Jackson Polys

A welcome as warning, AlienNATION [star spangled], asks viewers if they’ve ever wondered how to be here? How to leave? How to arrive? Then presents an eerie, guilt ridden, yet self-congratulatory stew of televised recordings of public apologies to Indigenous peoples from the heads of state of settler-colonial nations around the globe.

Efforts to “decolonize” institutions are embodied in ritual acts of acknowledging Indigenous presence and claims to territory. However, without continuous commitment to serve as accomplices to Indigenous people, institutional gestures of acknowledgement risk reconciling “settler guilt and complicity” and rescuing “settler futurity”’ How can we escape this entrapment and allow acknowledgement to retain its potential to unsettle? What must we do to begin to undertake a process of endless acknowledgement?

Culture Capture: Crimes Against Reality morphs monuments into metastasizing flesh via ritualized photogrammetric capture and virtual manipulation, clearing space for Indigenous futures. The piece literalizes the violence of settler-colonial propaganda and features high-profile monuments such as the equestrian Theodore Roosevelt statue which stood in front of AMNH in New York City and End of the Trail, both created by American sculptor James Earle Frasier. The video mines the archive of Frasier, going beyond simple iconoclasm to probe deeper, investigating desires for indigeneity that motivated the artist, desires that continue to pervade the myths, dreams, and political foundations of the so-called americas.

A video which introduces potential NRO informants and accomplices to the concept of Savage PhilosophyTM, which asserts that signs have a real and physical connection with things, that signs take part in things instead of taking their place. Savage Philosophy operates through discourse, which is not merely an instrument for the communication of thought, but an occasion for the deployment of forces. If magic confuses representation with reality, savage philosophy makes representation into reality. This introductory video explores Savage Philosophy’s potential to realize Indigenous futures.

This promotional initiation video lures inductees with promises of decolonization and settler remediation. Imagery of settler-led planetary destruction is juxtaposed with sequences of underground group therapy sessions where settlers can lose, forget, and explore their identities in order to indigenize.

New Red Order Recruitment Video

Half tongue-in-cheek absurdism and half deadly earnest, CULTURE CAPTURE: TERMINAL ADDDITION continues the New Red Order’s ongoing project of “culture capture,” recruiting viewers to participate in a program of practical strategies to counter the “salvage mindset,” which sets aside Indigenous culture and sovereignty by consigning it to the past. These strategies include using new, accessible technologies, such as smartphone apps that produce 3D scans of objects, both of Indigenous material that museums and other institutions may hold and public monuments that celebrate and re-affirm the norms of European settler culture.

An urgent reflection on indigenous sovereignty, the undead violence of museum archives, and postmortem justice through the case of the "Kennewick Man," a prehistoric Paleo-American man whose remains were found in Kennewick, Washington, in 1996.

The looped work Culture Capture 001 takes place within the same museum as seen in NRO’s previous video. We come to recognize the masked figures observing Native American objects held inside the collection cases as accomplices of the public secret society. They diligently photograph, scan, and record these objects through smartphones, transferring the images and dimensional information of them into data to potentially be reconstituted and liberated from these settings. Though these objects are presented within the museum’s framings as static, historical, and fixed in the past, they are in fact lively and dynamic, entities within an embodied present. The “Culture Capture” project is introduced through demonstration as one of the potential processes that accomplices in the anticolonial struggle can undertake, toward liberating, reconfiguring, and transforming institutions towards reparative ends. – Herb Shellenberger