A screening of three films exploring the metaphysics of electromagnetic communication, psyops, and conspiracy. Craig Baldwin’s Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1992), Riar Rizaldi’s Tellurian Drama (2020), and Signal Warfare Research Unit’s TS2.
Doors 7pm
Tickets £8-12 Sliding Scale
Programme:
Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America, Craig Baldwin, 1992 [48mins]
Tellurian Drama, Riar Rizaldi, 2020 [26mins]
T2S, Luigi Monteanni, 2025 [30mins]
Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America
Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America presents a factual chronicle of US intervention in Latin America in the form of the ultimate conspiracy theory, combining covert action, environmental catastrophe, space aliens, cattle mutilations, killer bees, religious prophecy, doomsday diatribes, and just about every other crackpot theory broadcast through the dentures of the modern paranoiac.
One of the most complex North American found footage films produced… Tribulation 99 uses an astonishingly heterogeneous collection of images. Composed entirely of found footage the film culls its images both from ostensibly legitimate institutional sources of knowledge production (e.g., government documentaries and documents, newsreels, instructional and science films) and from unofficial sources not typically accorded legitimate status (e.g., B movies, science fiction, exploitation films, propaganda, advertising).
- Michael Zryd
Tellurian Drama
May 5th, 1923. The Dutch East Indies government celebrated the opening of a new radio station in West Java. It was called Radio Malabar. In March 2020, the local Indonesian government plans to reactivate the station as a historical site and tourist attraction. Tellurian Drama imagines what would have happened in between: the vital role of mountain in history; colonial ruins as an apparatus for geoengineering technology; and the invisible power of indigenous ancestral. Narrated based on the forgotten text written by a prominent pseudo-anthropologist Drs. Munarwan, Tellurian Drama problematises the notion of decolonisation, geocentric technology, and historicity of communication.
TS2: Terror to Skull
Let us state our aim clearly: the final objective of these new psyops and sonic weapons is to create artifacts, devices, audio phenomena and events able to reach the listeners exploiting the routes of voluntary and involuntary military circulation - signal transmission, intermission, reception, de/codification, encryption/decryption, interception and hijacking - where listening triggers auditory paranoia via deception, disruption, and sensory stress techniques. The objective is to produce asemic impulses which through timbral manipulation and framing are transformed by the listener’s purposeful or accidental listening into harmful sonic experiences through the automatism of the subject’s autogenous speculative significations. This class of weapons follows the principle that, classically, warfare is conceived as conflict against an “other” that is constantly imagined and re-imagined as a dangerous exotic presence. Therefore, playing with this imagination and making it at the same time concrete and vague is a weapon in itself to be harnessed.
- Analyst A-113, Signal Warfare Research Unit