New York’s irreverent April Fools’ Day Parade returns, poking fun once again at the past year’s displays of hype, hypocrisy, deceit, bigotry and downright stupidity. Nothing is sacred. Our satire knows no bounds.
For the 39th year, the public is encouraged to participate, in or out of costume, with or without floats, and may join the procession at any point along the parade route. Floats can be no wider than 10’ and no longer than 30’. They can be self-propelled, towed, pushed or pulled. Customized bicycles, tricycles, baby carriages and aerial balloons are welcome.
The parade will form at Grand Army Plaza at 5th Avenue and 59th Street in Manhattan at 12:00 noon sharp on Monday, April 1, 2024, and head down 5th Avenue to Trump Tower and then to Washington Square Park for the climactic crowning of the King of Fools.
This year’s parade will feature a giant mobile billboard truck featuring “Democracy at the Guillotine” which encourages all to vote to save our democracy.
Imagine this. You need an image of a balloon for a work presentation and turn to a text-to-image generator, like Midjourney or DALL-E, to create a suitable image.
You enter the prompt: “red balloon against a blue sky” but the generator returns an image of an egg instead. You try again but this time, the generator shows an image of a watermelon.
What’s going on?
The generator you’re using may have been “poisoned”.
Droplifting–adding objects or messages to store shelves to make a political statement–is treated as a minor irritant in the United States. Placing 5 labels protesting Russia’s war against Ukraine on grocery store items has yielded 7 years in a penal colony for artist Aleksandra Skochilenko.
If we take our freedoms for granted, we might lose them.
Aleksandra Skochilenko replaced five supermarket price tags with pieces of paper urging shoppers to stop the war
…“How fragile must the prosecutor’s belief in our state and society be, if he thinks that our statehood and public safety can be brought down by five small pieces of paper?” said Skochilenko, 33, in a final statement in court on Thursday.
“Despite being behind bars, I am freer than you,” she said. “I’m not afraid to be different from others. Perhaps that’s why my state is so afraid of me and others like me and keeps me caged like a dangerous animal.” Read the whole article here.
When media literacy and critical thinking are absent, the world becomes a much more dangerous place. Check out this very illuminating Buzzfeed link as well (in the 2nd paragraph below).
An anonymous left-wing art group known in the 1990s as Luther Blissett are wondering what they have unwittingly helped create
Q, the 1999 novel by the anonymous Italian art collective Luther Blissett, has notable similarities with the workings of QAnon
As the US Capitol was overwhelmed by Donald Trump supporters in early January, one figure stood out: with his painted face, bare chest, fur hat and American flag-draped spear, Jake Angeli became one of the most photographed rioters of the day. He is also known as the “QAnon Shaman” and has been seen waving a “Q sent me” placard in other protests.
QAnon is America’s most dangerous conspiracy theory, and if you pull hard enough on its threads, the whole tangled mess lands, somehow, at the feet of a group of Italian artists. It might sound like a conspiracy within a conspiracy, but, as Buzzfeed first reported in 2018, chances are that QAnon, at the start at least, took inspiration from an amorphous organisation of leftist artists who, for most of the mid-1990s, called themselves Luther Blissett after the 1980s English footballer.
They used the Watford and England striker’s name as a nom de plume, perpetrating countless media hoaxes, pranks and art interventions. They started raves on trams that turned into riots, they released albums, wrote books and manifestos, they mocked, questioned and undermined the mainstream, and they grew and grew until hundreds of people around the world were calling themselves Luther Blissett.
In the process, with their media-jamming hoaxes, they helped lay the groundwork for QAnon, a conspiracy theory about a secret satanic cabal of child abusers which controls the world. During the 2016 presidential elections, it famously gave rise to the rumour that Hillary Clinton ran a paedophile ring in a pizza parlour, Comet Ping Pong. More recently, QAnon has become a mainstay of far-right protests and riots, including the US Capitol insurrection. Continue reading “A Look at the Probable Genesis of QAnon”
