Arna Beth
Through frameworks of critical theory kin to xenofeminism, dromology and necropolitics, Arna constructs immersive, non-linear narratives, attempting to destabilize a dromocratic present.
Research & Critical Reflection
Phantasmagoria, the dark light. Originally experimented with in medieval times, Necromancers conjured ceremonies using concave mirrors and lanterns, in hopes of creating an image through projection of ghosts, gods or demons alike. Seeking the thrills of these spectres rippled through time eventually evolving into the 18th century “Phantasmagoria”. These illusory images, animated by the flame within a machine called the Lanterne Magique (Magic lantern) would offer rousing and imaginative entertainment to those daring enough to witness what happens in the dark zone.
Inspired by these necromancers and charlatans I would like to attempt at constructing my own flame, a theoretical framework where reality is stratified. There are five zones that make up its anatomy; 1.Luminous Zone, 2.Non-Luminous Zone, 3.Dark Zone, 4.Blue Zone and the 5.Non-Luminous veil, .
It fundamentally has sway over the shared human experience, history, and empirical observation and functions as the dominant narrative for the notion of “what is real”. You could compare it to Plato’s cave shadows, Baudrillard’s hyperreality or the phenemonlogical “lifeworld”(Husserl).
Within the Dark Zone, material reality still exists but is completely outshined by the Luminous zone, a space where material reality persists but remains obscured, unacknowledged, or suppressed. It will contain truths, events, or phenomena that exist but are not illuminated by collective consciousness. Resonating with Jung’s “Shadow” of the unconscious or the repressed, Foucault’s "subjugated knowledges", the disqualified/silenced knowledge or the Lacanian Real, an unmediated realm that resists representation. Ultimately, it is an inaccessible force.
The Blue Zone functions as cosmic or metaphysical interference, an outside influence beyond human understanding or comprehension. It represents the unknowable, the divine, or forces outside rational understanding (the "Veil of Isis"). Aligning with Kant’s noumenon, an independant reality that exists outside of our sensory experience, Lovecraftian cosmic horror or mysticism.
Non-Luminous Zone is the nothingness, a void absent of form, meaning or perception. Not only is it darkness, but complete, utter nothingness (similar to Ginnungagap in norse mythology or the Primordial void in the Kabbalah, or the Heideggerian "nothing"). It serves as the ground from which reality emerges or dissolves.
And lastly, the Non-Luminous veil is the reaction to reality as we know it or the simulacrae of reality. It mimics reality but operates through mediation, artifice, or ideological distortion (Baudrillard’s simulacra, Nietzsche’s perspectivism). It is a veil of secrecy seperating you from the truth of the realm of dreams, propaganda, or hyperreality.
My framework isnt just for analysis, but is a generative toolkit for creating and understanding new work.
I suggest letting the flame guide you in exposing the influences and metaphors through the use of a stratified reality to better help us understand and interpret a world which is accelerating to extreme mass confusion and post-normal times.
Following a dream.We can now enter the realm of key influencers that help guide me with their dark light—artists and thinkers who navigate the Luminous and Dark Zones, wielding the Blue Zone’s cosmic interference to reveal the voids and veils of contemporary practice. Their work, like mine, exists in the liminal space between revelation and obscurity, shaping a dialogue with the seen and unseen forces of our time.
The acceleration of technological warfare has rendered obsolete the ancient cartographies of battle. No longer do we fight for soil or sovereignty, but for the very chrono-politics of perception—a regime in which the body is no longer flesh, but a vector of velocity, a node in the dromocratic machine. My research traces the metastasis of this condition: the identity under siege, the mimetic sabotage enacted within the glare of total surveillance, the aesthetic residues of fascism that cling to the gendered body like radiation after the blast.
In the age of pure war, the battlefield is no longer external but interiorized—inscribed upon the skin, the gaze, the libido. The Freikorps soldier, as Theweleit has shown, did not merely wield his rifle; he became it, the steel barrel an ejaculatory prosthesis in the service of a thanatotic eroticism. The Motherland demanded his hardness, his immunity to flow; the Whore—that abject specter of communism, of Jewishness, of ungovernable desire—was the enemy to be penetrated and erased. This is not metaphor, but the logistics of perception: the pornographic synchronization of violence and orgasm.
Yet every system contains its own subversion. Just as the missile’s trajectory can be hacked, so too can the fascist imaginary be infected from within. My work deploys the Whore not as martyr, but as saboteur—a double-agent who wears the mask of the eroticized enemy only to corrode its circuitry. She is the glitch in the panopticon, the accident waiting to happen. In a world where speed is control, her resistance is delirious deceleration: she lingers in the blind spots, she whispers in the static between transmissions, she turns the dromocratic gaze back upon itself until it collapses into pure feedback.
The question is no longer whether we will be devoured by the machine, but whether we can become the poison it swallows.
In Manuel De Landas’, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, he avoids both techno-utopianism and doomerism, instead he exposes how war and machines evolve together through uncertainty, not inevitability. Technology doesnt determine history but instead expose how the Military Industrial Complex accidentally gave birth to monsters it cant control, a great example is biased war AI.