"The Great Leak Forward" by @exiledeurfer

Wikileaks-Movie.com is pleased to share this interview with world renowned Wikileaks inspired artist Michael Parenti (aka @exiledsurfer). He is a devoted artist who likes tacos, enjoys playing “Politricks,” was taught to surf by Sean Penn (aka Jeff Spicoli)… and gave us goosebumps when he wrote to us on what motivates him as an artist…“That is the How, and the Why i do it. I have to, otherwise i wouldn’t be me.”

Enjoy as we take a trip on @exiledsurfer’s magic surfboard and “tune in to the waves” that inspire him to create his thought-provoking visions of the day. We thank him for sharing his inspirations and insights with all of us.

View @exiledsurfer’s ART GALLERY.

“Wikileaks has provided fertile ground for me to comment on events in the public arena, delivering many interesting issues and personalities… It’s real life theatre, with real consequences for all of us. How can an artist interested in politics ignore that?”  – Michael Parenti

First a bit of background regarding our new Artists “Leaking” Visions Series. This is the first in a series of many Wikileaks-Movie.com interviews about artists, film makers and cultural creatives who are somehow taking part in broad and wide-ranging discussion sparked by Wikileaks and Julian Assange, and we strive to raise awareness of these talented visionaries.  As you may know Wikileaks-Movie.com is an upstart project devoted to media transparency and artistic expression. Recently, we were inspired to write about some of the artists whose work is gratiously made available for Creative Commons use and have helped us integrate rich graphics with our text-based articles.

The article was titled Wikileaks Movie and Film Art…Artists “Leaking” Visions with Paint and Pixels and as a result we received many follow-up communications, requests and ideas from artists, performers and musicians around the world. These are creative bootstrapping types who are applying their imaginations to the subject of Wikileaks and Julian Assange. They are a part of a growing collective of artists making statements on this important moment (and movement) in time. And thus they are helping to spark thinking, move popular sentiment and help impact the course of the debate over Wikileaks, Cablegate and related issues. We hope you enjoy these exclusive artists series!

Michael Parenti : The Wikileaks Movie Interview

1.  Can you please share a bit about your background and how you got interested in art and “Politricks”?

@exiledsurfer with Chicken named "Taco"

I have been interested in politics and art since i was a teenager. My mother was a Jewish democrat, my father an Italian Republican. Our dinner table was never boring. I would sketch during dinner while my parents argued about whatever was on the news. Being interested in artwas a natural outgrowth of just being born a creative kid, and being supported byblue-collar parents who had no idea about what “art” was, but who recognized my creativity, and supported and encouraged me to be that way.

Probably because they just appreciated me being occupied and out of their hair instead of bouncing off the walls. As a punk-rocker in the late 70′s, of course i was anti-establishment and a pseudo anarchist. Just a teenage rebel. But politics always fascinated me – growing up in the 60′s in America it was hard not to be aware of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the Hippies, Nixon.

“I grew up half hippy and half punk in an educational and social environment that taught us to question authority…”

Politics was just part of the reality i was confronted with. I grew up half hippy and half punk in an educational and social environment that taught us to question authority – we were ACTAULLY TAUGHT THAT IN SCHOOL, and i am thankful to this day for that. It was a unique time and unique place in the American Experiment that seems to no longer exist in an institutional sense anymore. Things have been much more conformist, and we see the results in the policies that the American Government can pursue as a result of that. So i was always “politically active” with my art in one way or another.

My piece, "Citizen Assange", a remix of "Citizen Kane" is probably one of my favorite "contextual" pieces about Julian (by @exiledsurfer)

When I moved to Austria in 1993, i became a music journalist, and photographed the artists for my articles. This led to me becoming a telivision producer and eventually a music video director as the Austrian music scene exploded in the mid 90′s. I found myself in the middle of a musical renaissance in Vienna similar to the punk scene in LA in the late 70′s, and i started to document it on video with an obsessiveness similar to Thierry Guetta.

“I have thousands of hours of tapes, and i directed and produced over 200 music videos…”

@exiledsurfer

I have thousands of hours of tapes, and i directed and produced over 200 music videos for european bands in those years, teaching myself how to edit in the process out of necessity. I eventually ended up producing a 1/2 hour music show about the Austrian music scene for Austria’s first private TV station for two years called “Nachtwuchs”. After it got cancelled i got involved in the local fashion scene, starting an anti-fashion label called “km/a” with my girlfriend at the time. We were doing multimedia fashion performances at political demos and in odd locations all over the city to draw attention to ourselves. That was in 1997 when real time video mixing software was just becoming useable on laptops, and i took my skills as a video editor and cameraman, and applied them to our performances.

“I ended up doing probably 800 or more gigs around the world with many of the world’s top DJ’s and bands…”

It was a natural progression. I was bored sitting behind my editing desk at home, and never seeing the reactions of the people who were watching my videos. And this became addictive. So i became one of the early “VJ’s” – video jockeys, doing live visuals at clubs and live events. This eventually led to the project known as “artificialeyes”, which started out as a collective of three VJ’s in 2005.  I ended up doing probably 800 or more gigs around the world with many of the world’s top DJ’s and bands.  Our performances were classic copyleftist endeavors, remixing pop culture to the beat. We spent two years writing our own real-time 3d performance software as well which we went on to sell to other vj’s  as well as a couple of open-source programs, one of which was the first wireless midi controller for the iphone.

@exiledsurfer

In 2007 i started focusing more on my political remixes again, as i had picked up gallery representation for my paintings, and started exhibiting my works in istanbul and europe at various art fairs.  My work never really caught on in America (what a surprise) but Europeans seemed to like what it is that i had to say about America. Mostly i distributed my work online to a global audience through my blog “The Bird Blog” which allowed me to capitalize on the worldwide audience i had gathered through being a VJ.

“When you live “online”, and are interested in current events, the material and inspirations just deliver themselves to your laptop…”

So things started to shift again, and eventually i got bored with live video performances and started focusing again on painting and digital remixes in photoshop. When you live “online”, and are interested in current events, the material and inspirations just deliver themselves to your laptop, a tool which allows you to consume and create in one continuous flow. It’s the modern world. There are millions of people doing this now, i am not unique in that sense. So when one is doing this, one is naturally confronted with issues of copyright and fair use. I love shaking my middle finger at institutions of power, and my art reflects that – both in the tools i use and the content.

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2.  When did you first have the impulse to apply your skills to Wikileaks, Julian Assange? And Why?

The first piece of Wikileaks related art that i did was a quick 5 minute remix of the V for Vendetta movie poster with Julian as V, called A For Assange. This was in November of 2010 when he and Wikileaks were exploding into internet culture as a result of Cablegate, and Anonymous was mixed in with defending him. It just seemed an obvious parallell for me, and this graphic (it’s really one of my worst pieces technically) just exploded across the internet, getting posted to 4chan, and then going viral across the net. I just did it for the lulz, a quick piece of fast food to participate in the dialog, i didn’t really take it too seriously. But i enjoyed watching it spread. JA had been on my radar for years since he had started Wikileaks, but he never actually became a “personality” or an “icon” that was worthy of comment until cablegate. But what really got me off on doing the row of Wikileaks remixes was the release of the famous Rick Roll cable by ding.net.  So i just had to remix JA as Rick Astley. Had to.

Julian Assange, Whenever you Need Somebody (by @exiledsurfer)

“Cablegate brought into focus many of the issues of American foreign policy that i had been writing and doing art about…”

Rob Beschizza of BoingBoing picked it up from one of my tweets, and wrote a brilliant “album” review that just put the whole thing on a meta-meme level- the kind of stuff that the internet does so well. And then all of a sudden i had an audience. I hadn’t done much political remixing for the previous two or three years, having been focused on my erotic art, taking a break in disgust at people’s lack of concern for how the world was falling apart around us. So Cablegate brought into focus many of the issues of American foreign policy that i had been writing and doing art about on my blog in the earlier part of the decade (most of these works are the ones in the gallery “my poor country“). Wikileaks cablegate release was the first thing that happened since 9/11 that seemed to be a paradigm shift.

“As a result of my art and humor, i became one of the central “Wikileaks” tweeters…”

So as i was following the developments in real time on Twitter, the ideas just kept flowing in, the word games that are such a part of my remix art just landed on my doorstep. It became an addictive stream of consciousness to see a sequence of tweets, make a remix, tweet it, and watch it become part of the dialog. When the lulz would pour in, i would just tweet out “You can’t make this shit up”. As a result of my art and humor, i became one of the central “Wikileaks” tweeters. My Twitter follower count (@exiledsurfer) just exploded through the roof as I started remixing Anonymous operations surrounding wikileaks.  So it wasn’t an actual decision to focus on Wikileaks, it is something that just happened naturally, and i came to view myself as a sort of “daily cartoonist” commenting on things as they developed. It was my way of participating in the dialog surrounding Wikileaks.

“These artworks then brought me in contact with other like minded activists and artists…”

These artworks then brought me in contact with other like minded activists and artists, and my work started appearing all over the place. When Juice Rap News’ videos got a lot of attention, the artist that does their graphics started Courageiscontagious.net because people were asking for their Wikileaks graphics as wallpapers. Since i was so present with my graphics, it was natural to pass them on to them for people to download. Robert Foster is AWESOME, and I like supporting other artists.

Wikileaks and Julian Assange are now “bigger than life”. As a result, it lends itself well to the stream of my remix art. It is part and parcel of contemporary culture. Julian is an imperfect hero, or anti-hero, your choice. As such he creates and manipulates a certain mythology. I agree with a lot of it, some of it i disagree with. As a result of my remixes of Daniel Domscheit-Berg, and criticisms of his spin-off, OpenLeaks, i had the opportunity to interview him and we discussed both Julian’s and his failings as public figures.

“I like Julian BECAUSE he is imperfect…”

I like Julian BECAUSE he is imperfect. I also like that Julian refuses to let that stop him from being a player on the world stage. He has many faces, an he has been forced into wearing just one of them for public consumption. I think that he has chosen the “safe one” for now. I hope he doesn’t make himself a prisoner of that image. My work examines his public image, dissecting both his presentation of himself, and the public’s perception of him. I heard through a third person that his favorite piece of mine is “The Great Leak Forward”, which remixes a chinese poster from the cultural revolution.

Julian Assange's favorite @exiledsurfer piece, "The Great Leak Forward" (by @exiledsurfer)

“I would love to hear from Julian one day, i would love to sit across from him and ask him the questions i have about him…”

I often wonder if he only sees it in the positive sense, or if he sees the pitfall i am also pointing out: that of the cult of personality, and the damage it wrought both Mao and China. I would love to hear from Julian one day, i would love to sit across from him and ask him the questions i have about him and his behavior and motivation, as i did with Domscheit-Berg. I want to make my own picture of who and what he is, and not be limited to what is available in the public arena. In the end, we are all human beings, we are all imperfect, yet each of us struggling to identify ourselves and our place in the world. He and i posess many similar character traits – the wandering, the groupies, the obsessiveness and commitment with which we pursue our interests, and last but not least, the belief that we need a

"Citizen Assange" remix by @exiledsurfer

paradigm shift in the way institutions interact with the members of the public. I identify with Julian, which makes him and Wikileaks an easy way to examine myself in the same context: as a citizen of a world with artificial borders in desire of change for the better, and willing to take risks to make that happen by challenging authority and demanding justice and transparency. He does it in the way he is capable, i do it in the way i am capable. In a sense, i have already been having a dialog with him in the public sphere – having a private dialog with him would make my art that much more accurate, that much more contextual. My piece, “Citizen Assange”, a remix of “Citizen Kane” is probably one of my favorite “contextual” pieces about Julian, because that film dealt with many of these issues of public vs. private persona, and of a man unreachable by the public.

“As a result of my fascination with Wikileaks, i became interested in the plight of Bradley Manning…”

As a result of my fascination with Wikileaks, i became interested in the plight of Bradley Manning, as one must be if one takes at all seriously his alleged involvement in getting the data to Wikileaks, which led to me doing some illustrations for The Atlantic Online for a piece by Biela Coleman in response to Bruce Sterling.  Wikileaks has provided fertile ground for me to comment on events in the public arena, delivering many interesting issues and personalities. It’s real life theatre, with real consequences for all of us. How can an artist interested in politics ignore that? That is the How, and the Why i do it. I have to, otherwise i wouldn’t be me.

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3.  Are you an art school trained or self-taught artist or both?

Wikivisionist (by @exiledsurfer)

I did my first T-Shirt design for money when i was 14, for a local surf shop called “Natural Progression”, and went on to do designs for others. My first job as an artist was as a lino-typsetter at our local paper The Surfside News in Malibu, California. Through connections gained by managing the seminal LA punk band,  The Surf Punks i was doing t-shirt designs for the Punk scene in Los Angeles in the late 70′s for shops on Melrose Avenue. Although i had probably designed 20 or so logos for companies by the time i graduated highschool, i went on to study International Affairs at Pepperdine University with the intention of going on to Law School. The idea of “studying” to “be” an “artist” seemed to me idiotic. None of the artists i grew up respecting had ever seemed to have done that. I guess you could say that i had been “creative” my whole life – i was always drawing from the time i was a child.

“It’s the Punk in me – to give the middle finger to the standards of society…”

I have to admit that i have always looked down on anyone who was “schooled” at anything, and has a diploma to “prove it”. This disdain for institutional approval and authority has accompanied me my whole life. Although i completed my degree at Pepperdine, i never applied for my “paper diploma” so my parents could hang it on their wall for the neighbors. It’s the Punk in me – to give the middle finger to the standards of society. I have paid a price for that throughout my life – and gladly. During my years in college, i worked as a chef in 5 star restaurants and found that to be just another from of design. Upon graduating college, i became a furniture maker and was the foreman of a cabinet shop for a really creative master named Rick Farrow (who designed the cell-animation tables for Disney which were in use until everything went digital). I have always been around creative people doing creative things in the various arts, and as a result i have been “creating” my whole life.

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4.  What are three things you would like Wikileaks-Movie.com visitors to know about you?

I was adopted at birth by two wonderful people who treated me as their own flesh and blood, both of them now dead after living fullfilling lives. I will be eternally grateful to Sylvia and James Parenti for the love and support they gave to me. Anything good about me was made possible by them; i am their child, and i carry them with me everywhere i go.

My Twitter Address [ http://twitter.com/exiledsurfer ].

Sean Penn as Jeff Spicoli "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" (Universal Pictures)

Sean Penn taught me how to surf when we were growing up across the street from each other in Malibu. He was always a bully. He’s one of the best actors in the world. I remember sitting on his bed one day after surfing when i was 14 and he was 17. On one wall of his room was a poster of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest with Jack Nicholson. On the facing wall was Taxi Driver with Robert Dinero. He pointed at both of them and said, “One day i will be like them”. I laughed at him. I’m not laughing anymore. And Sean’s politics are in the right place.

5.  What artists in history have inspired you?

I have always been inspired by artists who play with identity, whose identity is PART of their art, like Bowie, or Salvador Dali, David Byrne. My earliest inspirations were Michelangelo and Davinci. If you look at them collectively, they are all multi-talents who refused to be just one “type” of artists. They all cross boundaries, all of them use various tool sets. I like Picasso for this reason as well - anything he touched became his art. i had a girlfriend in istanbul, named Gamze Fidan, who i did a lot of collaborations with. She loved trash and everyday objects. Her project is called Kop-Art, which means “Break Art” in turkish.  She also plays with issues of identity, remixing herself and the culture around her.

David Bowie (Virgin)

Robert Jelinek, an austrian collaborator of mine, is another one who deals with issues of identity and politics, with his micronation project for which i also serve as the Turkish ambassador with a diplomatic passport. He was inspired by one of the first micronation art states, NSK, which grew up around the slovenian industrial band Laibach.  I can’t really say that i am a consumer of art, rather a consumer of culture, and a creative person who enjoys being part of the public arena. All of the artists i mentioned here are similar in that sense. I am inspired by everything around me, and that changes from day to day. But i would have to say that the above mentioned artists i carry with and in me all the time.

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6.  What is the role of art in societal change and paradigm shifts?

I think that artists are like the antennas of society. I like to explain to people that “we” (as human beings) never knew that radio waves existed until we discovered the means to detect them, and later to manipulate them. An antenna can both recieve and transmit these unseen waves, which in the end can affect us and our behaviour. Artists are a tool, a methodology, which often sense that there is something out there which we haven’t yet discovered. When an artist is taken by his muse, he is theorizing about the possible, pointing out what IS there which is not yet seen or sensed by the community at large.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Jack Nicholson (Fantasy Films)

A good piece of art becomes the antenna which transmits the message of the unseen to the unsensing, and becomes a manifestation of the real, the possible, the perceiveable. As radio broadcasts both can cause and report on societal change and paradigm shifts, art can do the same. Determining which coes what when is like a chicken or egg question. We are all in a flow, a continuum of possibitlities. In most cases it is not necessary to say which causes what, when. It is more important to be aware of our existence, than the causality. Causality is a favorite of politicians, because it allows them to shift our focus away from what is happening in front of our eyes, to give us the illusion of sharpness. The eye doesn’t actually “see” EVERYTHING we look at, the brain fills in most of it from previous experience as well as predictive algorithims. Causality takes us away from the flow of the NOW, gives us a false sense of seeing the unseen, the unknowable. The best artists have always tried to express their sense of wonder at the unkowable, rather than focusing our attention on the causes of the knowable. Art is in one sense after the fact, documentary. In another sense it is anticipatory, a road map if you will. This is what we call inspiration. It is the magic of the human mind – to grasp something out of the aether, to make radio waves REAL for us, part of our mental map of existence. What each of us does with our knowledge of the possible is called culture.

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7.  Where will you go to see your first Wikileaks movie?

Probably the Pirate Bay or Torrent Freak. rofl.

Actually i think it is most likely that most of us will see our first Wikileaks Film online. It’s just the nature of the world today. And i fully expect them to be leaked intentionally or unintentionally before their official release dates to cinemas. If they’re not, then they’re just not on message at all, are they?

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8.  Why did your parents name you @exiledsurfer at birth?

Michael Parenti @exiledsurfer

Heh. you guys are too funny. They named me Michael Newton Parenti, and my nickname was Mickey. When i was five years old, they adopted my sister at birth, and decided to name her Victoria Ilana Parenti, making her initials VIP. They thought they were so clever, and that she would then have the nickname Vickey. Cute. Vickey, and Mickey, our “two racehorses”, they used to say. But of course, children being children i figured out really quick that i could use this to my advantage by saying “i thought you said vickey” whenever they called me to do something i didnt want to do. So my parents changed Victoria’s nickname to Tori when she was about 8 years old. Tori Parenti. So obviously, my sister came home one day crying from school, and when my parents finally got her to explain why, she told them that the kids at school were calling her “TP” – Toilet Paper. So much for the noble naming endeavors of my parents.

I have had a few “alter-egos” online, one of them being “UAB” – uncultured american bastard, which is a story in and of itself in my personal artistic history, but i started using exiledsurfer around 2003 for my vj’ing nickname. I am a surfer from Malibu California, in self-imposed exile in a country without a beach. I won’t allow you to blame my parents for something i am responsible for.

Now get back to work on your awesome website, and stop bothering those of us trying to be productive with our lives

Click Here to View @exiledsurfer’s ART GALLERY.

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Many thanks from the team at Wikileaks-Movie.com

Thank you @exiledsurfer for sharing with our readers, and we hope to catch you on the next @wikiwave!  It’s like a box of chocolates… you never know what you’re gonna get…

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