Joseph Beuys Wire Tap, 1998
(Thegn Penrose, Digital, 2023)
this is a thing I made recently relating to Joseph Beuys, Shamanism, Alchemy, and some pseudo-spiritual ideas I have about the internet and its origins in telecom in the 1990s. I might make more related to this, but who knows. since I had a deadline for the project it isn't all I wanted it to be, but it allowed me to sperg out about Joseph Beuys to people in my class that didn't care, so that's alright. I'm especially interested in the belief that Terrence Mckenna had in technological singularity and the internet before he died. McKenna believed that a technological singularity would provide the redemption of the spirit through matter prophesied in the hermetic tradition. This belief seems very out of place now, but in the 1990s it was considered perfectly logical.
formally it draws heavily on La Jetee (you absolutely have to check it out if you haven't yet, it's only 30 minutes and available on youtube), and the work of janet cardiff. I'll probably make a post about her some day, because she's a really interesting artist. she mostly makes installations, but they focus a lot on sound and physical spaces, so I was thinking of her a lot when mixing the audio. her work is very creepy and interesting, but honestly, it can only be fully experienced in person.
all that you really need to know is that the text-to-speech program in this video is recounting Joseph Beuys' story of crashing in Crimea during World War II. he had been drafted into the Luftwaffe and ended up crashing, after which, according to him, he was taken in by nomadic Tatars, who nursed him back to life using animal fat and sheets of felt. this story is probably not literally true and was either made up as part of his self-myth or hallucinated. later, after the war was over he became an artist, and like a lot of his german contemporaries was consumed by guilt and an overriding postmodern fear that whatever trauma they had inflicted upon humanity would stifle all meaning in human life. he and other artists like Anselm Kiefer, (who, not at all coincidentally was also interested in alchemy) were terrified of the urge to forget and suppress the memory of the holocaust and believed that without proper healing no actual progress could be achieved.
he is known for his especially pessimistic work in the 1950s and 60s that focused on trauma, the dissolution of humans as living beings and subjects, and a fixation on Auchwitz. following this he leaned more into his belief in alchemy and felt that through his ritualistic practices, much like the tatars healed him, he could heal the large scale trauma in the world around him. his attitude at this time was very sincere and earnest, and was accompanied by a strong involvement in the West German anti-war and anti-nuclear movements. some people would see his early involvement with the Green Party, for instance, as out of character or wacky, but it actually fits beautifully within his belief that great art would accompany meaningful material change in the world.
anyway, I'm rambling. I will not get into my ideas about the early internet yet. some day.
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