Saturday, 19 May 2007

Hexen 2039 : new military-occult technologies for psychological warfare: a Rosalind Brodsky research programme




“Owing to factors such as shifts in the balance of power…..and new models of warfare, the twenty-first century is increasingly becoming a period of uncertainty.

Our programme involves the testing and analysis of existing occult-based research in connection with military histories, in order to develop accurate neurological-based technologies for the new British military-occult industries.”

a tour de force of paranoid futurism: except of course that this is way, way more than paranoia, it is a study of the political and social geographies of a number of people, buildings and ideologies, and the associations between them. Rosalind Brodsky is a ‘fictionalised’ alter-ego of the artist Suzanne Treister, who investigates the links between military psy-ops, the occult, and media technologies. You might see this as science fiction, but as someone once said, science fiction is theory on fast forward.

This investigation is rendered through pencil drawings, alpha-numerical analysis of German and English texts via the Jewish mystical method of Gematria, remote viwing drawings utilising Dr John Dee’s scrying crystal from the science museum, London (John Dee was the ‘Queen’s Intelligencier’ to Elizabeth I and a close associate of the founder of the British Secret Service, Sir Francis Walsingham).
There are also a number of drawings relating the links between the individuals, locations and events and histories collated by the Hexen project, and the book contains a number of photographs of key locations analysed within the project, for example of the current broadcasting tower at Brocken, Germany, which adds a kind of emotional gravity to the book, as if to confirm that its not all at phantasy. Anyway, I liked the effects of the contrasts between the pencil images and photographs. There is also an in-depth essay by Richard Grayson, which outlines in greater depth some of the connections and examines Treister’s practise in detail.

You might still doubt the vision of this project, but if you go to Kode_9’s blog you will see a brief documentation of the advancing technology of audio warfare। There is also ample wider evidence, for example Jon Ronson’s book ‘The Men Who Stare At Goats’ (Picador, 2004) or the use of sound in torture at Abu Graib prison Iraq, or that some psychiatrists are quite happy to pass electric currents through people’s brains, or that IBM technology was instrumental in the Holocaust. Triesters’ book is chilling, compelling phantasy.







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