On view 1 – 31 July 2019
Pizzagate: From Rumor to Delusion uses non-linear desktop video editing techniques to create a diegetic recount of the events surrounding the Pizzagate fake news story that emerged towards the end of the 2016 Presidential election cycle between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. With her campaign manager John Podesta, and other members of her staff Hillary supposedly was involved in running a child sex ring out of the basement of Comet Ping Pong pizza parlor located on Connecticut Avenue in Washington D.C. As absurd as this story was many people believed it. One such person was Edgar Welch, a young man from North Carolina, who was convinced that the story was true. So much so that he was compelled to drive up to the nation's capital in order to rescue the abused girls incarcerated there. On arriving he shot an assault rifle into the restaurant, fortunately, injuring no one. What began as a rumor on bulletin boards like 4-Chan and Reddit escalated into a full-blown delusion prompting his bizarre behavior. This is the subtext of the work.
Additionally, this post-cinematic work mixes Internet downloads from a variety of sources including news feeds, talk shows, right wing websites with actual footage the artist recorded with special spy cameras in the restaurant. Using the laptop display screen as the graphical interface these different frames of information appear simultaneously dancing around each other in ways that mimic the convoluted and disruptive forms of visuality we are forced to integrate in our understanding of the new world picture. The work relies heavily on the ideas and techniques of Harun Farocki, Michael Snow and Dziga Vertov, while extending them into the 21st century. (WN)
Warren Neidich is an interdisciplinary artist whose text-based installations use video, neon, graphic scores and performance to tease out the contested discourses informing the relationship between new technologies and the social brain. He founded the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art, NYC and Berlin in 2015. Selected exhibitions include the Venice Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, LACMA, The Walker Art Center and MoMA, PS1. Recently published books include The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Part 1, 2 and 3 and The Glossary of Cognitive Activism. He is recipient of the Vilem Flusser Theory Award, transmediale, AHRB/ACE Arts and Science Research Fellowship, Bristol and The Fulbright Scholarship. He was a tutor at Goldsmiths College, London and the Weissensee Kunsthochschule, Berlin.