Iono Allen has made a beautiful and evocative machinima for my "State of Mind" installation. He has captured the rising tension and the feeling of suffocating in information which is an integral part of the installation. His use of the sound materials is masterfully supportive of the visuals; Iono has truly listened to State of Mind and realized it in this most perfect machinima. Please go to see it and let Iono know what a great job he's done and what a beautiful piece of work the machinima is in its' own right.
UPDATE: Iono's machinima made the swedish blogs! Yay!
And thanks to
Apollo Manga's Second Life Examiner review
Soror Nishi's blog
Further meditations on State of Mind
Yes, there is a lot of information in State of Mind. There are cross-connections between small, seemingly-isolated events, laws and trends. It takes a lot of time to understand these connections, these trends.
I am a researcher; a librarian; a datamouse. I understand the amount of time it takes to be current and to follow these issues. Too much for most people, who have a life to be involved in.
I keep up with these issues. When you try to talk to people about them, about what they mean to their lives; about what is really going on and how it does and will affect their free choice (like their choice and availability of music, movies, artworks and internet service) they think you paranoid.
That is why I needed to lay out State of Mind for my own mental health. I read perhaps 2-4 hrs. a day on the technical aspects of these issues, from technical forums; how the technology isn't secure; how it doesn't work as advertised, how it is misused by corporations to profile, how the idea of the "infallibility of computers" is used to disguise and cover an astonishingly large rate of failure/false positives...
We call it security theatre in the profession; in discussions among the people who actually install, set up and program these things. This is not "armchair philosophy" or politics. All of this... "think of the children" stuff is straight propaganda and deliberate manipulation and falsification of information.
Why It Matters
I live on the net. Anyone reading this is involved with the net and with information. These issues concern us all; our freedom to read and write our thoughts, and our freedom to think our own thoughts; our freedom to access information and make up our own minds, which is the foundation stone of democracy and freedom.
Orwell's Ministry of Truth or Brazil's bureaucratic, totalitarian government did not NEED to monitor every single person's thoughts; it was enough to influence them to monitor and censor their own thoughts. The point of propaganda is self-censorship and self-editing. It is a much simpler, easier and cost-effective way to control people than guns, bars, walls, barbed wire or Men In Black. You can rule great masses of people (take a look at China, South Korea and so on and etc) with much less trouble and effort, only needing your
Yes, it is more comfortable to turn the mind away from these issues; it's much more comfortable to believe waterboarding is the equivalent of a "college hazing" than it is to actually view the uncensored photographs and material from Abu Ghraib. It's a lot easier to believe that these measures supposedly being introduced to keep you and your children safe are real efforts to protect you when in fact they are lies, mistruths and propaganda.
Thanks to the modern internet, we have access to a lot of information (although there is a debate current now that the positive glut of non-vetted and unverified information is a device to to hide by obscurity and overwhelming data; the Purloined Letter trick). It takes time and effort to research, as it always has, and to gather the information one needs to be able to have an understanding of these crucial and critical issues and make an informed judgement. It's just so... time-consuming! What's a mother to do?!?!
And yet... people will spend a great deal of time and effort puzzling out clues to the just-as-involved plotlines of television shows like "Lost," "Heroes" and their favorite soap opera than the actual, real things happening around them which affect their daily lives.
Such is the State of my Mind these days. I am not alone, and I am in distinguished company; that of Thomas Jefferson, Shulamith Firestone, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin and many others who have given their time, effort and work so that I may enjoy the freedoms I have today (for now).
The links, the propaganda and the answering arguments and statistics are all in the installation. Laid out physically, with real links to verified documents, I am comforted in knowing that I am not paranoid. We were warned by Orwell and many others. The linkages and trends are real and happening now.
The STATE is now the Corporatocracy; the Plutocracy. Government is a brand; the flags are only advertising logos.
Since last March, the US vote can now be bought. The Disney machine continues to destroy and lock up our common cultural heritage by distorting and manipulating copyright for its own gluttony. Laws are being twisted to spy on schoolchildren in the name of protecting them; the drumbeat of fear is being used to encourage submission to the profiteers.
Our personal data is bought and sold without our knowledge and consent; banks entrusted with that information treat it with less security than you treat your car keys, and place the blame and expense on their customers, which results in cost to you for their lax and cavalier handling of your security... if they don't outright sell it to anyone for 35$USD (yes... google a bit; you'll find many such offers from these supposedly-legitimate banks).
Yet we let it go on. You trust people you shouldn't trust and give them your freedoms inch by inch. A little research would show you the truth, or at least enough information to make up your own mind about these issues.
I did State of Mind so I wouldn't start screaming.
