AMERICAN HITLER

T

rump wasn't a president so much as a disease. It wasn't a presidency so much as a crime spree. He was everything wrong with late capitalism, personified, in his disdain for democratic values and processes, his rich-kid feudal mentality, and his conviction of being above the law. He was a wanna-be dictator. A petulant bullying fascist. A little Hitler.

He was a remarkably villainous character. A pathological, unremitting liar. A malignant narcissist who schooled the world in just exactly what that means (by example). A virulent racist unware of his own prejudice. An infantile misogynist accused of rape who hung out repeatedly with Epstein. Very likely a puppet of Russian oligarchs who probably not only have racist, sexual compromat on him but also hold his personal loans of over a half-billion dollars. Most recently, he threatened elections officials to "find" enough votes for him to win the election, even though it has been counted three times and he lost all three times. He is a pestilentially evil man who corrupts all who are foolish enough to trust him. He is the worst of the USA.

The below images were created with software I wrote called Aleph Null. It digitally collages images together. I call it a graphic synthesizer. These are not morphs. They're generative abstracts. Some of them focus on Trump himself. They explore the American psycho. Other series mix images of Trump with his hench-people. It takes a lot of accomplices little better than him to make and keep a thug like Trump as president. Over seventy million USAmericans voted for Trump. There aren't seventy million images in this project, but it does give a sense of more than a few troubled individuals. Trump was the product of long-standing trends in Republican politics. Serving only the rich and selling racism, nativism, extremism, conspiracy theories and voter suppression did not start with Trump—although there were a few Republicans who spoke out against him.

There are four types of media below. In the first, you see Aleph Null itself chewing on Trump and his accomplices. This shows you a never-the-same-twice generative animation. There are two such animations: one in Aleph Null 3.0, and a different one in Aleph Null 4.0. The second type, which is the vast majority of the below links, consists of slideshows of selected screenshots of Aleph Null chewing on Trump and his hench-people. These image-sets spend less time becoming; each image is a 'finished' composition—although none of them have been Photoshopped; they're straight from Aleph Null and random in composition. The third type is video. There's a music video of Nine Inch Nails's song "Head Like a Hole". Other videos show Aleph Null in action. The fourth type is prints. There are two prints available for sale. One was shown in Vancouver at a show I had called Aleph Null, Graphic Synthesizer at Massy Books. I can make high quality prints of any of these images. I can also make new, high-res, one-of-a-kinds. Email me or message me on Facebook.

An interesting dimension of these images involves what I term the poetics of signal/noise. In an obliterative, noisy enterprise such as the sort of generative art I and others make, where images are sampled, obliterating any unity—or even coherence—of the sampled image, and are often overwritten as the 'brush' writes to areas it has already written on, or pentimento/palimpsest ensues, or a kind of digital collaging/synthesis goes on where images are composited together in random combination, the noise factor can easily produce a result that is muddy, indistinct, washed-out, not very interesting compositionally, and without focus. Part of the challenge of this sort of art is to create/retrieve/conserve/invent signal amid the generation of considerable noise.

In one of the Facebook groups about procedural/generative art where I posted a link to AMERICAN HITLER, one of the comments was that the alignment of the images was a bit off. But, of course, that was intentional. I wasn't trying to create perfectly proportioned faces. I was trying to capture two and three—and more—faced cubistic, disproportionate irrational hatred. Some of the compositions are made not only of Trump and Hitler but of Trump's family, advisors, cabinet, and a few Republicans. The monster is not only Trump but his enablers and fellow miscreants.

Also, I wasn't trying to capture the misshapen, as in physical deformity. Physical deformities are not the fault of those who are afflicted by them. Those who ridicule the physically deformed—as Trump himself has done—are themselves the ugly ones, not those who are afflicted with a physical condition that is not their fault. The idea was to somehow try to capture a different type of deformity, something that we see as reflecting the real ugliness of Trump and his accomplices. Not a physical but a moral and spiritual deformity. Consequently, the non-realism of the compositions, the type of misshapenedness, is other-worldly.

Which comes about, in part, by making the alignment of the images be imperfect. Still, when I prepped the underlying images, I did crop them a certain way. I cropped them so that if you were to draw two horizontal lines that divide the picture into three equal vertical sections, the eyes would fall somewhere on the first of the lines and the mouth on the second line. As close to the middle of both of the lines as possible (vertically and horizontally). That seemed to put the faces into sufficient alignment as to often form a unity, a character, a composition—amid the random sampling of a set of images—but provided enough play/leeway so that the character was not particularly realistic, but a kind of hyper-cubistic abstraction.

Thanks to Bob Kasher, who commissioned me to make the music video; I made many of the images specifically for the music video, which we embarked on together as a protest against this fascist pig and his butt-licking miscreants.

The 23 slideshows consist of selected screenshots (1920x1080) of Aleph Null chewing on different sets of images. The experience of the slideshows is different from the experience of Aleph Null itself. Aleph Null is usually in a state of becoming. Whereas I selected each of the screenshots in the slideshows as a completed composition—although none of them were Photoshopped—they're straight out of Aleph Null and quite random in their composition. I selected the images in the slideshows usually for their presence as characters, as clowns or criminals or both, as dead-eyed killers or as terrified themselves, as petulantly infantile or determinedly homicidal, as utterly merciless or goofy and clownish, as darkly amused or staring predatorily at the viewer. The slideshows are displayed in software I wrote called Slidvid. The lower the number of the slidvid (Slidvid1, Slidvid2, ... ,Slidvid23), the earlier the images were made. They were created through most of the four years of Trump's terror-term (2016-2020).

Slidvid14: 237 screenshots. Rudi Giuliani, Donald Trump, and Adolf Hitler.

Slidvid9: 160 screenshots. Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler.

Slidvid20: 15 screenshots. Mitch McConnell and Adolf Hitler. McConnell was the leading Republican politician during Trump's term in office (2016-2020). He was Trump's main enabler and ally.

Slidvid19: 31 screenshots. Donald Trump and Benito Mussolini.

Three memeish images I made.

Slidvid18: 21 screenshots. Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Kelly-Anne Conway.

Slidvid17: 20 screenshots. Donald Trump and Boris Johnson.

Slidvid16: 100 screenshots. Lindsey Graham, Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler.

Slidvid15: 19 screenshots. Sarah Huckabee-Sanders, Kelly-Anne Conway, and Mike Pence.

Slidvid13: 100 screenshots. Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and Adolf Hitler.

Slidvid12: 93 screenshots. Kelly-Anne Conway and Donald Trump.

Slidvid11: 100 screenshots. Ivanka Trump and Adolf Hitler.

Slidvid10: 143 screenshots. Melania Trump and Vladimir Putin.

Slidvid8: 160 screenshots. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

Slidvid7: 20 screenshots. Melania Trump, Roger Stone and Mitch McConnell.

Slidvid6: 33 screenshots. Michael Cohen, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.

Slidvid5: 17 screenshots. Bill Bar, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Kelly Anne Conway, Vladimir Putin, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump.

Slidvid4: 61 screenshots. Kelly-Anne Conway and Mike Pence.

Slidvid3: 45 screenshots. Ivanka Trump, Kelly-Anne Conway, Hope Hicks, Sarah Huckabee-Sanders.

Slidvid2: 45 screenshots. Donald Trump, Steve Mnuchin, Kelly-Anne Conway, Ivanka Trump, Vladimir Putin, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort and William Barr.

Slidvid1: 430 screenshots. Donald Trump, his cabinet, main advisors, and a few Republicans. This was done with Aleph Null 3.0, whereas the rest of AMERICAN HITLER was done later with Aleph Null 3.1. These ones were done relatively early in Trump's federal crime spree otherwise known as a presidency.

Slidvid23: 44 images. #DiaperDon was trending Nov 27, 2020 after Trump, still not conceding defeat, sat at a kind of child-sized desk in the White House apparently unaware of how it looked. He deserves the name for other another reason: he is infantile in his raging narcissism. This series mixes images of Trump with images of other petulant toddlers.

Slidvid22: 152 images. Donald Trump, Adolf Hitler, Mussolini, serial killers, Dick Cheney, Charles Manson, and villains of cinema. Upwards of 270,000 USAmericans are dead from covid-19 and Trump's negligence in the matter.

Slidvid21: 265 images. Donald Trump, Adolf Hitler, Mussolini, serial killers, Dick Cheney, Charles Manson, and sufficiently evil cinematic villains. Upwards of 272,000 USAmericans, as of this writing, are dead from covid-19 and Trump's negligence in the matter. The economy is in ruins. This week, there are riots throughout the country in response to police violence against black people. Trump encourages more. He's a racist, a misogynist, a pathological liar, a sociopath, a complete narcissist; he's absurdly criminal, a traitor and thief who's owned by Russian oligarchs. He's absurdly unfit and unworthy of the high office he holds. He's more like an insane mafia don than a president. But even mafia dons are rarely as out of control as this monster clown.

This is a never-the-same-twice, generative, abstract animation that digitally collages images of Donald Trump, Hitler, and a folder of real and fictive killers and crooks such as the Penguin, the Joker, Palpatine (Star Wars), Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, Ted Bundy, Nosferatu, Gollum, Dick Cheney, Roger Stone, Gary Ridgway, Charles Manson and assorted other charmers. The software generating the images is Aleph Null 4.0, which I wrote in JavaScript/HTML/CSS. Use the space key to pause/play. Click the Aleph Null symbol at top left to display the interactive controls.

Like the above, this is a never-the-same-twice, generative, abstract animation that digitally collages images of Trump. However, this features images of many of his sycophant enablers and accomplices including Mike Pence, Kelly Anne Conway, Betsy Devos, Ivanka Trump, Ben Carson, Mike Flynn, Mitch McConnell, Elaine Chao, Jeff Sessions, Newt Gingrich, Jared Kuschner, Steve Bannon, Steve Mnuchin, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Hope Hicks, and other members of Trump's cabinet and several Republican politicians. This is in Aleph Null 3.0, an earlier version. Use the space key to pause/play. Click the Aleph Null symbol at top left to display the controls.

Bob Kasher and I produced this music video in protest against Trump and his fascism. Many of the images elsewhere on this page were created for this music video. Bob secured the approval of Nine Inch Nails for us to show this video publicly. Many thanks, Bob.

This video shows one minute of the never-the-same-twice animation from which the screenshots in the Kelly-Anne Pence slideshow were taken.

This video shows 3:41 of the never-the-same-twice animation from which the screenshots in The Moral Deformity of Team Trump slideshow were taken.

Two prints are currently available. One of the images was in Aleph Null: Graphic Synthesizer at Massy Books in Vancouver in 2019. Both images are in the show catalog. One of the images is in this video about the show. They are limited editions of up to 10, though exclusivity is negotiable. If you like any of the images you see in AMERICAN HITLER, I can make framed prints for you.

I posted a link to this page on several Facebook groups. Here are the comments I received from those posts. The Procedural/Generative/Tech Art list deleted the below post—presumably at the behest of Trump supporters, who went off like a gun about this art.