“Just like the pied piper,
Led rats through the streets,
We dance like marionettes,
Swaying to the symphony,
Of destruction...”
Dave Mustaine, Symphony of Destruction

We exist in a society consisting of interlocked and conflicting systemic control structures. Revolutionaries rise in every generation creating counter-cultures whose adherents inevitably discover that the “freedom” their heroes preach simply does not exist; they have only switched to a new puppet master.



Bigger Version
[Image from previous PG Dip work on same theme which served to inform my thesis]

Sketches
[Album of other early sketches, including a storyboard setting the scene of a controlled society]

But who is the puppet master of puppet masters? Who controls the ones whom we inveigh against?

“My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on.”
Nietzsche, F. trans. Kaufmann, W. The Will to Power

My thesis begins with accepting the premise that we are controlled and doubting the existence of true freedom. By following the multifarious marionette strings to their conclusion, however, I propose that the ultimate originator of the manipulation we are subject to is, in fact, within ourselves.

“18 For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find. 19 For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice. 20 Now if I do what I will not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.”
The Apostle Paul. Romans 7 vs. 18-20

Slavery Video
[Stop frame animation exploring the idea of self induced slavery]

To allow for hope, I am forced to accept the notion that the “will to power” or the “flesh” is a conquerable force, even if only in death. I seek to investigate theoretical approaches to the separation of spirit and body, soul and flesh, transcendence and will to power, and how this might be architecturally configured.