WARNING: The International Apophenia Society

by bart plantenga

Apophenia is the tendency to misperceive connections & meanings between unrelated things; a disorder exacerbated by our times, by social media, by our perceived lack of agency, & by our devastating conviction that over-consumption comes with no environmental consequences.

I came across artist Alisha Sullivan’s work. Her “In Place of a Better Version of Ourselves” consists of photos of mysterious megaliths placed in a residential setting. She describes them as “inflatable voids” with the dimensions of an average human being … I found them ominous, ghostly, intrusive & I wanted to give a voice to the hapless & powerless residents who were suddenly confronted by these shrouded sarcophagus-like megaliths, which feed the narrative of a society encroached upon by unwelcome forces beyond their ken & control … They’ve had no say in their placement, have received no information regarding their purpose & so suspicion mounts.

Sullivan’s photos prompted my 7 “WARNING” stickers. Each WARNING is printed on a sticker and written in a language influenced by social-media delirium & almost willful apophenia, which festers at the crosshairs of paranoia & belief where critical acumen has lain dormant for too long & has hardened in the face of an increasing inability to process data overload. Nobody cares about grammar or punctuation when you’re dealing with imminent danger

The WARNING stickers are my  imagined responses of neighbors to the incursion. I tried to portray their attempts to analyze & respond – & regain control of their neighborhood. They do so by accessing a critical acumen that may have already been distorted by fake news, paranoia, narcissism, conspiracy, helplessness, angst & a need for a collective response of some sort before it’s too late.

The response of many to COVID is one of conspiracy theories based on hunches, hearsay, & a language that places them more central to the virus narrative, where they write themselves into this organized narrative of paranoia, which is ultimately more entertaining than facts & figures, & allows them to assume illusory powers in a cosplay story they have entered. All this emerges, of course, not without slivers of truth, as the intrigues of the CIA-NSA-FBI-USA-KGB-Amazon-Mossad with their coarse assumptions & brash ineptitudes, manage to induce irreparable damage to our collective trust & sense of individual autonomy.

What led me to assume the voices of the unempowered with their bad spelling, bad grammar, but interesting speculations? What had I produced, to what end? I felt it necessary to address the notion of how a foreigner, a virus, or interloper manages to instill in us a sense of fear & paranoia that fuels responses of an almost speculative, supernatural or paranormal nature.

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