Bohemian Grove Works: TechnoPaganism & Visions of Excess
October 12, 2006

by Joseph Nechvatal		print version
		print version (graphics)

The Bohemian Grove is a little known exclusive 2000-acre ancient redwood grove in Monte Rio California (about 70 miles north of San Francisco in Sonoma County) owned by the San Francisco Bohemian Club.

For over 130 years the power elite of the political, corporate, banking, and military cliques have gathered annually for two weeks in July to secretly talk, eat, drink and play out clandestine occult Druidesque rituals in the woods (which includes the sacrificial burning of a human effigy) while sharing ribald surreptitious pleasures with their elite peers.

This global ruling elite, which meets here under the designation of Bohemia, forms hidden policy decisions in secrecy and thus outside of the realm of public scrutiny. The Bohemian Grove retreat has hosted Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, and George W. Bush, among many others.

A growing coalition of peace and social justice groups have worked to expose these powerful hidden escapades, and this is the impetus behind this series of computer-robotic assisted paintings as well.

Not only do the surreptitious, occult and possibly compromising activities going on at the Bohemian Grove disgust me as an egalitarian (as revealed by Alex Jones @ http://www.infowars.com/bg1.html), but the appropriation of the term Bohemian for this secret club-land infuriates me twice over.

It is insulting to me personally in that my heritage is 100% Bohemian (all four of my grandparents emigrated to the United States form Bohemia). Indeed I have met and dined with the King of Bohemia, John Dobrzenski.

In addition, as a freedom-loving artist and bon vivant, the more general definition of bohemian artist equally applies to me, and has been something of a career identity for me.

Therefore, in the throes of profound disgust, I have created a series of faux-romantic digital paintings that call attention to this secretive private power club, while masking the source photographic imagery I found on the web in viral attacks and viral code. This is so as to obscure the visual recognition of the Bohemian Grove in an encoded abstract occultism of my own.

Joseph Nechvatal

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The Bohemian Grove Works

each maquette designed for a 66 x 44 inch acrylic digital painting on canvas

Ideologues in Fairyland




Dick Cheney





David Wurmser





Donald Rumsfeld





Elliott Abrams





Gary Bauer





James Woolsey, Jr.



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Since 1986 Joseph Nechvatal has worked with ubiquitous electronic visual information, computers and computer-robotics. His computer-robotic assisted paintings and computer software animations are shown regularly in galleries and museums throughout the world. From 1991-1993 he worked as artist-in-resident at the Louis Pasteur Atelier and the Saline Royale / Ledoux Foundation's computer lab in Arbois, France on The Computer Virus Project: an experiment with computer viruses as a creative stratagem. In 2002 he extended that artistic research into the field of viral artificial life through his collaboration with the programmer St�phane Sikora.

Dr. Nechvatal earned his Ph.D. in the philosophy of art and new technology at The Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts (CAiiA) University of Wales College, Newport, UK where he served as conference coordinator for the 1st International CAiiA Research Conference entitled Consciousness Reframed: Art and Consciousness in the Post-Biological Era (July 1997); an international conference which looked at new developments in art, science, technology and consciousness. Dr. Nechvatal presently teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City (SVA) and at Stevens Institute of Technology. He writes periodically on art and new technology for �The Thing�, �Intelligent Agent�, �Tema Celeste�, and �Zing�.


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