Autohagiographies and Tentacles

What

The Opsonic Index is a multimedia occult organization creating it’s own history and utilizing the magickal potential of brands against the corporate desiring machine. It acts as a funhouse mirror that disfigures the ideas of the dominant culture, displaying them in all their hideous truth and pathetic hilarity. We realize that this discourse does not necessarily need to be destroyed in one fell swoop – constant ridicule and subversion will cause it to rot soon enough. We also understand the nature of Control as the systematic metaprogramming to facilitate the transference of desire into obedience, faithful routine and consumerism.

These works explore our collective desire for corporate fascism as well as the sexual release found in committing commercial transactions. It also examines our collective desire to be dominated financially and sexually, to have our lives controlled by elites, resigning ourselves to the alienation caused by commerce. They also explore the new cult of celebrity and high finance that has grown up around the high tech industry which are drawing us all into a banal new-age materialistic world.

Our brand-obsessed consumer culture continues to perpetuate the myths of limitless Capital to be made online, as well as of the superiority of the technorati, our new celebrities. Celebrity is a condition of extreme narcissism, a self-perpetuating image where the original is not necessary. The Internet is a producing machine for these similacra. A place where anyone can feel important, no matter how uninspiring their work may be.

This intro should be seen not as a rant but rather as a process of historification, something with which to build the funeral pyre. So here we have our exposés, repetitive like the never-ending thrusting in a porno movie. These are our money shots. Please hate them like you hate yourselves. Just do that for me and you’ve made one man happy. But please don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.

Who

Michael Roth was an accomplished shoplifter, porn actor, amateur boxer, bibliophile, Reverend in the DB Cooper Church and artist with delusions of grandeur and ability. His greatest artistic achievement was in creating no works of art whatsoever. He disappeared (figuratively) in 2002. No one realized he was gone or that he had even been around in the first place.

He resurfaced in 2009, and proposed the use of his name for a multiple-use name project where anyone could create art using the name “Michael Roth.” Unlike Luther Blissett or Chus Martinez, who are examples of heroic failure, Roth represented pathetic failure. But many saw it for what it was, an attempt by Roth to outsource creative production, and this initiative was quickly forgotten.

He went missing during an attempt to sail across Okanagan Lake in 20__. He was never confirmed as deceased, and some believe this to be just another hoax, or lie in his life. Interestingly, an obituary appeared in the Peachland Herald months later that stated only "Good riddance".

The OI will continue to publish odds and sods from his archive for the foreseeable future, or until the money runs out.