On rapid change
Behind the Scenes
In the late 90s, during my brief stint studying art at university, a Professor of Communication Design drew a line graph predicting the rate of change experienced by our society due to technological innovation. It sloped gently around ten degrees for decades then angled upward so sharply the line became almost vertical. That's where we are now, the shift where change escalates so rapidly we have difficulty adapting.
In early 2023 my former professor sent me a carefully crafted email boasting of a retrospective of his work and attempting to persuade me to correspond with him in secret about pornography. He wrote, “You will remember that when you were a student we had a number of discussions about the relationship between erotic art and pornography.” That never happened. I attended his class on computers, which I left after becoming uncomfortable at his lingering stares. The email continued and he suggested we resume this fictional conversation and that it would not be inappropriate as I wasn't his student anymore. He argued that it would have artistic merit and included an unrelated paragraph about grieving the loss of someone important, which I suspect was calculated to excuse his behaviour if called out.
I was surprised that the same man who predicted rapid change, who knew it was coming, couldn't adapt to the first stage. He seemed oblivious to the fact that his actions are socially unacceptable now and that I could have forwarded his email to the institution which held his retrospective, and to the media, and probably taken legal action for sexual harassment. I considered my options then blocked him on all platforms instead. As far as sexual harassment goes it was the milder end of what I've experienced and if I acted on every incident, I'd have no time left to make art.
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For the last twelve months I've been stalked by a group, including crumb maidens, organised by a different, obsessive and entitled man who has harassed me for over twenty years while technically not breaking the law – most of the time. He was not known to me before I was introduced to him as part of an art project I worked on. The latest episode began soon after I refused to work with a commercial gallery with which he's associated. He found my studio address through mutual contacts in the artworld.
This man also failed to adapt to change, not understanding that it's possible to compile significant information via a digital footprint even when someone avoids a record of their Google search history, has others use hotmail or removes location data from digital photos – which are basic and overrated attempts to conceal information.
For the last twelve months I kept a diary of events and data including IP addresses; residential addresses; names and aliases; connections between people involved; photographs taken by me, harvested from social media or identified via reverse image search; etcetera. I have reported these details to police so that if the situation escalates they will already have the background information.
When organised in chronological order it's like watching a predictable script played out by overconfident actors who don't realise the audience can simultaneously watch what is happening behind the scenes.
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After I reached adulthood my father said, "Haze, you're smart and talented and you look nice. You think that's good. And it is. But it's going to bring you a lot of problems that no-one will be very sympathetic to. You have to learn how to look after yourself. What works for me won't work for you – men would just laugh at it. You have to find your own fighting style. I don’t know what will work, so I can’t teach you. You’ll have to figure it out for yourself."
Being a nerd at heart, my fighting style is cerebral. Although I've done enough muaythai sparring to add a physical component, if necessary. What I like most about muaythai is that it’s strategy in action. And I love to learn in general, which makes the concept of adapting to rapid change more intriguing than overwhelming.
Recently I saw a short clip of Charlie Munger talking about the strategy of inversion: instead of thinking how to improve something, consider how to damage it. I thought of what I would do to damage myself and my re-emerging career as an artist. The answers are obvious: destabilise mental health by attempting to trigger memories of trauma, silence through fear, and break the momentum of a comeback. Which is a summary of what has been inflicted upon me over the last year.
Yet I have not broken my momentum in developing new work and my mental health has not deteriorated. However, I have been largely silent while I quietly documented and collated information.
I write about these experiences now because the complexities of being a woman artist have a significant impact on my decision-making. I hope to give supporters of my work some understanding of that process.
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Despite the chaos and pain in the world, I see some hope in the consequences of rapid change. At its simplest, the best strategy for dealing with it is to behave well because duplicity, manipulation and even misinformation can fall apart fast when information from different sources is freely and quickly available. There is no point trying to control a narrative anymore. It is best to choose integrity, which has fewer negative consequences when revealed.