A Specific Experience of an Abnormal Meaningfulness:
Cyberspace Conspiracy and Performativity in the work of Robert Sloon
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Darth Vader, Lee Harvey Oswald, Bouvet Island, zombies, the Angolan War, James Bond and letters between the “Swaartklip Twaalf”. In 1958 Klaus Conrad defined ‘apophenia’ as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness" (Conrad 1958 [2008]: Online); a form of paranoia that ascribes meaningful links between pieces of visual, literary, historical or personal information where objectively there are none. Robert Sloon (or, rather, his corporeal Other) was born on the same day that Umkhonto we Siswe blew up the unfinished reactor at Koeberg Station. (This bombing caused R500 million damages and set back the construction fof the plant by 18 months. It remains almost invisible in the public imagination.)
You know, who's running the show? Well, nobody. That's why conspiracy theories are so popular. Conspiracy theories are big because they're comforting. Any conspiracy is infinitely less multiplex than the real deal, which is sort of multiplex to the point of being unknowable (Gibson in Gibson & Darling 2000: Online).
Conspiracy theories have become contemporary popular culture’s way of filtering global events, political unrest and economic tensions. Although conspiracy has been an important mode of understanding the world since the 1960s, the democracy of information that defines the post-millennial age allows every conspiracy theorist the opportunity to share her videos, discuss her postulations and shout off of her globally accessible soapbox. It was the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the unprecedented public dissent directed towards the official version of events that launched conspiracy theory into the public and academic imagination. Today you can play JFK Reloaded, a free downloadable game, which aims "to establish the most likely facts of what happened on November 22, 1963 by running the world’s first mass-participation forensic construction" (Ewing 2004: Online), the theory being that a player could help prove that Lee Harvey Oswald had the "means and the opportunity to commit the crime" (Ibid.) and thus help disclaim or, if a recreation of the events of the Warren Commission prove impossible, support conspiracy theories about the event.
Certainly there is no better (non)place than the “consensual hallucination” (Gibson 1984: 69) of cyberspace in which to convince individuals of the non-validity of hegemonic truths, and the truths of (quite often invalid) individual’s postulations on subjects ranging from AIDS (that HIV was developed by scientists working for the US government) to aliens and 9/11 (countless, including that the destruction was a controlled demolition). More than present a platform to disseminate
(mis)information, cyberspace has made conspiracy interactive, where millions of operators mesh their theories, paranoia, individually infinite apophenias into a web of linked narratives, a psychotic join-the-dots between universes of stars, many of whom long dead.
Robert Sloon’s Work in Progress blog tells us of the ‘mothman’ conspiracy (April 14 2009), in which sightings of a giant winged man appear en masse to foreshadow catastrophic events, from the collapse of the Silver Bridge over the Ohio River in 1967, to Chernobyl and 9/11. Later a post appears entitled The Other Side (June 15 2009), the post begins, “after the bridge at Xangongo collapsed, no one from the 1-Recces saw “die Mot” again” (Sloon 2009: Online) and tells of sightings of the mothman (or ‘Die Mot’) during the South African involvement in Angola. The Other Side is, in fact, a short story written by Sloon; situating the mothman prophecies within our own nefarious local history. Similarly, after telling us of the Majestic 12 on the blog (June 10 2009), Sloon presents The Swaartklip Twaalf on ‘Syndrome’, a fictional letter between PW Botha and General Magnus Malan detailing secretive UFO activity in South Africa. Presented within the same contextual framework as evidence from ‘real’ conspiracies, these pieces make visible the layers of fiction and history that construct theories and truths, particularly in cyberspace. More than that, these pieces and The Battle of Simonstown newspapers suggest that even as he fictionalises Sloon is grasping for the real, a finite moment in time and space where events may or may not have happened. In recontextualising conspiracies within a South African context, Sloon reveals not only elements of our shady histories, but also shows us a piece of himself – alive in the internet, but born (as mentioned, on the day of the Koeberg bombings) in South Africa.
Philosopher Daniel Dennett says in his 2006 book, Breaking the Spell, “Humans are creatures that crave to find order and meaning in their environment. Not only do we want to find meaning in our surroundings, but we need to do this (Hubscher 2007: Online).
Conspiracy theories are comforting firstly, as Gibson suggests, because they protect us from the truth, and secondly because it is in the apophenic discovering of links, the construction of meaning and the search for portentous signs and symbols that we create our own identity. Subjectivity in cyberspace is a particularly tricky terrain. While Case, the lead character in Gibson’s Neuromancer may find freedom in independence from his own physical, clumsy and damaged body, privileging cyberspace over real environments, it is also constantly stressed that his subjectivity is intrinsically linked to his physical body. “Despite the appeal of this fantasy, the body is continually shown as an inescapable part of Case’s subjectivity and the actual condition of being without a body is shown as an absence of subjectivity. In fact Gibson himself has said that he dislikes critics who praise his novel for being ‘hard and glossy’ when ‘what I’m talking about is what being hard and glossy does to you’” (Vint 2007: 109). Cyberspace is unparalleled in the freedom it provides to construct identities that are heedless of the meaty baggage of the body, but it is also a hard, glossy and terrifying place, imbued with a sublime vastness where individual unease is inescapable. The paranoia of the digital age is defined by “anxiety about boundaries and borders; voyeuristic fears and caffeinated ambitions about power, love, sex, nature, and nuclear holocaust in the hands of machines; and the real-life on-line experience of disembodiment and abstraction from geographical space and real time” (Edwards 1995: 82).
Sloon has been hard and glossy for some time, as the slick fiery dice on his infamous art blog, ArtHeat (www.artheat.net), will testify. Perhaps it is this intense anxiety that has caused Robert to recently uncover himself, show his real live body to the world. In the latest issue of Art South Africa (Issue 7.4) Robert Sloon stands dripping wet in the sea, wearing sunglasses and wielding a crossbow. Looking out of the photograph, this is the first time that we have been allowed to view his face in public. Constructed as a pseudonym (an approximate anagram of ‘born to lose’) with which to author both his online criticism and his artwork, Sloon’s identity is now freely available to the public, the face of his mild-mannered alter ego finally unobscured. We are told, rather disquietingly, in this article that Sloon is in fact someone else, however, while Sloon’s (or his other’s) face is indeed visible in a number of works on Syndrome he always remains masked: And it is the masks, the pseudonyms, the ever increasing alter egos, that reveal the fragile positioning of both Sloon and his real-life counterpart.
[…]the fact remains that in cyberspace we could pass through as anyone we ever wanted to be. This is one of the most spectacular novelties emerging from the new technologies, that the possibility to travel in cyberspace taking up any identity/persona one ever wanted to have, defying all physical boundaries set by real life, with no other limitation but one’s fantasy (Boudourides & Drakou 2008: Online).
The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense - a 'final' irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the 'West's' escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space (Haraway 1991: 150 – 151).
Cyberspace makes identity unstable, unsure, and undefined and gender remains, perhaps now more than ever, one of the cornerstones of individual and cultural identity. Although the logic system of the world wide web may be said to echo male-defined masculinity, the multiplicity, multi-tasking and infinite truths and fictions of cyberspace are threatening to the singular male ego. In The Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway asserts that cyberspace creates a virtual eunuch, an insecure floating subjectivity. Sloon, however, takes the position famously asserted by Judith Butler, that gender is inherently performative and that, despite Haraway’s assertion, performance and performativity allow for an assertion of gender, of identity, a way of holding on to subjectivity in the digital age.
In ‘Syndrome’, Sloon literally performs his gender, taking on the roles of famously male men from history and fiction. Darth Vader is looming behind Robert Sloon in an albumen print. In another, Sloon is exuding an ectoplasmic materialisation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in yet another he re-enacts James Bond’s most tragic moments. The ultimate anti-hero father figure, the alcoholic spiritualist who wrote the world’s most famous rational detective and the sexy and sexist (though here very sad) international man of mystery all grace the walls of Sloon’s exhibition. And though Sloon is clearly engaged in issues of masculinity (as the zombies and characters from Alien vs. Predator surely attest to), there is something very fractured, unsure and anxious about Sloon’s male role-models who the artist self-consciously presents as broken, insane and evil.
The roles of these men vary according to the work: The misguided Sir Arthur Conan Doyle appears, disturbingly, at his psychic call in The Medium Robert Sloon Exuding an Ectoplasmic Materialisation of Arthur Conan Doyle. Darth Vader looms ominously in the accompanying albumen print Death Star. In You Only Live Twice Sloon positions himself as James Bond, seen here in the inevitable drunken stupor caused by all the drinks consumed by the hero in the novel from which the piece is named. In In a Glass, Very Darkly the viewer is encouraged to take this position, agreeing to drink a bottle of expensive champagne, so long as she agrees to sit and drink it alone, without speaking to anyone, and then leave the gallery on completion, also alone. Most poignant in its demonstration of a wounded masculine identity, as well as a pertinent example of Sloon’s obsession with fiction versus reality is the first Bond piece, The World Is Not Enough, in which a bookmark is placed in a first edition of the novel, stating:
In October 1962, Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli released Dr. No. James Bond, already a legend from the novels, was set to become the West’s favourite conqueror of battles both feminine and political. The film produced one of the iconic images of the Sixties: Ursula Andress, playing Honey Ryder, emerging from the sea, garbed only in a tiny white bikini and a knife.
In April of the following year, Ian Fleming wrote the 11th James Bond book, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. This novel is perhaps the most tragic of all Fleming’s creations. James Bond, the incurable bachelor, falls in love and marries the damaged but beautiful Tracy. Driving away to honeymoon in Tracy’s Lancia Flaminia Zagato Spyder they encouter Bond’s arch-enemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld. In an act of bitter revenge, Blofeld fires wildly into the car, killing Tracy and leaving Bond distraught, whispering, “We have all the time in the world,” into her lifeless ear. Bond is unable to progress, ultimately doomed to continually live a circular life.
It is also noticeable as the first time reality started to collapse in on itself. High up in an Alpine ski lodge, Ursula Andress amongst the lodge’s affluent guests is pointed out to Bond.
Appropriately, earlier in the novel Bond is told that his family motto is “The World Is Not Enough.”
In Watching the Detectives Sloon looks out of his window, a collection of seemingly significant objects on his desk, watching something outside of both his office and the picture frame. Like Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, this is a moment without a narrative, a sign without a referent. There are no answers and no finite explanations for this work. Much like the detective pictured, the viewer is constantly looking for clues within the photograph, within Syndrome, and to understand the ever-elusive (though now visible) character of Robert Sloon.
REFERENCES:
Boudourides, M. & Drakou, E. @ Cyberspace. 2000. Online. Available: http://www.math.upatras.gr/~mboudour/articles/gender@cyberspace.html. (16.06.09)
Darling, P. & Gibson, G. 2000. Sandpapering the conscious mind with William Gibson in ‘Science Fiction Weekly’ Feb. 7, 2000, issue 146, Vol. 6, No. 6. Online. Available: http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue146/interview.htmlb (16.06.09)
Edwards, P.M. 1995. Cyberpunks in Cyberspace: The Politics of Subjectivity in the Computer Age in Star, S.L (ed.) 1995. ‘Cultures of Computing’ UK: Sociological Review and Monograph Series. (69-84)
Haraway, D. 1991. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century in ‘Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature’. New York; Routledge.
Hubscher, S. L. 2007. Introduction to Apophenia in ‘Digital Bits Skeptic’ 2007 November 4. Online. Available: http://www.dbskeptic.com/2007/11/04/apophenia-definition-and-analysis/. (16.06.09)
Vint, S. 2007. Bodies of tomorrow: technology, subjectivity, science fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Go Back to Robert Sloon|Text
Cyberspace Conspiracy and Performativity in the work of Robert Sloon
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Darth Vader, Lee Harvey Oswald, Bouvet Island, zombies, the Angolan War, James Bond and letters between the “Swaartklip Twaalf”. In 1958 Klaus Conrad defined ‘apophenia’ as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness" (Conrad 1958 [2008]: Online); a form of paranoia that ascribes meaningful links between pieces of visual, literary, historical or personal information where objectively there are none. Robert Sloon (or, rather, his corporeal Other) was born on the same day that Umkhonto we Siswe blew up the unfinished reactor at Koeberg Station. (This bombing caused R500 million damages and set back the construction fof the plant by 18 months. It remains almost invisible in the public imagination.)
You know, who's running the show? Well, nobody. That's why conspiracy theories are so popular. Conspiracy theories are big because they're comforting. Any conspiracy is infinitely less multiplex than the real deal, which is sort of multiplex to the point of being unknowable (Gibson in Gibson & Darling 2000: Online).
Conspiracy theories have become contemporary popular culture’s way of filtering global events, political unrest and economic tensions. Although conspiracy has been an important mode of understanding the world since the 1960s, the democracy of information that defines the post-millennial age allows every conspiracy theorist the opportunity to share her videos, discuss her postulations and shout off of her globally accessible soapbox. It was the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the unprecedented public dissent directed towards the official version of events that launched conspiracy theory into the public and academic imagination. Today you can play JFK Reloaded, a free downloadable game, which aims "to establish the most likely facts of what happened on November 22, 1963 by running the world’s first mass-participation forensic construction" (Ewing 2004: Online), the theory being that a player could help prove that Lee Harvey Oswald had the "means and the opportunity to commit the crime" (Ibid.) and thus help disclaim or, if a recreation of the events of the Warren Commission prove impossible, support conspiracy theories about the event.
Certainly there is no better (non)place than the “consensual hallucination” (Gibson 1984: 69) of cyberspace in which to convince individuals of the non-validity of hegemonic truths, and the truths of (quite often invalid) individual’s postulations on subjects ranging from AIDS (that HIV was developed by scientists working for the US government) to aliens and 9/11 (countless, including that the destruction was a controlled demolition). More than present a platform to disseminate
(mis)information, cyberspace has made conspiracy interactive, where millions of operators mesh their theories, paranoia, individually infinite apophenias into a web of linked narratives, a psychotic join-the-dots between universes of stars, many of whom long dead.
Robert Sloon’s Work in Progress blog tells us of the ‘mothman’ conspiracy (April 14 2009), in which sightings of a giant winged man appear en masse to foreshadow catastrophic events, from the collapse of the Silver Bridge over the Ohio River in 1967, to Chernobyl and 9/11. Later a post appears entitled The Other Side (June 15 2009), the post begins, “after the bridge at Xangongo collapsed, no one from the 1-Recces saw “die Mot” again” (Sloon 2009: Online) and tells of sightings of the mothman (or ‘Die Mot’) during the South African involvement in Angola. The Other Side is, in fact, a short story written by Sloon; situating the mothman prophecies within our own nefarious local history. Similarly, after telling us of the Majestic 12 on the blog (June 10 2009), Sloon presents The Swaartklip Twaalf on ‘Syndrome’, a fictional letter between PW Botha and General Magnus Malan detailing secretive UFO activity in South Africa. Presented within the same contextual framework as evidence from ‘real’ conspiracies, these pieces make visible the layers of fiction and history that construct theories and truths, particularly in cyberspace. More than that, these pieces and The Battle of Simonstown newspapers suggest that even as he fictionalises Sloon is grasping for the real, a finite moment in time and space where events may or may not have happened. In recontextualising conspiracies within a South African context, Sloon reveals not only elements of our shady histories, but also shows us a piece of himself – alive in the internet, but born (as mentioned, on the day of the Koeberg bombings) in South Africa.
Philosopher Daniel Dennett says in his 2006 book, Breaking the Spell, “Humans are creatures that crave to find order and meaning in their environment. Not only do we want to find meaning in our surroundings, but we need to do this (Hubscher 2007: Online).
Conspiracy theories are comforting firstly, as Gibson suggests, because they protect us from the truth, and secondly because it is in the apophenic discovering of links, the construction of meaning and the search for portentous signs and symbols that we create our own identity. Subjectivity in cyberspace is a particularly tricky terrain. While Case, the lead character in Gibson’s Neuromancer may find freedom in independence from his own physical, clumsy and damaged body, privileging cyberspace over real environments, it is also constantly stressed that his subjectivity is intrinsically linked to his physical body. “Despite the appeal of this fantasy, the body is continually shown as an inescapable part of Case’s subjectivity and the actual condition of being without a body is shown as an absence of subjectivity. In fact Gibson himself has said that he dislikes critics who praise his novel for being ‘hard and glossy’ when ‘what I’m talking about is what being hard and glossy does to you’” (Vint 2007: 109). Cyberspace is unparalleled in the freedom it provides to construct identities that are heedless of the meaty baggage of the body, but it is also a hard, glossy and terrifying place, imbued with a sublime vastness where individual unease is inescapable. The paranoia of the digital age is defined by “anxiety about boundaries and borders; voyeuristic fears and caffeinated ambitions about power, love, sex, nature, and nuclear holocaust in the hands of machines; and the real-life on-line experience of disembodiment and abstraction from geographical space and real time” (Edwards 1995: 82).
Sloon has been hard and glossy for some time, as the slick fiery dice on his infamous art blog, ArtHeat (www.artheat.net), will testify. Perhaps it is this intense anxiety that has caused Robert to recently uncover himself, show his real live body to the world. In the latest issue of Art South Africa (Issue 7.4) Robert Sloon stands dripping wet in the sea, wearing sunglasses and wielding a crossbow. Looking out of the photograph, this is the first time that we have been allowed to view his face in public. Constructed as a pseudonym (an approximate anagram of ‘born to lose’) with which to author both his online criticism and his artwork, Sloon’s identity is now freely available to the public, the face of his mild-mannered alter ego finally unobscured. We are told, rather disquietingly, in this article that Sloon is in fact someone else, however, while Sloon’s (or his other’s) face is indeed visible in a number of works on Syndrome he always remains masked: And it is the masks, the pseudonyms, the ever increasing alter egos, that reveal the fragile positioning of both Sloon and his real-life counterpart.
[…]the fact remains that in cyberspace we could pass through as anyone we ever wanted to be. This is one of the most spectacular novelties emerging from the new technologies, that the possibility to travel in cyberspace taking up any identity/persona one ever wanted to have, defying all physical boundaries set by real life, with no other limitation but one’s fantasy (Boudourides & Drakou 2008: Online).
The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense - a 'final' irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the 'West's' escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space (Haraway 1991: 150 – 151).
Cyberspace makes identity unstable, unsure, and undefined and gender remains, perhaps now more than ever, one of the cornerstones of individual and cultural identity. Although the logic system of the world wide web may be said to echo male-defined masculinity, the multiplicity, multi-tasking and infinite truths and fictions of cyberspace are threatening to the singular male ego. In The Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway asserts that cyberspace creates a virtual eunuch, an insecure floating subjectivity. Sloon, however, takes the position famously asserted by Judith Butler, that gender is inherently performative and that, despite Haraway’s assertion, performance and performativity allow for an assertion of gender, of identity, a way of holding on to subjectivity in the digital age.
In ‘Syndrome’, Sloon literally performs his gender, taking on the roles of famously male men from history and fiction. Darth Vader is looming behind Robert Sloon in an albumen print. In another, Sloon is exuding an ectoplasmic materialisation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in yet another he re-enacts James Bond’s most tragic moments. The ultimate anti-hero father figure, the alcoholic spiritualist who wrote the world’s most famous rational detective and the sexy and sexist (though here very sad) international man of mystery all grace the walls of Sloon’s exhibition. And though Sloon is clearly engaged in issues of masculinity (as the zombies and characters from Alien vs. Predator surely attest to), there is something very fractured, unsure and anxious about Sloon’s male role-models who the artist self-consciously presents as broken, insane and evil.
The roles of these men vary according to the work: The misguided Sir Arthur Conan Doyle appears, disturbingly, at his psychic call in The Medium Robert Sloon Exuding an Ectoplasmic Materialisation of Arthur Conan Doyle. Darth Vader looms ominously in the accompanying albumen print Death Star. In You Only Live Twice Sloon positions himself as James Bond, seen here in the inevitable drunken stupor caused by all the drinks consumed by the hero in the novel from which the piece is named. In In a Glass, Very Darkly the viewer is encouraged to take this position, agreeing to drink a bottle of expensive champagne, so long as she agrees to sit and drink it alone, without speaking to anyone, and then leave the gallery on completion, also alone. Most poignant in its demonstration of a wounded masculine identity, as well as a pertinent example of Sloon’s obsession with fiction versus reality is the first Bond piece, The World Is Not Enough, in which a bookmark is placed in a first edition of the novel, stating:
In October 1962, Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli released Dr. No. James Bond, already a legend from the novels, was set to become the West’s favourite conqueror of battles both feminine and political. The film produced one of the iconic images of the Sixties: Ursula Andress, playing Honey Ryder, emerging from the sea, garbed only in a tiny white bikini and a knife.
In April of the following year, Ian Fleming wrote the 11th James Bond book, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. This novel is perhaps the most tragic of all Fleming’s creations. James Bond, the incurable bachelor, falls in love and marries the damaged but beautiful Tracy. Driving away to honeymoon in Tracy’s Lancia Flaminia Zagato Spyder they encouter Bond’s arch-enemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld. In an act of bitter revenge, Blofeld fires wildly into the car, killing Tracy and leaving Bond distraught, whispering, “We have all the time in the world,” into her lifeless ear. Bond is unable to progress, ultimately doomed to continually live a circular life.
It is also noticeable as the first time reality started to collapse in on itself. High up in an Alpine ski lodge, Ursula Andress amongst the lodge’s affluent guests is pointed out to Bond.
Appropriately, earlier in the novel Bond is told that his family motto is “The World Is Not Enough.”
In Watching the Detectives Sloon looks out of his window, a collection of seemingly significant objects on his desk, watching something outside of both his office and the picture frame. Like Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, this is a moment without a narrative, a sign without a referent. There are no answers and no finite explanations for this work. Much like the detective pictured, the viewer is constantly looking for clues within the photograph, within Syndrome, and to understand the ever-elusive (though now visible) character of Robert Sloon.
REFERENCES:
Boudourides, M. & Drakou, E. @ Cyberspace. 2000. Online. Available: http://www.math.upatras.gr/~mboudour/articles/gender@cyberspace.html. (16.06.09)
Darling, P. & Gibson, G. 2000. Sandpapering the conscious mind with William Gibson in ‘Science Fiction Weekly’ Feb. 7, 2000, issue 146, Vol. 6, No. 6. Online. Available: http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue146/interview.htmlb (16.06.09)
Edwards, P.M. 1995. Cyberpunks in Cyberspace: The Politics of Subjectivity in the Computer Age in Star, S.L (ed.) 1995. ‘Cultures of Computing’ UK: Sociological Review and Monograph Series. (69-84)
Haraway, D. 1991. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century in ‘Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature’. New York; Routledge.
Hubscher, S. L. 2007. Introduction to Apophenia in ‘Digital Bits Skeptic’ 2007 November 4. Online. Available: http://www.dbskeptic.com/2007/11/04/apophenia-definition-and-analysis/. (16.06.09)
Vint, S. 2007. Bodies of tomorrow: technology, subjectivity, science fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Go Back to Robert Sloon|Text
