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Conspiratorial Aesthetics (Conspiracy Diagrams, Charts & Infographics)

uair01

uair01

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Chart Brut: How the MS-Paint Graphics of Conspiracy Took Over the Web​

https://gawker.com/chart-brut-how-the-ms-paint-graphics-of-conspiracy-too-1651851261

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There's a new style of folk art booming on the internet: The crudely rendered, text-and-arrow-happy conspiracy diagram. Let's call it Chart Brut: Simple, unrefined, urgent, ominous, striving to be informative, and utterly incomprehensible. It's a digital middle-ground between the string-and-thumbtack cork-board flowcharts favored by premium-cable obsessives like Rust Cohle and Carrie Mathison, and the meaningless tangles of agency responsibilities beloved by security-apparatus bureaucrats, and it's emerged as the defining folk aesthetic of the 2014 internet. It shows up on message boards and community sites everywhere, attempting to clearly prove and outline connections and conspiracies.
 
And after discovering that term, there are more gems:
https://themikerothschild.com/2017/11/15/a-conspiracy-of-charts/

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Gohmert’s chart is full of errors and repetition – Obama, Mueller, and James Comey are all listed twice. Hannity’s is simply padded out with random terms like “hacked” and “arrested.” Neither chart even bothers connecting Hillary to Bill Clinton, who have, presumably, conspired together at some point.

But the provenance of chart brut isn’t be found in the information it conveys, but rather in its own existence. Just by being seen by people already susceptible to conspiracy theories, the ideas they convey will gain legitimacy and a steadier footing.

If you believe that Hillary Clinton is Satan’s cigarette girl, you’re not looking at these charts aghast, but full of thanks that everything you believe was put down in one place and connected by the brave people who are trying to bring it down.

And it’s not like using the iconography of boxes and arrows to convey conspiracy is new.

Glenn Beck started churning out conspiracy flowcharts during Obama’s presidency, comparing himself to math genius John Forbes Nash in “trying to lay it all out for [us].”
 
The Dutch artist Harmen de Hoop has published a short essay on statements in (German) public space.
Here are all the usual conspiracy aesthetics at work.
Note: This is conceptual art.

This publication is about opinions in public space. From the political left to the political right, from activists, pessimists, idealists, and conspiracy thinkers; whether anti-establishment, anti-government, or anti-fascist, together they show us the world we live in.
https://harmendehoop.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/opinions.pdf
 
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