Propaganda is a series of canvases and drawings in which I use texts based on psychological warfare published by the Pentagon to explore the manipulation of information that surrounds us.
The texts are overlapping, erased, covered, hidden, scratched, on paper and on blackout fabric. The blackout fabric is a reference to the idea of light as truth in Plato’s myth of the cave. The treatment, or mistreatment, of the texts reflects the manipulation process of words in propaganda. Some of the propaganda techniques that I have embodied visually are prevarication, equivocal or ambiguous expression, saturation of data, misplaced emphasis, omission, censorship, arbitrary association and information taken out of context.
The propaganda techniques that I use come from Propaganda Techniques, based on Appendix I: PSYOP Techniques from Psychological Operations Field Manual no. 33-1, published by the Pentagon in August 1979.
If you would like to find out more about why I started to do work on propaganda you can read Consumerism as a diversion from politics. On how Bernays, Freud’s nephew, invented marketing as a reaction to fascism.
Other work inspired by propaganda:
- The book of madness, an exploration of the art of the insane.
- You, fascist (or the holy trinity of manipulation) on how religion, institutions and the repression of sexuality create people who are easy to manipulate.
- Essence Existence, about how Aristotle’s ideas would have been lost without Arabic translations.
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