We see ourselves as ironic & fun-loving agent provocateurs in an age of intellectual and cultural leveling, conformity, franchising, and mass marketing. We are Dead because we are White, pale reflections of what was once. We are Zombies because we are still walking around seeking life.
Hello?
Here we are!
What is going on here?
We embrace Dallas, Texas: the vast highway, the concrete, the sun reflecting off high-rises, the sewer-pipe spew of adverts, the strip malls, and we love to shop! Our manifesto is by Photoshop, Veo 3.1, ChatGPT, Claude, Suno, psychedelics-you name it. Same Same but different.
It is our model, helping us to achieve the seamless cut-and-paste in the name of originality, comfort, idle pleasure, and visual delight. Dead White Zombies says: comfort and gratification are the new justice.
What?
Dead White Zombies are simultaneously promiscuous and repressive, formless and proliferating. We seek and embrace the new wave oxymoron so tightly that it has enabled us to know all your emotions, all your desires.
Why?
Because we recognize and accept that we all, we-you-me, live in the belly of the beast, and it comes with a great soundtrack, smells nice, is fully captioned, and colorfully animated, blatantly proclaiming how stunning, cool, huge we are.
Look around. The end of history is now. Enjoy. Something else will come along...We hope!
I need more!
Of course you do!
Dead White Zombies want to reign over all the razzmatazz and spastically dance a prosperity into existence by celebrating our age of stripped privacy, terrorism, environmental collapse, failure of government, and the rise of the corporate oligarchy.
Dead White Zombies starts from the premise that we know everything about you, except who you are. We pretend to unite, but instead we splinter each man, woman, and child into individually targeted, atomized entities, only to reassemble them into ethereality or profound insight. You decide.
Why are you doing this?
Duh? We are all Dead White Zombies!
Now wait a minute!
Dead White Zombies remains unstable. Everything we do happens spontaneously through natural and unnatural exuberance, supported by the unfettered play of the market, emotions, and passing thoughts. We are haunted by the unresolved issues of the past that speak in every image, thought, word, and gesture. But that is just fine.
Our financing is a deliberate haze full of clouded, opaque deals, charity, grants, including an erratic flow of mana, coercion, unusual incentives, fragile exemptions, contorted legalities, transferred air rights, carbon swaps, special zoning, offshore banking, of course, public-private wheeling, dealing, singing, and dancing, and babbling.
Dead White Zombies expands, and when it is not, and when it is no longer needed, it thins, reconfigures, and manifests only where, when, and how you least expect.
Because of this tenuous viability, Dead White Zombies must swallow more and more to survive; our goal is to do anything, anywhere, and we will gladly assume (or is it shirk) responsibility for both pleasure and enlightenment.
How can you do this?
Dead White Zombies are authorless, yet astonishingly authoritarian. China is our model. Are we not all living in one vast Chinatown now?
Humm?
Gleefully, we choose theater, performance, media, installation, whatever, as our megalomania to satisfy a dictatorial urge; we are not talking politics here, but entertainment. But aren't they the same? We will add nothing that you have not seen or heard before; we will just reconfigure and reaffirm, offering not canned laughter, but canned euphoria in high concentrations. And just when you think you know what we are, we will change again. We are on the run.
What are your plans for the future?
Dead White Zombies plan to engulf a whole city, state, nation, planet, universe. Dead White Zombies extend to infinity. We work in stealth and heretofore never-before-seen ways. We don't know what we're doing, but it seems to work.
Answer my question! And now?
Right now, Dead White Zombies are hyperventilating, screaming, laughing, and peeing their pants.
We are freewheeling the apocalypse, taking a seemingly harmless joy ride down the central expressway, back and forth, back and forth, through the heart of the unmitigated ebb and flow of colorful traffic. The mix master delights us. We want to perform there.
Aren't you finished?
Not quite. Hell no! Take a moment, reach over, and turn up the volume on that hot new song to complement the air-conditioned breeze.
Yes, you have figured us out by now. Dead White Zombies are dedicated to the profound and fundamental coherence of incoherence.
We are simply spastic tragic-comic figures on the top layer of a cultural wedding cake. Stick your finger in, lick the icing. Hummm, yum, tastes good!
OMG! Are you serious? You are crazy!
No. Yes. Maybe.
Know that we have resolved to stay up late and steadfastly work with all defunct and pumped-up mythologies, for that is all that is left of a bygone civilization. We do this all for you.
We scrounge for glimmers of meaning and order, picking over the shards of the real we find scattered on the pavement of our Plano cul-de-sac.
But make no mistake, Dead White Zombies are not dummies, though always on the lookout for stone-washed authenticity; honestly, we remain a little skeptical, maybe even paranoid, keenly aware of the lure of the sweet-smelling shadows of success, smooth surfaces of affluence, and plastic emptiness that can suck us in.
The mirages of substance waver all around. Emphasis on mirage. That's what we do. We make a mirage in the desert. Then, zap! We're gone.
Dead White Zombies says: “Look Ma, no hands!” Yes, Dead White Zombies’ origin goes back to Kindergarten. We make no apologies. We like riding our BMX bikes with the banana seat. We like finger-painting on cave walls. Caves are cool.
Dead White Zombies like spending its life indoors, chill and cool, floating in the massaging, crossing currents of life-affirming AC. Dead White Zombies love and relate to the animals in the Dallas Zoo. We often feel like them, looking out at the world, wondering who is caged.
Dead White Zombies stares at its computer monitor and at each big-screen TV in an HD home theatre, bass speakers thumping, and says...
“This is our window. Yes, real life is inside there, let me take a little walk in the great outdoors as I sink further into and become one with my nice new sofa. I'm in my very own reality show, how cool is that?"
WTF? And what do you hope to achieve?
Dead White Zombies will impregnate your mind with a sperm spew of ideas. For you are the new host. You, too, will be, if not already are, a zombie. Yes, hello? You are transforming; it is a process. This is how it happens; it is happening right now. Adjust, get comfortable. Give it time. Relax. Deep breath. Everything is going to be okay.
I can’t breathe! I need a little more time to think about all this, some comfort before my transformation.
We understand. How about Botox injections, a little collagen plasty in the meantime? Go shopping for a new pair of jeans? Buy something online, anything will do. Do something to distract you.
Silicone boob implants? Liposuction? Pop some pills, smoke a joint. Only a suggestion, man. How about that penis enlargement or a vaginoplasty? This is Texas, and size does matter. Yes, admit it, you need an upgrade, you are not good enough.
Now wait a doggone minute, y’all…
No, we can't! You can be and do whatever you want, says Dead White Zombies.
Are you fucking with me?
Absolutely! It is simple, amigo. More and more people, more and more things and needs, and fewer resources, time, and space.
Oh no! Poor me. I'm Helpless. What can I do?
You look worried. You should be. Naw, just kidding! Everything is as it should be...Why? Say it with me now... Because Dead White Zombies are the new species!
See, that was easy. Yes, we are all mindless wanderers, ones and zeros, part of an endless data stream pushed along through the vectors of existence.
Something is happening to me.
You are one of us. Welcome! Don't we feel better now?
