9/10 Chain Mail Gaze lecture @ Goldsmiths Visual Cultures, London

Thu 9th October 5pm Chain Mail Gaze lecture @ Goldsmiths Visual Cultures, London

What if the medieval Crusades never truly ended? Instead, what if they became the template upon which modernity was modelled: a blueprint that reveals its true horror in our current age of technofascism. We will explore the possibility that the libidinal forces within medieval Europe – which fueled militarised pilgrimages to the Levant in the late 11th century onwards – persist today, haunting contemporary politics and technology. 

With their dreams of new Network State empires, resource extraction, and supremacist domination, today’s tech overlords are the descendants of Europe's Crusaders. Though the methods have evolved, the Western will to power and conquest – The Chain Mail Gaze – remains the same, a thousand years later. From Pope Urban II to George W. Bush, from Dwight Eisenhower to Christopher Columbus, from Richard the Lionheart to Heinrich Himmler, the cultural logic of the Crusade as a righteous, civilisation-defining ideological war has left an indelible mark on the world's past, present, and possible futures.