TREVOR PAGLEN, "YOU'VE BEEN F*CKED BY PSYOPS: UFOS, MAGIC, MIND CONTROL, ELECTRONIC WARFARE, AND THE FUTURE OF MEDIA"

TREVOR PAGLEN
You’ve Just Been F*cked by PSYOPS:
UFOs, Magic, Mind Control, Electronic Warfare, and the Future of Media
Lecture-performance
Followed by conversation with artist Joshua Citarella
Thursday, October 24th, 2024, from 7:00 to 8:30 pm
e-flux Screening Room, 172 Classon Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11205

Free admission: Please RSVP

Protocinema and Art21, in partnership with e-flux Screening Room, present “You’ve Just Been F*cked by PSYOPS,” a lecture-performance by Trevor Paglen followed by a conversation with artist Joshua Citarella. The event coincides with Paglen’s essay “Society of the Psyop,” being published in three parts this fall by e-flux Journal. This collaboration brings together three organizations with long relationships to the artist and aligned dedication to critical reflections on art and politics.

With AI-generated content, social media influence operations, micro-targeted advertising, and ubiquitous surveillance becoming the dominant form of visual culture, we have entered an era of PSYOP capitalism. This era is characterized by hallucinations and manipulations intended to influence our senses, perceptions, and beliefs. This talk delves into the history of secret military, intelligence, and technology programs that have paved the way for our increasingly strange present.

Trevor Paglen is an artist whose work spans image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines. Paglen’s work has had one-person exhibitions at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington D.C.; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Fondazione Prada, Milan; the Barbican Centre, London; Vienna Secession, Vienna; and Protocinema Istanbul, and participated in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, and numerous other venues.

Joshua Citarella is an artist, educator, and internet culture writer. He is a professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. He is the author of Politigram & the Post-left (2018). He is the host of the eponymous podcast and newsletter on Substack which examines the internet, extremely online politics, social media platforms, geopolitics, conspiracy theories, and fitness & health. He is the founder and director of Do Not Research, a non-profit arts organization founded in 2020 and a lively community around writing, visual art, internet culture research and more.

Art21 is the world’s leading source to learn directly from the artists of our time. The mission of Art21 is to educate and expand access to contemporary art through the production of documentary films, resources, and public programs. See more at art21.org.

e-flux Screening Room focuses on the intersection of contemporary art and film. It is a space for exploring artists’ cinema, video art, and experimental film historically as well as through contemporary practices and theory, and through curated screenings, lectures, and symposia.

Protocinema is an itinerant cross-cultural art organization that commissions and presents site-aware art around the world. Its purpose is to support dialogue between cultures on equal footing and create opportunities for listening and expression. Protocinema works towards an understanding of difference across regions through its exhibitions, commissions, public programs, screening tours, mentorship, the Protocinema Emerging Curator Series (PECS), and Protodispatch, a monthly digital publication edited with Laura Raicovich. Protocinema was founded in 2011 by Mari Spirito. See more at Protocinema.org.

Press inquiries: Sidian Liu sidian@protocinema.org or Mari Spirito mari@protocinema.org, +1 917 660 7332

Emma Nordin emma@art21.org, Lauren Lee lauren@e-flux.com