In Defense of Ghosts, 2012, live action and animated video, (13:20 min)
IDoG is partially based on a 2500 year-old essay by Chinese philosopher and Confucius contemporary, Mo Tzu (Mozi), entitled “Explaining Ghosts.” The lecturer argues for society’s moral need to believe in and worship ghosts, whose existence is not only proven by the Founding Fathers, but the Founding Fathers themselves are ghosts. His misinterpretation of American History is a satire of the commonplace misappropriation of the Founding Fathers, god, and American history for political causes.
The March of History, 2012, digital video, (15:10 min)
“The March of History” is a faux educational video that is styled in the Masterpiece Theater vein. A bombast introduces the subject of history: the difficulties of the genre, its fallibility, the historian’s role, who should and should not be included in history, etc. ad nauseam. While the historian makes no specific claim for history’s meaning, his actions, in the end, reveals the true message. While the video is unabashedly about class disparity, it also parodies the distantiating utterances of post-modernist academia.