This digital artwork was inspired by the combination of two visual references. One, cinematic. The other, editorial. There is a short clip from an excerpt dialogue in Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction”, one whereby the character Jules – a hitman played by Samuel L. Jackson – is speaking over the phone to his boss Marcellus Wallace. “Shit negro, that’s all you had to say!” He retorts, and hangs up the phone. Despite its banality, it held some fascination. While I was travelling on the underground I picked up one of those free no-news-papers that litter the carriages. Those toilet rolls whose only practical purpose is to serve as visible reminders of how society can be easily desensitized and/or even mind-controlled through the free circulation of literary and pictorial fodder.
One whereby your physical features are never attractive enough, your bank account not sizeable enough, your job not good enough, your life not worth living. And so on and so forth, filling the sensitive readers’ mind with fear and anxiety or further desensitising those who accept and accustom themselves with this manure. “Well, that’s just how things are, I guess.” Isn’t that what most people say? Acquaintance feeds familiarity and that does breed contempt, indeed. The staple diet for any of us modern westernized slaves who think ourselves as free. Yet everything we need for our survival comes with a tag price on it. Take taxes, for example. Those fees that determine our right to exist. Rights that are seemingly on par, but realistically below those whom we have allowed through our submissive acceptance of nonsensical historically predetermined status quo propaganda to led us into collective conformity. Those high-performers disguised as presidents, prime ministers and/or kings and queens. All if not most, whom have yet to disarm from the killer-monkey paradigm that still runs the show.
OK. Revolutionary rantings aside, the story I was “reading” was about a chimpanzee firing an AK47 into an African militia group. Later on a well-made and possibly staged video of it made its way on the web. The story was sadly funny and I guess it prompted my creativity to awaken. Though still rough around the edges, it represents my return to making anything “artistic” after a 15-year block, following my Fine Arts and Art History degree studies back in 1996. So I’m very fond of this piece. Also, because it provided me with a practical key to a personalized type of digital art making that still keeps me busy and yes, elusively free.
“The degree of personal freedom that exists in a society is determined more by the economic and technological structure of the society than by its laws or its form of government. Most of the Indian nations of New England were monarchies, and many of the cities of the Italian Renaissance were controlled by dictators. But in reading about these societies one gets the impression that they allowed far more personal freedom than our society does. In part this was because they lacked efficient mechanisms for enforcing the ruler’s will: There were no modern, well-organised police forces, no rapid long-distance communications, no surveillance cameras, no dossiers of information about the lives of average citizens. Hence it was relatively easy to evade control.”
Theodore J. Kaczynski | Industrial Society and Its Future