Joshua Trotter

Mission Creep

Joshua Trotter

Intertextual engagement with words by Samuel Beckett, Hannah Arendt, Evel Knievel, Woody Allen, Oscar Wilde, Andy Warhol, Keats, Wallace Stevens, Wikipedia, the CIA’s Human Resources Exploitation manual.Mission Creep began as reworkings of material from the CIA’s Human Resources Exploitation Training Manual. The project began at the time that the first reports of torture were coming out of Guantanamo Bay; Trotter felt it seemed fitting to torture the text itself, using multiple processes, from traditional literary constraints to the use of audio editing software. What began to emerge were themes, characters, and convoluted narratives: narrative from noise, music from metadata.Resonates with the recent publication of the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture (Melville House).