A little history of the flat Earth

Alex­an­dra Midal : The title of your exhib­i­tion, Keep it Flat, refers to the 2020 US elec­tion campaign slogan of the incum­bent Pres­id­ent, Donald Trump. After being elec­ted in 2016 with the very popu­lar “Make Amer­ica Great Again, ” he was running for re-elec­tion chant­ing “Keep it Great.” You change one word and Great becomes Flat. What does this change imply? Why this refer­ence to Trump?

Emma Pflieger : The refer­ence to Trump is related to his inaug­ur­a­tion cere­mony in Janu­ary 2017. His commu­nic­a­tions adviser, Kelly­anne Conway ^[1], denied on NBC how sparse the crowd was, despite foot­age show­ing that it was much thin­ner than at Obama’s inaug­ur­a­tion in 2009. She spoke of “altern­at­ive facts.”

Antoine Fœglé : There was a strong resur­gence of flat earth theory on YouTube^[2] in 2016; it coin­cided with the US elec­tion campaign and the Brexit refer­en­dum in Britain. For us, Keep it Flat comes from the direct analogy with the disc shape of flat earth theory, but is also linked to the ambi­ent relativ­ism of post-truth. In this context, post-truth is based on the idea that factual truth has less appeal than a commonly held opin­ion^[3]. All inform­a­tion is placed on the same level, without distinc­tion, in order to serve popu­list interests and the narrat­ive prepared by the group.

A.M. : In your opin­ion, is there a common under­stand­ing of conspir­acy theor­ies?

E.P. : With the decline of grand narrat­ives, the common thread in all conspir­acy theor­ies is the search for mean­ing and the need for coher­ence in an alien­at­ing capit­al­ist world. This search for mean­ing involves a process that drives a series of actions: invest­ig­at­ing and seek­ing evid­ence that the powers-that-be in this world are lying and acting in small groups against the common interest. The aim is to wake up a popu­la­tion that has been put to sleep by lies. Another common feature of most conspir­acy theor­ies is the idea of a hidden purpose in everything that happens. Noth­ing happens by chance, as evid­enced by the famous “By Design, not by Chance” slogan of creation­ists, who believe that the world and everything asso­ci­ated with it were created by a divine power, and completely out of our hands.

A.M. : What inter­ested you in partic­u­lar about flat earthers after having worked on the creation­ists?

E.P. : In 2019, Antoine and I found a video on YouTube, a song called Hello Flat Earth, celeb­rat­ing the flat earth. It is a cover of the global hit Hello by Adele. While the inter­na­tional sing­er’s version is a romantic ballad, the lyrics sung by flat earth singer Amber Plaster say that we live on a flat earth, surroun­ded by a wall of ice covered by a glass dome. She explains that NASA is lying to us and that the laws of grav­ity, for example, do not exist. She argues that man has never set foot on the moon and that the Bible is the scientific text of refer­ence for cosmo­logy. The video shows the Earth from above the clouds, filmed by a camera on a weather balloon. It shows the hori­zon line of the Earth… which is flat. The process chosen to promote this theory is to manip­u­late and use the appeal of popu­lar culture to high­light evid­ence of the great conspir­acy being organ­ised against us. Popu­lar culture is used as a Trojan horse. We know that the view­ing of this video had a start­lingly reveal­ing effect on view­ers wonder­ing about the shape of the Earth. After being posted on numer­ous YouTube chan­nels and clock­ing up a few million views, it was awar­ded a prize at the Flat Earth Inter­na­tional Confer­ence in 2018. This event brought together self-starters, sing­ers, artists, speak­ers and YouTubers who were strongly and convin­cingly commit­ted to promot­ing flat earth theory. Certain that they hold the truth, they call into ques­tion each and every polit­ical and scientific insti­tu­tion.

A.M. : How do they ques­tion these insti­tu­tions?

A.F. : Samuel Rowbotham was the first modern flat earther. He opposed Newto­nian and Coper­nican theor­ies ^[4], which he considered to be disin­carn­ate and falla­cious math­em­at­ical theor­ies. Instead, he decided to use his obser­va­tion and intu­ition to estab­lish convin­cing, intel­li­gible reas­on­ing. He formu­lated and presen­ted evid­ence that the Earth was undeni­ably flat. In the follow­ing years, he tran­scribed his obser­va­tions and published them in 1849 in a pamph­let entitled Zetetic Astro­nomy: Earth Not a Globe. In 1881, he published a revised, exten­ded version.

A.M. : So, he used his own physiolo­gical exper­i­ence to write laws that are supposed to be valid for all human beings, thus oppos­ing any other form of know­ledge, espe­cially theor­et­ical know­ledge. He used his body as his compass and invited fellow human beings to do the same in order to become aware of the exist­ence of a vast conspir­acy to conceal the fact that the Earth is flat…

A.F. : Abso­lutely! By doing so, he contra­dicts Descartes and Galileo, who postu­lated that our senses deceive us. For Rowbotham, the exper­i­ence of our senses is the found­a­tion of our rela­tion­ship with the world: if the hori­zon is flat, then the Earth is flat. In the chapter entitled “The conquest of space and the dimen­sion of man, ”^[5] philo­sopher Hannah Arendt exam­ines the divide between the world of sens­ory exper­i­ence and that of scientific truth. She distin­guishes between the scholar and the layman by explain­ing that, in order to go beyond the appear­ance of the phenom­ena that govern the world, schol­ars must renounce their senses. She goes on to explain that this is why they resort to math­em­at­ics, which they consider to be the best language for access­ing scientific truth. As for the laymen who are unable to under­stand this language, they can only rely on their sens­ory percep­tions to try to under­stand the world around them. The more science allows the world to be tested, the less unin­formed people are able to grasp it–al­though the possib­il­ity is not totally closed to them. In this context, which char­ac­ter­ises present times, the layman, or the flat earther along with many others, has only his senses to help him.

E.P. : What fascin­ates us about Rowbotham is that he borrows from forms of scientific reas­on­ing to estab­lish his laws. He seems to think that it is enough for things to look like they are true for them to be true. Rowbotham was a skilled speaker (there is much evid­ence of this) with the abil­ity to adapt to his audi­ence in order to convince them. For example, he frequently asked ques­tions about the spher­i­city of the Earth to which no one had answers, only to instil doubt. This form of gaslight­ing, ^[6] i.e., answer­ing one ques­tion by asking another, is still used today in flat earth rhet­oric under the acronym JAQ: Just Asking a Ques­tion.

A.M. : So Rowbotham proposed a form of educa­tion through evan­gel­ism, is that right?

A.F. : He was the first to use the train and the print­ing press to dissem­in­ate his know­ledge to a wide audi­ence^[7]. We can there­fore describe his prac­tice as propa­ganda. His speech was delivered at a time when the Royal Soci­ety in London had already embraced the theses of Darwin, Newton and Galileo. Rowbotham began a race against time by oppos­ing the teach­ings proposed in large English cities, which were in line with modern science. He revived the conflict between rural and urban. When we decon­struc­ted the gene­a­logy of flat earth­ism, we noticed that all the major play­ers of this theory had a perfect under­stand­ing of what was at stake with the mass commu­nic­a­tion of their times. They knew then, and still know now, two centur­ies later, how to capit­al­ise on these tech­no­lo­gies to spread their theor­ies.

E.P. : Lady Eliza­beth Blount took over from Rowbotham. As a creation­ist, she was partic­u­larly opposed to Darwin­ism, science and modern medi­cine. She published a romance novel, A Song Writer’s Story (1898), in which she inser­ted sheet music and songs in praise of flat earth. The same prin­ciple of the popu­lar song is repeated by Amber Plaster’s cover of Hello. Some of Bloun­t’s scores were so success­ful that they were even played at Crys­tal Palace in London. Blount was also the first to use visual evid­ence, hiring a photo­grapher to take pictures to demon­strate the valid­ity of her exper­i­ments: the photo­graphed hori­zon is flat.

A.M. : What is your role as artists? What urgent matter is your exhib­i­tion respond­ing to?

A.F. : Since 2015, flat earthers have made abund­ant use of social media to provide a simple and reas­sur­ing answer to a real­ity whose complex­ity seems insol­uble. In this age of hyper­con­nec­tion, the over­abund­ance of inform­a­tion creates blind­ness^[8]. The more inform­a­tion there is, the less the indi­vidual is able to process it, the more diffi­cult it is to create mean­ing, and the more inform­a­tion we demand. The brain tends to select inform­a­tion that confirms indi­vidual beliefs, inter­pret­ing and fiction­al­ising^[9] the inform­a­tion to create a logical mean­ing and to estab­lish the coher­ence that it requires between the two. In the case of conspir­acy theory, the prin­ciple of apophenia ^[10], as theor­ised in 1958 by German psychi­at­rist Klaus Conrad, plays a key role. Conrad discovered that a healthy indi­vidual suffer­ing from para­noia tends to make connec­tions between appar­ently unre­lated objects and ideas. Apophenia trig­gers a feel­ing of creat­ive epiphany, which is at the root of delu­sional attacks; the whole universe turns around and rearranges itself around the indi­vidual, corrob­or­at­ing and making sense of all their suspi­cions. Through this epiphany, the indi­vidual finally returns to the centre of their system of know­ledge, to the centre of what we call the “world-disc.” This is the start­ing point from which we began our invest­ig­a­tion.

A.M. : You show that, faced with a worry­ing infla­tion of inform­a­tion, flat earth­ism allows us to enjoy a comfort­able feel­ing of secur­ity…

A.F.… where flat earthers finally feel they have power over events and our envir­on­ment.

A.M. : The triple Freu­dian wound (we are not at the centre of the universe, we are descend­ants of the ape, we are not masters of ourselves) is healed because the flat earther regains control over his exist­ence. Tell us about the objects you exhibit.

E.P. : To decon­struct the gene­a­logy of the flat earth theory, we have gathered a series of arte­facts from popu­lar culture, science, reli­gion, polit­ics and cinema. Each one shows how this theory clings to and is artic­u­lated around events. For example, the role of Walt Disney, along with engin­eer Wernher von Braun, who facil­it­ated the valid­a­tion of budgets for the Apollo programmes by publish­ing educa­tional book­lets for the general public. We present three of these–­Mars and Beyond, Tomor­row the Moon and Man and Weather Satel­lites–which explain the space missions in simple terms. We also have a version of the jumper worn by little Danny Torrance (played by Danny Lloyd) in Stan­ley Kubrick’s film Shin­ing (1980) that refers to the Apollo 11 mission. Accord­ing to flat earthers, this knit­wear crys­tal­lises the idea that Kubrick and his special effects director, Douglas Trum­bull, filmed the fake moon land­ing of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on 20 July 1969. To capture the complex­ity of the conspir­acy issue, we also felt it import­ant to show arte­facts unre­lated to the flat earth theory. These repres­ent polit­ical and scientific contro­ver­sies that have contrib­uted to the erosion of trust in insti­tu­tions.

A.M. : Why do you use a train as the cent­ral medium of your exhib­i­tion?

E.P. : Used as a narrat­ive device, the train recre­ates a linear­ity within the ocean of inform­a­tion in which we find ourselves. It allows us to recon­struct mean­ing in the hetero­gen­eous inform­a­tional land­scape through which it travels. The train is also the idea of the closed circuit of the “world-disc” that devel­ops with every analogy between the differ­ent arte­facts and the elements it films. The train re-enacts apophenia in action among flat earthers.

A.F. : To conclude, we could use the way in which Michel Foucault, in Les Mots et les Choses^[11], describes how, in the 17^th century, the prin­ciple of resemb­lance played “a build­ing role in the know­ledge of West­ern culture”^[12] and how it “organ­ised the play of symbols and allowed the know­ledge of visible and invis­ible things.”^[13] More precisely, with the example of the theory of signa­tures, Foucault returns to the analogy of forms by show­ing how a nut was supposed to be able to cure head­aches because of its resemb­lance to the human brain. This game of corres­pond­ences served a dream of unity where everything in the universe responds one thing to another. Under­stand­ing of the world was based on a search for signs using the accu­mu­la­tion of formal resemb­lances where everything visible on our scale should have an equi­val­ent in the invis­ib­il­ity of the micro­cosm. The system was thus self-suffi­cient, circu­lar and perfectly closed, like the flat earther’s dream of unity. Although the original context of this theory is quite differ­ent from today’s system of hyper-inform­a­tion, when we examined its logic, we noticed how the work­ing model of flat earther know­ledge always proceeds in the same way, by wind­ing itself in a circu­lar fash­ion. As forms play an essen­tial role in the flat earth contro­versy, we felt it was essen­tial that we appro­pri­ate them too. The form of the circu­lar­ity of reas­on­ing thus finds its way into the exhib­i­tion mech­an­ism used by our train. However, if you take your time and look care­fully, you will see that the circu­lar mech­an­ism of the train is only a decoy foiled by our arte­facts, our films and the phantom ride, but we will say no more about it for the moment.