The video is mostly being interrogated about race from two extremes. Lori Blondeau, my auntie, is the Red Queen. Shawna Dempsey plays the White Queen. No Shawna, I don’t think anyone really believes you’re racist. When we were shooting I made Lori say “Us Indian women, we love our men!” and she cracked up right after saying it. This was a fun video to make, and I got to live in Winnipeg for six weeks and hog time at Video Pool, I even got the building code. You know you’re a somebody when you get the building code.

This is what I was basing it on from my youth in the 80’s, along with the original by Lewis Carroll. Honestly, I was projecting a lot when I was six. I didn’t even know this sequence was originally about mathematics.

Mars the Red Planet

Performance at Grunt 2000. I was a neo colonialist captain taking a doomed mission of youth group volunteers to colonize our new land claims settlement on Mars. I was mostly into wearing the costume.

You can find a clip here at the Grunt Archives

My performances make me shy, I was kind of a reluctant performance artist. Doing it alone seemed easier, as with many things in life.

More youtube

Margaret Cho makes me happy. Here she is talking about tokenization.

Mame Project #001
I don’t know what it is about the film Auntie Mame. It’s my Christmas time film. Anyway, this is some one’s interpretation of it. Her sales book is a shambles!