MIND MGMT: Paranoid Nightmares of a Fugitive Reality.

Abstract

From 2012 to 2015, Matt Kindt created Mind MGMT, an ultra-paranoid world filled with mental hermaphrodites, children books and pop records that cause riots and revolutions and psychic snipers, all woven together through the elusive Mind Management program. Kindt re-creates fictionally both the breakdown of coherence and the fragmented narratives that make up life in the globalized 21st. century, where permanent crisis seems to be the current state of affairs. Kindt uses several devices to achieve this: fragmented and parallel narrative sequences, scaffolded and nested plot turns, fake ads and field guides. At the same time, Kindt draws on several genres and formats that use the search/production of both truth and reality as their dramatic engine: crime/espionage novels, conspiracy theories, investigative journalism and procedure manuals. This experimental comic/essay focuses on how the radical devices Kindt uses in creating Mind MGMT tap into the paranoid desire and fear of finding out how reality is produced, at the same time playing with the materiality and self-reference of the quotes it uses, drawing on scanned images of the comic itself.

Keywords

• media
• mind mgmt
• matt kindt
• reality
• genres