It is a long-known fact that the entertainment industry is closely related to the military industrial complex. They work together on simulations, and Hollywood traditionally relies on cooperating with the Pentagon when it needs to depict past and future conflicts with the most authentic props possible. But, in addition to this business connection, the military is discovering a new aspect in cultural circles to be worthy of emulation:artists, who are imputed with networking abilities, improvisational skill and the capability to manage resources, are increasingly being taken as models for ideal soldiers. Levi-Strauss’s »bricoleur« as the extended arm of global security interests. The association GSA (Global Security Alliance), founded as part of the Munich »Ortstermine«, turns around this appropriation of artistic strategies, helping itself to the rhetoric and aesthetics of state and private security corporations in the best tradition of culture jamming.
Video screenings of various short films about different participants like Critical Art Ensemble and Frank Beauregard play with the new, »clean« image of global conflicts. The rhetoric of marketing becomes the update of an omnipresent, glossy, sabre-rattling. For example, Beauregard already sets the standard for the new aesthetic of a holistic, paranoid concept of security in the first part of his talk as security consultant: »The idea is simple: security aesthetics. The new image of safety in Europe. The new feeling of certainty at the cutting edge. Take the risk of existing with style in the chaos of the contemporary world!« As well as the progressive surface militarisation of the public sphere that was pointed out by Mark Terkessidis and Tom Holert in their book »Entsichert«, published in 2002, the other big topic of the GSA is the basic tendency towards networked paranoia and ontological conspiracy theories.
The Austrian media artist Konrad Becker presents the most telling contribution to this theme with his work »Black Helicopter Spotting«. Becker painted lifesized shadows of black Apache helicopters on the ground in twelve squares in Munich. Here, he uses the myth of the black helicopter, a recurrent image of state control, particularly in rightist militia circles in the USA, which, alongside the »Tin-foil-hat«, a hat made of aluminium foil which is said to protect people from mind control, is one of the most longstanding pillars in the jargon of conspiracy theorists opposed to the state. But Becker’ black helicopters seem more like a threat than a form of protection. They oscillate somewhere between prophetic visions in the sky and the flying eyes of a mysterious world government that controls everything. Fleeting shadows that, like the famous flying saucers, gain presence in the public awareness only by virtue of their permanent absence. One of the intentions of the work was unfortunately unable to be realised. Becker’s aim was to feed the images into the conspiracy cycle with the help of the end-user satellite service, Google Maps. But to all appearances, the black helicopeters have just missed the rather sluggish update cycle of the programme, thus manoeuvring themselves into a gap in awareness, which is likely to prevent heated discussions on the Net about the phenomenon, but also matches their character as ephemeral beings. The »continuation of war with artistic means«, as Becker himself says, has by no means reached its conclusion. The GSA still exists on the Net and as a potential platform for future actions in the border area between virtual wars and real aesthetics. It receives its sustenance from an economy of panic in whose wake paranoid schizophrenia turns from being a pathological state to become the constitutive, collective state of a society where increasing interconnection is always threatening to revert to a system of permanent, mutual surveillance.

http://www.global-security-alliance.com/

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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