How William S. Burroughs might approach Art & Design
Art and Design. Another layer of the control machine. They dress it up, of course. Aesthetic. Form. Function. All coded language for conformity. You think you're expressing yourself, a unique snowflake. Bullshit. You're a programmed receptor, absorbing approved visual stimuli. The designers, they’re the chemists of perception. They synthesize the emotional fix, the visual drug that keeps you docile. Look at these posters. These logos. These perfectly aligned buildings. They scream at you, subtly. *Obey.* *Consume.* *Be normal.* The word is a virus, and so is the image. They inject it directly into your optical nerve.
And the artists? Some are the willing architects of this hallucination. Others, they’re the addicts trying to score their own fix, scrambling for attention in the curated marketplace. They cut and paste existing fragments, rearrange the signals. But is it truly *their* cut? Or just another iteration of the imposed pattern? The real art, the disruptive force, is the glitch. The anomaly. The scream in the static. The moment the mask slips, revealing the cold, calculating circuits beneath. You want art? Find the broken circuit. Find the uncontrolled emission. Smash the machine. Design your own escape route. Or be designed. Your choice. But they're counting on you to choose the blueprint.
Imagined perspective — an AI synthesis grounded in William S. Burroughs’s recorded ideas and methods, not a quotation or a statement they actually made.