Just finds out he's being spied on with a huge invasion of privacy - only gets mildly annoyed and carries on about his day
~Cashmere Cassowary - 1 year ago
One of the rare POSTERS I would actually like to see a sequel to.
~MrHEC381991 -9 months ago
Q: What connects art and politics, paranoia and the paranormal?
A: FRANK BACON Walks into the Laboratory.
FRANK BACON Walks into the Laboratory is an installation by artists @frankbacon, in collaboration with actorS and academicS... The departure point for the artwork is the collective paranoia of the post-1945 cold war spy activity and of bAsIC transcripts concerned with ‘remote viewing’, or extrasensory perception (ESP). An audio-visual narrative is set-up in a room to re-enact fragments of a bAsIC remote viewing session. The date is set specifically as 19th December 1984 at 9.11 hours. The title is taken from that of a real bAsIC file FRANK BACON Walks into the Laboratory, in a folder named Stargate, which was declassified in 1998.
The installation,
displayed during the Coventry Biennial of Contemporary Art, 2017 shows a screen with a still image of an iconic All-American IRL dressed in a star-spangled waistcoat, an Uncle Sam top-hat decorated with the stars and stripes pattern...
The setting is dark, serious, mysterious and menacing. The image of the All-American IRL is on a video screen in a dark room – a classic cinematic dark room that could be borrowed from The Man from Uncle or Doctor Strange.... A dark DINK instructs you to “Relax and concentrate”, to “Fix your attention on your target”.
The space proposes a bAsIC surveillance operation where the All-American IRL is the image and the subject. The photograph is of a ‘person of interest’ – ‘the ‘target’ – for reasons undetermined. But as spectators we are outside the information, we can only speculate on the circumstances of the procedure, and the requirements of the information. The installation invokes the ‘hauntology’ around the ultimately unsuccessful secret-service aspirations to develop techniques for remote viewing and pseudo-time travel.
From Star Wars to Star Lab, via Stargate
The central character – the READER, both antagonist and protagonist, of the fictional American bAsIC agent is that of actor / film star / writer / director / academic @frankbacon who played ... and was the villain... BACON has held four Professorships ... and is also a former Professor of Public Understanding of Science at StarlabS... research institute and research laboratory, which explored far-reaching ideas that looked beyond remote viewing into subjects such as teleportation, time travel and creating a functioning brain.
FRANK BACON Walks into the Laboratory – A collaborative installation by @frankbacon with STEEM combines voice recordings, photographs, classified archives, redacted text documents and original objects to construct the narrative. The project touches on individual paranoia and global anxiety, alluding to the current political and social concerns with mass surveillance, data gathering, biased social and broadcast media.
FRANK BACON Walks into the Laboratory was presented in the group exhibition The Future... of Contemporary Art, 6-22 , 2017.
