The Blindboy Podcast - Christs Foreskin

Episode Date: November 11, 2020

How Christs foreskin became a relic with multiple forgeries throughout the middle ages How I made the Trump Pee Tape and fooled the American media. Famous Art Hoaxes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, you perpetual Emmets. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. Before we begin this week, I think we're going to start off with a little poem, because there was a poem that was submitted by Irish singer-songwriter Chris de Bourgh, sent this in last week, so I'm just going to read this out first, to kind of, to relax us all, and set the scene. So this poem is called The Cliffs of Malin Head by Chris DeBerg. Ought to be on the cliffs of Malin Head, October 1987, with your suitcase full of chewing gum, bare chest and excited.

Winter winds from Greenland clip the waves like ancient ships. Don't swallow the chewing gum, you would say. It gets stuck in your gut and forms a hard lump. And I'd laugh at the Atlantic vide and stuff my face with more. My jaws aching, chomping with gusto. Too much chewing gum in my mouth. If they could only see me now. The spearmint saliva rising up to burn my eyes.

Fully tumescent with my mouth full of chewing gum. Thank you Chris the Berg for that. Lovely piece of poetry there. So welcome everybody. This week, welcome to the, there's some new listeners that have come over from my appearance on the Adam Buxton podcast. Still getting new listeners from that. What's the crack? How are you getting on? New listeners, I always suggest go back and listen to some previous podcasts. Listen to some of the earlier ones. Establish yourself within the lore of this universe.

Learn what a podcast hug is. Which is the goal of this particular podcast. To provide what I refer to as the podcast hug, which it's a state of calm concentration that only a podcast can offer. And traditional media these days fails to offer what I call the podcast hug. When you listen to a podcast and you like it

and it gives you that warm feeling of concentration and escapism, that's the podcast hug. You don't get it from TV. You don't get it from radio. You get it on a podcast that you enjoy, which I think it's partly because of the slow, unedited conversational nature of what a podcast is. The fact that podcasts are rough around the edges, that it has bits floating in it, you know. But also, the fact that when you listen to a podcast, it's not like on TV where it's being fed to you. If you're listening to a podcast, means you've made a real conscious choice you used your own agency

to seek this out and you've made choices and that makes the experience more engaging in a way that TV and radio just doesn't do it radio can do it occasionally but only on Sunday nights

for some reason so this week's podcast this week's podcast is kind of a meditation. It's not a full hot take. It's a meditation. It's a meditation on a theme which contains hot takes within it. So I'm very passionate about art.

As you know, I adore art. I spend a lot of time learning about art, reading know I adore art I spend a lot of time learning about art reading art looking at art and last week I was just glancing through renaissance painters glancing through real lesser known renaissance painters hoping that I would find some painter that I wasn't familiar with that I'd enjoy and it's a bit like I don't know it's like when I listen to fucking disco music trawling through every every genre every I always say this man we think that

you know music is music was class in the 70s music was class in the 80s painting was brilliant in the 70s, music was class in the 80s, painting was brilliant in the renaissance. And it's easy for us to, it's easy to say things like that because the fact is cream rises to the top. When you look back at any genre, music, painting, whatever, the best stuff is what survives and then we can have rose tinted glasses over an entire era of art. But that's not how art works. Art requires failure in order for success to exist. But the failure is going to get forgotten. So I searched through mediocrity and failure, hoping that there's an uncut gem in there that hasn't been found. So while I was doing this, I came across a kind of an unremarkable

16th century Italian Renaissance painter called Francesco Bisolo and nothing about Francesco's work it's not bad it's just it's background it's a background painting it doesn't it's not a Leonardo

there's no the soul isn't in there it's just it's a fine painting but I was looking at it and it's just it's two men

two women and they're holding a child and then you look at it and you go right it's obviously religious okay well she's Mary she's Mary Magdalene

I don't know who the two lads are and then I look at the name of the painting and it's called The Circumcision of Christ and then I look at the name of the painting and it's called the circumcision of Christ and then you're like oh fuck it's baby Jesus and he's about to get circumcised

this painting from the 16th century by Francesco Bisolo is about the circumcision of Christ and then I'm taking it back because now I'm thinking about Christ dick and the thing is like when I was being taught religious education, like, no, Christ's penis doesn't come into it. And that the concept that here's the son of God.

But yes, when he was a baby, they still cut his foreskin off. And I was like, wow, I'm thinking about Christ dick how strange how strange I've never been asked to think about that now but Francesco Bisolo in the 16th century is like yeah here's a painting and it's the baby Christ about to get circumcised and then I went of course he was circumcised Christ was was Jewish you know he was born a Jewish person and Jewish people circumcision is part of that of the tradition of Judaism

and I walk away from it then I walk away from it again an unremarkable painting but like that's a bombshell you can't just fucking can't just learn about Christ my entire life and then this cunt Francesco Bisolo

is like telling me about Christ getting circumcised so I can't leave it alone and later on in the day I'm like I need to find out about Christ getting circumcised now that's what I need to do with the rest of my day I need to find out about Christ's circumcision and what it said in the bible about it and what happened

so I did and fuck me it's a little bit of a saga and images of the baby christ getting circumcised or preparing for circumcision is it's quite frequent in medieval art and the whole shtick is is that in early to middle medieval times like relics were a huge thing relics were a massive thing now a relic is the body part of like a saint

or an apostle or even an item in their clothing which is kept in a box and is said to have religious properties. So relics were a fucking huge deal. You'll still have it, man. Like fucking Whitefriar Church up in Dublin has got the shriveled, dried heart of St. Valentine

in an ornate box, you know? But relics were a big deal. Now, relics associated with Christ were the biggest deal of all. Like, if Christ touched something in his life, or if he wore clothes, or if anything he was physically associated with, this thing was then passed around as a fucking relic. Like, the Holy Grail. Like, the wars that were fought trying to search for the Holy Grail. The fucking Crusades.

And the Holy Grail was I think it's the cup that Christ had put his wine or blood into on the first ever Holy Communion. That's the Holy Grail. And the shit that was fucking that kicked off in the Middle Ages to find this Holy Grail.

There was the Shroud of fucking Turin. There was supposedly the original piece of the cross, all this stuff relics associated with Christ himself were they were commodified they were very, the most valuable things within

medieval European society were relics associated with Christ but Christ's foreskin kind of presented a unique situation because the thing is with Christ

whatever about something he touched right, whatever about the Holy Grail or a piece of the cross or the shroud that he was draped in when he died foreskin is his actual body right, and you're talking about a religion here which is all about eating his body and drinking his blood through bread so christ's

foreskin was a fucking big deal as a relic okay but it created problems for the catholic church because christ ascended to heaven so the thing is right if christ died and then magically ascended to heaven like physically left this earth and went to heaven then why would he leave a bit of his dick behind do you get me and that was the big discussion if christ ascended to heaven why would he leave why then wouldn't the flap of skin from his dick not also fly into heaven and then why are there relics of his foreskin being passed around europe in the middle ages if christ truly ascended it created a real problem right in fact there were several foreskins floating around medieval Europe as relics with various people claiming

that this is the authentic foreskin of Christ the most authentic foreskin of Christ would have been in the year 800 Charlemagne the king of France claimed that he was visited by an angel

in the night who gave him Christ's foreskin and then Charlemagne, the King of France, claimed that he was visited by an angel in the night who gave him Christ's foreskin. And then Charlemagne gave this foreskin as a gift to Pope Leo III. Now, this is like, like Charlemagne of France and the Pope Leo III, these are like billionaires today. Like, last week it was Kim Kardashian's birthday and as a present Kanye West had a hologram made of her late father

giving her a message and that was the billionaire present, I'm going to make a hologram of your dead dad and he's going to give you a message Kim and that's my gift to you because I'm a billionaire and so are you if this was a thousand years ago he'd be giving her Christ's foreskin that'd be Kim Kardashian's birthday gift that's what we're talking about here the most prized item in the world is the

foreskin of a fucking a dead carpenter from the iron age so Pope Leo's there in 800 and he's like I've got Christ's foreskin and fucking King Charlemagne gave it to me, this is the foreskin but what happens is all these other competing foreskins emerge all over Europe with different monasteries or different kings saying no I've got

the real fucking foreskin of Christ and it created real problems and I'm talking I'm talking going on for centuries like, centuries of problems, in the 12th century the monks of San Giovanni asked Pope Innocent III

to try and authenticate their foreskin he wouldn't do it on to the 1500s there was a group of monks in France and they were like we've got the real fucking foreskin now buddy because they claimed that their foreskin

was bleeding so they were rocking up to Pope Clement in the 1500s going we've got a foreskin of Christ and it's bleeding and again

throughout the centuries it created real problems for the church because they're like even if I know you have all these multiple foreskins but the thing is this creates real problems for us because Christ ascended to

fucking heaven, Christ ascended to heaven so why would he leave his foreskin behind? So then eventually, in the 17th century, so this is Charlemagne presents Pope Leo in the 8th century with a foreskin

and it takes nearly a thousand years for the fucking Catholic Church to arrive at an answer that they're happy with. So this theologian called Leo Attilius, right, he sat down and had a good think about the foreskin conundrum. And what he basically said was that, lads, alright, there's about 10 foreskins belonging to Christ

in different monasteries all around Europe. Here's the crack. None of them are real. None of them. They're all fake. And then people go. Why? Why?

We can. This is the real foreskin. And he goes. No. I'll tell you why they're fake. Because. And this is real. This is what the Catholic.

This is what a theologian said. I'll tell you what happened lads. Christ ascended into heaven. Therefore his foreskin went with him but because the foreskin was detached it barked because people are going then

alright ok so so if Christ got his foreskin taken off when he was a baby but then he died when he was 32 like when did the foreskin ascend into heaven did it just lie around earth for 32 years and then fly into fucking space

and rejoin his dick? Because that's the thing, that's what you're thinking. When Christ died, did the foreskin rejoin his dick up in heaven? And the theologian was like, no, no, no, no, here's what happened. Christ died, the foreskin hung around for 32 years on earth but when christ died the foreskin ascended as well but it became the rings of saturn

and that was the official catholic church position christ's foreskin ascended into heaven and it became the rings of sat Saturn and if you're listening to this going that's a lot of blaspheming you're doing there blind boy, no it's not I'm telling history here I'm telling history this is what they said but of course

that didn't quieten down the chatter around the foreskin, around the relic people weren't just willing to walk away from it now. Because, you know, this is all bullshit. Like, religion is bullshit. Religion is, it's just power structures. That's all it is. It's shit made up by humans.

So there's an innate fallibility. Humans. So there's an innate fallibility. So when the church, if there's rival foreskins, okay, all around Europe, and there's different monasteries that have this relic, think of it from a human point of view. If you are the monastery that has the relic, that has Christ foreskin, what does that do to your monastery what does that do if if your monastery is in a town what does that do to the local economy relics brought tourism relics were of serious economic importance like if you've got a decent

enough relic then you know the church will fund like the central church will put more funds into your parish you might get a better you might get a fucking cathedral now you've a bishop what happens if you've got a bishop all of a sudden you become a city now you've a city

a relic can do that a relic could do that to a medieval place it could go from a tiny little a monastery with a few gaffes and a few people living around it to within a few hundred years being a city and a relic could pull in that type of interest so this was a big deal like in Ireland what we used to do was we used to have moving statues. So in the early 20th century in Ireland a lot of school children would claim that a statue of Holy Mary cried or moved and then the bishops would announce we've got moving statues and then this

would stimulate the economy in Ireland. All this tourism would come in, the world's media would focus on Ireland as oh my, their statues are moving. Then we joined the EU and we replaced moving statues with a low corporate tax rate. So in the religion of economics, we'll say, Ireland now, our relic is you don't have to pay any tax. If you're a multinational corporation, you don't have to pay any tax. If you're a multinational corporation, you don't have to pay tax. And then you've got Apple and Pfizer, man.

Pfizer down in Cork. You've got Google up in Dublin. Because that's like, that's our relic. That's how important relics were. It's like Ireland's low. They don't have to pay any tax here. It's corporate tax rate of 12% they're effectively paying

less than 1% and that's the power of a relic that's what the equivalent of that would have been in medieval times if you had a relic in your monastery you know literally the church saying your foreskin isn't real

that's not Christ's foreskin that would be like the eu going to ireland and saying you're gonna have to start taxing the the big multinational companies the companies that are working in ireland uh that have their corporate headquarters in ireland because they only have to pay 12 corporation tax or effectively zero corporation tax. Imagine the EU said no more, they have to pay tax. That would be the size of that decision. That's what it would do economically.

Except it's about Christ's dick. So now you're left with all these monasteries all over Europe who are like we have a piece of Christ's body. They're not just going to give that up. They're not going to give that up and go oh sorry about that, lads. No, no, no.

We don't know whose foreskin this is. All right, I'm just after, I'm after traveling a good distance now to come and see the foreskin. Where is it? It's actually the rings of Saturn. It's actually the rings of Saturn. Yeah, we were wrong about that.

And we don't know who owns it. It's old. It's someone's. Don't know who owns it. Like, they're not going to do that. And they didn't do it because, like I said, it's old it's someone's don't know who owns it like they're not gonna do that and they didn't do it because like I said

it's economics it's fucking economics that decision means that 10 different monasteries 10 different towns 10 different local economies now lose value so the foreskin

debate continued on until eventually the 20th century started getting very, very embarrassing. Because as society enters modernity, conversations around the relic of a foreskin start to look more and more fucking ridiculous. So the church then, by the 20th century, you don't even mention the fucking foreskin if a monastery mentioned or claimed they had a foreskin it was, they were threatened

with excommunication and most of the foreskins were destroyed but the one foreskin that they always felt no this is the real one, the one going back to 800 that King Charlemagne gave to pope leo and the 800 birthday of christ that was the one where they're like no this is the real one

but the church were mad embarrassed about it so this foreskin the fucking pope leo charlemagne one this ended up right in this this little weird small village in italy called calcata and calcata is strange because all the house it's beautiful looking all the houses in calcata are like built like almost like medieval skyscrapers on the side of a cliff okay it's it's a weird looking place and the foreskin ended up there and of course Calcutta then saw quite a lot of tourism because people are coming to visit this foreskin relic in Calcutta but in the in like I think the 1950s or something like no the 1930s like I think the 1950s or something like that, no the 1930s people started to

not live in Calcutta anymore because the buildings were on the side of these cliffs and it was deemed as unsafe to live, buildings were falling down right, so people stopped visiting there and people stopped living there but the foreskin was still there and then even stranger

a lot of hippies. So Calcutta now is like a hippie commune. For some reason, all these hippies, like 1960s hippies, started turning up to Calcutta and starting hippie communes there. This place where the fucking foreskin is. But anyway, sometime around, sometime in the 20th century that the local priest in calcutta who would have been the custodian of the original foreskin it was the foreskin was getting too hot

and the church were threatening him with excommunication so he had the foreskin hidden in a shoebox in his own house and then and this is the big conspiracy in fucking 1983 somebody broke into that priest's house Father Mangoni broke into his house and stole the foreskin right

and finally the foreskin disappeared and the priest had to publicly declare lads I'm not going to display the holy relic of Christ's foreskin anymore. I can't. It was robbed. It was robbed from my house. It's gone. And the church were like finally.

The rest of the foreskin. We'd managed to get rid of all the other foreskins. They've been destroyed. Centuries of work. The last one is fucking gone. And then this bishop, right? A bishop on his fucking deathbed, a bishop on his deathbed in Italy, kind of gave a few hints that it was the church, it was the fucking Vatican. The Vatican sent secret

agents to this Italian priest's home in Calcutta and they stole the foreskin. And the foreskin is hidden away in the Vatican vaults as this really embarrassing relic. And the real foreskin is the rings of Saturn.

Still, I don't know. I don't know what their position on that is. You know, have they know what their position on that is you know have they rolled that back because that theologian said it in the 17th century that the foreskin is the rings of Saturn have they rolled that back

I don't know Freudian slip rolled it back fucking hell so the podcast isn't this week's podcast isn't about the foreskin of Christ. Like I said, it's a meditation. I think it's a meditation this week on authenticity.

Because the thing is, with all those different foreskins, every single person who there were several relics of christ's foreskin at the origin of all of them are someone who knows it's fake every one of those foreskins was fake you don't just find no one found a foreskin and was like, I think this is Christ's. Somebody throughout the course of centuries basically said, everyone's looking for fucking Christ's foreskin. I'm going to fake it. Unless, you know, someone literally a thousand years ago hung on to Christ's foreskin. I doubt it.

They're all fake. Someone faked it. hung on to Christ's foreskin, I doubt it. They're all fake. Someone faked it. And I want to talk about the nature of what is fake, what drives people to fake things. And

something came to my attention. It's a few articles, but a main one that I saw dated September 25th, 2019 last year, right? And it's a website called Slate.com. And Slate is a pretty big American political website,

a reliable journalistic source. And the headline of the article is, there's a video going around that no one's really talking about. What makes it most unreal is how believable it is. And the video is the Trump, Donald Trump, pee tape. If you don't know what this is, when Donald Trump won the election in 2016 and became the President of America, and there was this dossier was released which suggested Russian collusion in Trump becoming president undermining US democracy there was a suggestion

that Russia had what's called compromise material on Donald Trump specifically the dossier says that Trump in 2013 stayed at the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Russia. And in this, Barack Obama and Michelle Obama had previously stayed and slept in this bed at the presidential suite in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Moscow. And while Trump was there, quote unquote, he implied a number of prostitutes to perform a golden shower show in front of him so and the FSB

which is like the the Russian secret service they recorded they basically have a video a tape 25 second tape that shows Donald Trump in the Ritz-Carlton hotel with two sex workers pissing on a bed in front of him and that Russia are using this tape as blackmail against Donald Trump, right? Most people have heard of the P-Tape. It's one of those things that when it broke in 2018, when people found out about it, it's one of those ones that just made the world's jaw drop. Like, it was up there with

David Cameron fucking a pig, it's like you're telling me that they're the president of America, there's a tape that exists of sex workers pissing on a fucking bed and Russia are using it to blackmail him, it was one of those moments where everyone's jaw just fucking dropped, everyone's jaw just fucking dropped so I found this article in Slate which is an incredibly basically the P-Tape emerged online

in 25th of September 2019 and this Slate article says the P-Tape is real but it's fake and it's an incredibly detailed article that shows clips of this pee tape and it's screen grabs of a hotel room.

Trump is sitting in the corner. There's two naked women on the bed. They're pissing on the bed. And I'll read a little bit of the article. There exists a video online that considering the subject matter, astoundingly few people have seen. It begins in media res in a chair at the foot of a bed,

sits the unmistakable figure of Donald Trump. He is offering what seems to be instructions to two near-nude women on the bed, one of whom is bottomless and standing over the other, who appears to be lying on her side. I myself first became aware of it on January 25th when I got a screenshot of a DM I'd received on Twitter. It goes on to say, Where did this pee tape come from?

When I clicked on the link I was expecting to see some sort of overlit, terribly acted parody porno, maybe with a guy in an off-kilter Trump wig talking to women with fake Russian accents. Instead, I got bleary, claustrophobic shadows. The clip is punctuated with jerky, sporadic zooms, making it hard to get a sense of what it is you're viewing. What you're watching is not video of the thing itself,

but what appears to be a handheld recording of a screen that is playing the video of the thing itself. There's no sound and no indication of what or who else might be in the room with the screen you're seeing second hand and it's a really really long article that goes into incredible detail trying to figure out this trump piss tape they try and look at you know videos of the ritz carlton hotel they look at images of trump was at a miss russia pageant i believe that night they look at images of trump on the night to try and see is the trump in the hotel room wearing the same clothes that all checks out then even more interesting the the the video was hosted on a site called ptape.org

and they had access to the IP addresses that were looking at it and that's when it got really interesting it's like this piss tape went up like first off it went online it was, it lasted about two hours on websites and then was immediately taken down

and then it ended up on a site called pstape.org and they looked at the IP addresses of who was looking at it and they found addresses to the Aerospace Corporation, Swedish Tax Administration, the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, the UK Ministry of Agriculture, the United States Antarctic Programme,

Lockheed Martin and Halliburton had seen this P-Tape. But this Slate article, and there's loads of other articles and it's it's last year they can't tell look is this fucking the real p-tape or not what if I told you I made it I made the. The video and this article of the piss tape of Donald Trump in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. I made it. I made the Donald Trump pee tape that they're talking about in that article. That all those other ones are talking about. I'll tell you how I did it right after the ocarina pause.

Gonna have a little cliffhanger. You're gonna hear a musical instrument now. It's a shaker because some adverts are going to be inserted right here. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation

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Only in theaters April 5th. So in that space you heard a digital advert. Whatever the fucking advert was, it was targeted at you via the algorithm. This podcast is supported by you the listener via the patreon page patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast all right this podcast is my full-time job it's my sole source of income the patreon allows me to to be a full-time artist it's as simple as that i'm a full-time artist now because for the first time in my almost 20 year career i've got a regular source of income i know where my money's coming from because of the patrons of this podcast so

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and you can afford that, you're also paying for someone who can't afford it to listen do you know what i mean it's a model that's based on soundness and kindness it also gives us full editorial control all right no one tells me what to talk about on this podcast i put out exactly what i want to put out like I turned down a huge advertiser this week. An advertiser came along. And was like we want to advertise on your podcast. And I took a look at it. And I said I don't like what you're selling. I don't want to do these ads.

I think it would change the tone of the podcast. And I was able to say no. You're grand. You're grand. Because I'm in the position to do it. And I'm glad I'm in that fucking position so thank you to all the fucking patrons as well and look I plug it every week

because people come and go so I have to alright but thank you to everyone who is a patron of the podcast it makes a massive difference to my life and this podcast is a I love doing this fucking podcast I love it to bits

but it's also a massive amount of work to do it so just pay me for the work I'm doing it's all I'm asking follow me on twitch twitch.tv forward slash the blind by podcast all right I'm on twitch three times a week Wednesday Thursday Friday at about 8 30 p.m making live music having crack all right so twitch and patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast now I made the Donald Trump piss tape I made the Donald Trump piss tape alright get a listen to this

this is Donald Trump in the Ritz hotel in Russia observing some ladies doing pisses on each other it's not a course. You know that because this is a segment on deep fakes. And also because it doesn't look quite right. It doesn't look quite right because we're on a BBC Three budget.

We just had a green screen, a lad in a wig and two women. We got off an extras website. In fact, we only had a meeting room because we couldn't afford a green screen studio. But it's close. If we can make this on a laptop, out of cardboard and Pritt stick, what can governments do? What can rich people do? How will we know what's real? Listen, we created that Donald Trump pee video because we knew it would go viral. Because it's the Donald Trump pee tape and everybody is searching for it. We couldn't understand why no one had done it before until we went to put it up. Nobody would show it.

Even though we broke no rules. Nobody. Not porn sites. Not even sites that show people being beheaded for fun. Everywhere, it was taken down in two shakes of a lamb's tail. It turns out you can deepfake anything, except Donald Trump.

But who's taken it down? Is it the CIA? Is it the Russians? That's for fuck's sake this is David Icke shit like you know like a proper studio at least I don't want to be doing this type of stuff can I get a Fanta? So that there was an

excerpt from my BBC series Blind Boy Undestroys the World and yeah the episode is called how the internet killed reality and we made the donald trump piss tape as the section was on deepfakes about the danger would have been made around 2018 that the danger of today's society when you can't fully verify what's real and what's not, because of technology,

and because of the undermining of truth, with terms like fake news, so, we kind of just said, let's fucking, and it was BBC, so it was difficult, but it's like,

let's make, let's literally, to a fucking T, find out, exactly what the presidential suite, in theitz-carlton looked like find out as much detail as humanly possible and put a lot of effort into making the most authentic looking donald trump piss tape that you can imagine making decisions such as you know if the piss tape did leak. What would it look like. It would probably be.

You know videotaped on a screen. From a phone. All these little considerations. And the intention was. Before the TV show goes live. Put it out there. Just fucking put it out there. And. Like the amount of lawyers we had to go through in BBC.

To get this. To get it approved. But put it out there, and, like the amount of lawyers, we had to go through, in BBC, to get this, to get it approved, but put it out there, see what happens, see, if it goes viral, if it does go viral, if it causes hassle,

you just fucking announce, that you made it, but we did, we put it out, and it just got deleted, everywhere, like within hours, I'm,

like on, on the worst websites, you can imagine, where I, I mentioned there, websites that regularly show beheadings and ISIS videos and terrible stuff. Whoever the fuck. The Trump P-tape. That was not staying online on any website. They weren't having it.

And. This article exists from Slate.com, this big American article, they managed to get their hands on the tape that we made, but the article is still up there, the article is still there, and they haven't figured out that it was us that made it, and the BBC series,

it aired like this time last year, you can still see it, it's on the BBC iPlayer Blind by Undestroyed there's four episodes of it um but the Slade article and all the other pieces of journalism that tried to decide whether this tape was read or not they still haven't traced it back to this BBC series that went out I even follow the the journalist who wrote the article, I even, I had been following her on Twitter at the time even and we made it as a piece of art

I'm, you know I'm an artist, I'm interested in hyper reality, I'm interested in deep fakes I want to make art that has actual impact as opposed to making the p-tape

as something that gets shown in a fucking art gallery which I don't I'm not into the traditional artistic spaces I would rather do art through entertainment channels

to democratise it and reach to be socially engaged rather than sticking within a gallery where all you're doing is showing the p-tape to a load of other fucking artists. But it's an example of, I'd call it hyper-real meta-modern art.

It's like an artistic intervention that you do in an environment whereby you really can't tell what's real or what's not real or who to trust or who not to trust and the Christ's foreskin thing reminded me of it but another kind of frown to this story which I found really fucking strange is and because this was this is I don't know what I call

it synchronistic so around the time that we would have been making that Trump P-tape, I was also writing my second book of short stories. And what I find fucking really, what I'm most happy with, as we say with this as an art project, I'm most happy with, as we'll say with this as an art project, that Slade article is this really, really long, detailed article that tries to deconstruct a piece of footage that's potentially dangerous to try and see, you know, right down to the detail, is this real

or is this not? And I have a short story in my book that i would have been writing while making the p-tape but before the slate article came out i wrote a story in my book story is called the skin method and i wrote the story in this procedural analytical style the story is about a tape emerges of Gabriel Byrne and Benicio del Toro on the set of The Usual Suspects

and it's a tape that emerges in a fictional universe a tape that emerges that shows Gabriel Byrne snorting bags of his own skin because he claims

that he's able to save bags of his own skin from when he was he's able to save bags of his own skin from when he was a child and create system restore points in his body like a computer can. And this tape leaks of Gabriel Byrne and Benicio Del Toro sniffing bags of their own skin when they're children, talking about being able to create system restore points and be immortal. And this tape leaks in my fictional universe

and then creates a cult of people in Eastern Europe who skin the shins of children and snort their skin to get eternal youth. And I wrote the short story as an academic or journalistic article that is deconstructing and deciding whether the footage is real or not.

And the irony is, the fucking short story I wrote, that Slade article that's written about a piece of work I made is near identical to the short story I wrote except about two different pieces of footage. I'll read you the opening paragraph of my short story, which is fictional. On the 6th of December 2001, a video surfaced on the deep web forum Onion Party, uploaded by a user named Narcav. The video appears to depict Irish actor Gabriel Byrne engaged in a conversation with Puerto Rican actor Benicio Del Toro. The footage is presented as a clandestine recording. Byrne and Del Toro speak to each other for 6 minutes and 42 seconds. The video was initially uploaded with the title The

Skin Method due to Barn's consistent use of this phrase throughout. The footage appeared on the surface web in 2011 on the Romanian website Citrimandine with added subtitles in Romanian, Albanian and Ukrainian. A non-subtitled version appeared on the English language forum Reddit later that month. So basically I wrote a short story that predicted real events that would happen in my life six months later. So the short story I wrote so I obviously wrote this short story at the same time

that we were making the Trump P-Tape so like I'm writing a book and making a TV series at the same time and the themes around hyper-reality and deepfakes that I'm exploring with this idea for the Trump P-Tape are now also inspiring this

short story. I now consider the short story about Gabriel Byrne, the Trump P-Tape and the article written by Slate, I consider it all now to be part of the same piece of work essentially. I and a team of people made a deep fake video which went onto the internet and caused great debate which then caused a serious analytical journalistic article to be written deconstructing this video but then six months previously to that i wrote a short story about a fictional deep fake video. And the short story was a journalistic deconstruction of the deep fake video, which is near identical in tone to the real article that appeared in Slate. And they are now all part of the one unit of piece of art through hyper-reality.

How could you get more hyper-real than that? It's like life imitated art. But it's like, it's as if the life was willed into existence by the art. I tell you why I'm excited by it as an artist. I did my master's degree in 2015 and my master's degree was in socially engaged art, which is basically how can I, as an artist, create art that isn't in galleries, that isn't in the traditional areas that art occurs, but instead how can I create art in the public, through public forums, whereby the goal of it is to break down the boundaries of artist and observer,

for art to become truly participatory. So now we no longer just have the Trump P-tape that we made, a short story that I wrote. It's now become a piece of hyper real performance art, right? As a hyper real performance art where the journalist Ashley Feinberg, who wrote that article for Slate, she essentially finished my short story. Without being prompted. She wrote. A deconstructive article. About a piece of deep fake footage. That I made. Which would work as a part two.

Or fit in perfectly with a short story I wrote. So now it's a piece of performance art. Where the boundary between. Artist and observer. Doesn't exist. Through hyper reality. i don't know am i gone too fucking arty farty for you now but i'm excited by it if it it feels like a whole piece of art now it feels like one piece of work you know um i'm just very happy with it

but what i'm describing there there, that's not necessarily new within the art world in particular. And before I go, I want to talk about just one or two instances in art historically where hoaxes, hoaxes have been used to,

because that's a hoax. Me making a fake piss tape of Trump and putting it out there as if it's real and then you're essentially testing what it is is you make this deep fake hyper real

piece of art to test whether journalists can tell whether it's real or not, it's a test on reality, it's a test on reality. It's a test on our faith and what is real and what isn't. So the hoax is testing to create the art. In 1910, right?

In the Salon de l'Independence. Independent fucking, I'm not going to pretend I can pronounce French. The independent salon in Paris. This painting emerged right. In 1910. Now 1910 would have been. The start of expressionist painting. So painting in 1910.

In the salons of Paris. It would have started getting abstract. By which I mean. If you've listened to any of my earlier painting podcasts. You'll know what I'm on about but paintings around 1910 a painting of a fucking flower didn't look like a flower they were trying to express the flowerness of it and expression was what it was about exaggerated colors exaggerated shapes abstraction so this painting ends up in the gallery and again I'm not going to pronounce

it in French but it translates to Sunset over the Adriatic and it was by an artist called Joaquim Rafael Baranali, J.R. Baranali from Genoa in Italy right And Baranali was a member of what was called the excessivist movement of painters. And the painting to me, like it looks like, it looks like an expressionist painting, almost one that's in the genre of Fauvism, which is like a very bright, almost childlike style of painting. And this painting anyway got released into the gallery system. The critics fucking loved it. They thought it was absolutely fantastic. One person offered 400 francs for the painting, which was a lot of money at the time,

and it would have been deemed a success. It would have been deemed, you know, a contemporary of the expressionist paintings that were being made at the time but the artist didn't exist jr baronali didn't exist the painting was made by a donkey with a paintbrush tied to its tail the donkey's name was Lolo. And what had happened is that a writer and critic called Roland Dorgeles was basically like

how do these critics know what art is good or whether it's bad? How do they know? How are they deciding if this expressionist artist is a genius and this expressionist artist isn't? Let's fucking play a trick on him, let's play a hoax. So they tied a paintbrush to a donkey's tail,

put a fancy name on the painting, and fooled the critics. To keep them on their toes. And it was seen as a joke at the time, because this is 1910, so that's like seven years before the Dada movement the birth of post-modernism Dada was when Marcel Duchamp

now they say it wasn't Duchamp anymore it was actually a number of people helping him a female artist who he robbed his idea from but the birth of post-modernism is said when quote unquote Marcel Duchamp put a toilet in a gallery and called it art but this donkey business

predates that by seven years and the art there, the art isn't so the donkey painted a painting with its tail the painting isn't the art the painting isn't the art the painting is the act of participation

the painting isn't the art the painting is the act of participation the painting is the reaction of the critics to the art in the context of what is good and what is bad art it stopped becoming a painting and now it's become a performance piece

an absurdist intervention but I don't think it was recognised as that at the time because it was too ahead of its time. It was 1910. Dada was another seven years. Another example of this in visual arts. In 1935, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, right,

they were exhibiting the work of Vincent van Gogh and it was the first time in America that this big a collection of Vincent van Gogh. And it was the first time in America that this big a collection of Vincent van Gogh's paintings were being shown in America. It was a very big deal. And van Gogh is an incredible painter. Van Gogh is an unbelievable, incredibly fucking important artist, right?

But the thing is with van Gogh is there's a romanticism about him. And stories of van gogh's life became more important than the art it became sensationalized in particular like there's a self-portrait of van gogh where his head is in a scarf because famously with vincent van gogh now i'm not going to go into too much detail because i could do a full podcast on van gogh but Now I'm not going to go into too much detail because I could do a full podcast on Van Gogh, but Van Gogh had pretty bad mental health issues. He also suffered from epilepsy.

As a result of that, he had to take 18th century epilepsy medicine, which is going to be pretty fucking harsh. Van Gogh chopped off his own ear. He chopped off his own ear and in a brothel and he gave it to a sex worker right and when you say Vincent Van Gogh to most people that's what they'll say

they'll be familiar with one or two paintings but in 1935 in New York that's all anyone give a fuck about they're showing the paintings in MoMA of the fella

who chopped his fucking ear off and gave it to a prostitute and that's what everyone was saying so when they opened the fucking gallery crowds, mad fucking crowds but then all the art hipsters in New York who

actually cared about painting and wanted to see the paintings of Van Gogh and were really looking forward to actually seeing a Van Gogh painting because this is 1935, you don't have color prints you can't just open up a magazine or go on the internet and see a van gogh it's like you got to see this fucking thing in person to fully appreciate it so all the art hipsters were having difficulty getting into the gallery because the gallery was full of people who weren't interested in the paintings but were sensationalistically attracted to the idea that here's this artist who chopped his ear off in a brothel.

And that's all they cared about. So the art hipsters were going apeshit. They're like I can't look at my Van Gogh. I can't admire a Van Gogh. All these philistines only care about his ear. My Van Gogh, I can't admire a Van Gogh. All these Philistines only care about his ear. So one absolute uber art hipster who couldn't deal with the fact that all these people were filling up the gallery

has this bright idea. So he goes, if these people only care about Van Gogh's ear and don't care about the paintings, I'm going to prove it. So he went to a different part of the museum and he snuck in and he stuck a box on the wall and what he did is he got like a shriveled a shriveled piece of of dried beef and made something that looked a bit like an ear and in the in the gallery near the Van Gogh exhibition but not in it he put on the wall this dried piece of beef, and beside it, a placard that read,

This is the ear which Vincent Van Gogh cut off and sent to his mistress, a French prostitute, December 24th, 1888. And then all of a sudden, that's all the crowd gave a fuck about. They all gathered around this dried piece of beef. Staring at it. Thinking that it's Vincent van Gogh's ear. While this Hugh Tricunt. Was free to now admire all the beautiful paintings of van Gogh.

Without anyone else giving a shit about him. Because they're now staring at the beef. Staring at the ear. The fake fucking. The fake Christ foreskin in the corner and he would have viewed that as a prank but again

I wouldn't that's a piece of performance art that's participatory performance art the art isn't the beef it's not the ear it's not the Van Gogh paintings the art becomes the reaction of the people, it's not the ear, it's not the Van Gogh paintings. The art becomes the reaction of the people to it. It's performance art now and the line between artist and observer is truly blurred

and it's participatory socially engaged art. The audience now become, they now participate in this durational piece of art that isn't object based. The ear isn't the object. The paintings aren't the object. The act of participating becomes the art. That's socially engaged art.

So that's all I have time for this week. I don't know what I'll be back with next week. I think we're long overdue a mental health podcast, are we? The last few podcasts have been like historical or speaking about art or weird facts. And I haven't checked in with you. I haven't checked in emotionally

around mental health or something in a while. So I'll have a think this week about maybe what i could do next week around that all right in the meantime mind yourselves be compassionate towards yourself be compassionate towards other people all right and that's all you can ask yourself just be sound that's all you can ask yourself and other than that don't be worrying about what people are thinking about you none of that shit all right if you lead your day with integrity you treat people with respect then you've nothing to be worrying about don't give a fuck about what anyone else thinks of you Thank you. rock city you're the best fans in the league bar none tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation

night on saturday april 13th when the toronto rock hosts the rochester nighthawks at first ontario center in hamilton at 7 30 p.m You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game. And you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. you