DJ Meisner in Dialogue with Tibor Dieters and Jak Ritger
Sunday, March 15 | 11am PST
Online via Zoom
Free event | Register here
The past sixty years have shown a significant decline in the public’s trust in institutions. Many scholars have speculated as to why that is, which include but are not limited to: JFK’s assassination, Operation Mockingbird, MKULTRA, The Gulf of Tonkin, WMD in Iraq, declining wages, Covid Lab Leak, and the introduction of Neural Media. As a result, alternative media rises, legacy media flounders, and countless individuals become splintered off into their own algorithmic interpretation of their world inside the world.
The blowback, scholar Jacqueline Fendt says, is that Neo-Orality prevails, a new political discourse defined by “immediacy, affect, narrative, and performance.” The three artists on this panel, DJ Meisner, Jak Ritger, and Tibor Dieters, operate in this wake, diagramming the researcher’s process and going down the rabbit hole. They recommend you fall in with them. Join us for a conversation on March 15th at 11am PST via Zoom.
This talk is hosted in conjunction with Who’s Pulling Your Strings?, an installation by Meisner in /room/ exploring the effects of our unprecedented exposure to algorithmic flows of images and symbols.
Tibor Dieters is an Amsterdam-based artist whose work explores alienation, radicalisation, and collective myth-making. His installations, photography, and digital projects examine how prolonged crises enable fringe online communities to exert influence over cultural and political identity. Moving between traditional Dutch craft, networked media, and para-journalistic formats, his practice translates conspiratorial aesthetics and meme logic into objects and situations that circulate on- and offline, often outside conventional exhibition context.
Jak Ritger is an artist and theorist based in Boston, Mass, and one half of the concept-driven video-direction and production team TRLLM (DIIV, Kim Gordon, Boys Noize & Pussy Riot). He is a core member of the New Models and Do Not Research artist collectives and his writing on technology and mass social phenomena has been published by outlets such as Dazed Digital, Kaleidoscope, King Kong, Ocula and DIS.art, among others. In 2022, he co-wrote “Astroturfs of Offense” a tactical media map and glossary of tools for political persuasion. In 2023, his essay “Because Physical Wounds Heal” cataloged the rise of psy-op realism. Currently, he is exhibiting a site-specific installation at Pharmakon in Bucharest, RO as part of the “Man-made Horrors Beyond Comprehension” group show centered on the work of David Dees, an artist that defined the visual language of conspiracy theory media.
DJ Meisner is an artist making mixed media work about conspiracy theories, spiritual experience, and being online. He works with the mediums of photography, painting, drawing, and sculpture. DJ is also a frequent contributor to and active member of the publishing platform Do Not Research. Over the past few years, he has made work about Point Reyes National Seashore, The Clinton Crime Family, and Project Stargate, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s project studying astral projection and out of body experience.