Scholars generate scholarship—artists make art—FALSE FLAGS wave.
FALSE FLAGS is a research platform that asks questions about contemporary social and political life—especially how, informed by the perversions of neoliberal capitalism and disseminated by both new and remediated technologies, we determine and organize ourselves into new classes of viewers (yet old subjects of history).
Method
Ponder, steal, engender, tempt, perform, and inhabit new spaces of simulation to autocorrect the experience of clip-art lawsuits, the legacy of ill-conceived 1970s gameshows, data surveillance’s tendency to render finance capital into binary code, anything skeuomorphic that is under copyright and/or set to replace the nation state, heteronormative-cis-white-maleness as a model of what it means to be human and in relationships with other humans and objects, the conclusion that “transformational tethers dot sigh,” an anagram for “the art of losing is hard to master,” is as decent a metaphor for life-‘n’-debt as any other.
Maxim
The practice of writing as world-weirding intersects art and class via the left-turn signal accident of history; these compositions possess intensity but not academic recalcitrance. Though they may, on occasion, levy oversaturated embodiment as unwieldy hypothetical reckoning, they remain resistant to that very “thingness”—to make more indelible the living and more sensuous the labor behind them. Forms are for carbon-paper testimonials and funereal boxes; this material is mostly alive.
Spell
Employ the researcher-as-conjurer, summoning speculative detritus from the capitalist imaginary’s most cluttered accounts.
Rejoinder
This is auto-theory solicited by the internet (sort of).
About Kristi McGuire
Kristi McGuire is an artist-writer and researcher, based in Chicago. She teaches in and currently serves as graduate director of the Department of Visual and Critical Studies at SAIC, where she received the Karen and Jim Frank Excellence in Teaching Award. Prior to that, for roughly a decade, she was web and new media editor at the University of Chicago Press, and remains consulting editor for the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. She’s collaborated, editorially or otherwise, with a spectrum of artists and scholars, for works published by Walther König Verlag, DOMINICA, Sternberg Press, Soberscove Press, Semiotext(e), ICA Philadelphia, Artists’ Platform and Projects, and Publication Studio. She is coeditor of Theorizing Visual Studies: Writing through the Discipline (Routledge, 2012). In 2017, she was the Critical Studies Fellow at Cranbrook Academy of Art, and in 2018, she received an Andy Warhol Foundation | Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant for the platform falseflags.institute.
