I was a DNR Meat Puppet
DJ Meisner is an artist based in San Francisco.
/Slash/ Art
1150 25th st, building B, San Francisco, CA 94107
January 10 – April 18, 2026
When I was a kid, I used to dream about getting pictures of the tube, the ephemeral rotating funnel of water that surfers chase. The pictures have been taken before; it wasn’t the novelty of the image I desired, but that it would be mine. Part of the dream was the motion, too. The temperature changing across my body as the curved wall of water rose up over me, always from left to right, a GoPro in my right hand set to take 30 pictures in one second. The shutter button, a spring loaded silver hemisphere, tired my finger from strain. It was built for the water, the rigid housing that kept my camera sealed off from the world.
These were my first dreams of want: with a camera, taking a photo of something I wanted to see again. I would wake up, not in some fictional version of Hawaii-Mexico-Puerto Rico-Iceland developed out of an admixture of personal experience and voracious consumption of every video GoPro ever posted on YouTube, home in my bed. The Desire dissipated, and it would be a while before I captured pictures like the ones I dreamt of. Years later, when I did, I learned the lesson that many photographers already know: the image does not capture capital ‘E’ experience.
In 1971, Robert A. Monroe published Journeys Out the Body, a catalogue of descriptive accounts of his many out-of-the-body experiences (OBE) in the decade prior. Monroe, at the time a radio tycoon, would go on to produce a series of binaural beat tapes called The Gateway Tapes, meant to help induce and guide OBEs. The Defense Intelligence Agency started sending officers to The Monroe Institute, first recorded in 1978, for the on-paper interest of developing psychic spies as a part of Gondola Wish, a subproject of what is now known as the Stargate Project.
In January of 2024, during a weekly Twitch Stream for Do Not Research, Joshua Citarella played us (remote) viewers the first of many tapes that The Monroe Institute has produced as a part of Monroe’s Gateway Process. For the past two years since then, I have listened to The Gateway Tapes every day.
I’ve tried to synthesize my experiences, absolutely untransmittable. I write them case scenario, I sound crazy. I’ve given experiences, and they’ve been somewhat successful. People seem to be receptive, but even those talks are largely sanitized; the contents of those talks are not the craziest things that have happened to me since listening to the tapes. But they, transmitted orally, like an infectious disease, are the most legible.
Writing may not have a future. Vilém Flusser charts this out. That writing used to take effort to inscribe into clay, that what you wrote had to be important enough to write down. And that writing creates historical consciousness (whether this is an accurate consciousness is another issue), that summarizing the complexities of The Fall of Rome into alphanumeric characters written and read in sequence is a development of shared reality, institutional trust, and eventually historical and political consciousness. But the trajectory changed with computation, with what he calls ‘the apparatus’. We think we are writing and using the typewriter or keyboard as a tool, but the tool is not a tool. It does not do what I want, its use is limited, and so my intention with it is limited. This hammer can only strike nails, which sucks if what I am doing has nothing to do with nails. The mediums are sometimes in the way. You are not truly expressing yourself on your instagram, you are performing within certain metrics and algorithms, moderated by a new mediating priest class, what Flusser would call the programmers. And maybe it makes sense that writing doesn’t have a future: it is a relatively new development in evolutionary history. Maybe that is why our subconscious doesn’t communicate in written language but in images. Maybe that’s why writing is decently automated.
Those who believe in writing, in the utility of writing, believe in it not because of reactionary Luddism, or what Flusser indicates as the persistence of “the useless appendix”, but because of faith. There must be something, albeit currently scientifically unmeasurable, that makes writing important, that makes its future necessary. The cycle between hope and cope ever churns.
Some will say that the inability to convey the importance of my spiritual experiences with The Gateway Tapes is a skill issue, and maybe it is. But it is in fact an apparatus issue as well. This tool of writing is not the one that brings me closer to womb-like communication. There are things I experienced that defied my understanding of cause and effect, of perception, of memory and material.
In 1974, Philip K. Dick had a spiritual experience that he spent the rest of his life mulling over. He wrote four books about it, as well as an 8000+ page exegesis of his ramblings, the meat of which was published in 2011. The first book, Radio Free Albemuth (published posthumously in 1985), is about a divine intelligence called VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligent System) recruiting people through information downloads beamed into people’s brains and subliminal messaging in the media during the rule of a paranoid and fascist US president Ferris F. Fremont (FFF for 666). Fremont rises to power by working up the ranks of the intelligence community and enacting assassinations of his political opponents, all while blaming a fictitious underground group of sleeper cell communists called Aramchek, for whom, he alleges, the Communist Party of America is merely a front. Once he’s in power, Fremont’s political party, Friends of the American People (FAPers), acts as a police force against suspected dissidents, getting friends and family members to rat out each other using sexual blackmail. Fremont hyperstitions Aramchek into being. Once that symbol of resistance was out there, its vacuum was filled by VALIS and those it influenced. Towards the end of the book, the main character (Dick’s author surrogate) is sentenced to 50 years in a concentration camp (called “Work Therapy”). Dick argues with his fellow prisoner Leon about where salvation is supposed to come from, an age old gnostic argument. Leon tells him that this heavenly organization Dick works for is wrong, that he’s fighting for the wrong salvation. “It’s not worth it Phil. It has to be in this world...This is where the suffering is...Anyone who loves his life loses it; anyone who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”
In VALIS, PKD’s next novel, the first one published about his spiritual experience, a more personal iteration of the story unfolds. This one ends with his schizophrenic alter Horselover Fat traveling the world in search of the next incarnation of Sophia, the syzygy of Jesus. Phil, hardened by the experiences he had throughout the novel, becomes an agoraphobe, staying home watching the tube to fill the air of loneliness. On TV, a commercial for FOOD KING ends and instantly the next for FELIX THE CAT begins, ‘KING’ having preceded ‘FELIX’. ‘King Felix’ had been the two word cipher, used to indicate those serving VALIS. Did it mean something? Had a call signal gone out? Phil doesn’t know.
On Halloween 2025, I woke up with an awful foreboding feeling that something was wrong. I tried to ignore it and went to work. At the time, our DNR book club was reading Does Writing Have a Future? by Vilém Flusser. It isn’t the kind of book you can pick up and put down easily, and given my mood, I wasn’t reading while walking as I usually do. Instead, I was listening to the podcast Otherworld. In this episode, a man describes how, when he was younger, a demon repeatedly possessed people in his life, including himself, in attempts to murder his younger brother. Friends and family, unaware of the circumstances, would come to the house. Sometimes their eyes would roll back, and they would suddenly try to attack the brother. In one case, someone grabbed a knife from a shelf and attempted to stab him, failing only because someone else intervened.
As I was listening to this, a man was walking toward me on the sidewalk. Just as we were about to pass each other, he lunged at me with a knife and tried to stab me in the neck. I ducked out of the way, stunned and confused. He continued walking past me, muttering, “my bad.” I stopped the podcast and stared at him, becoming smaller and smaller in my field of view. Had I been reading while walking, I would not have seen him in time. I would likely have been stabbed in the neck and killed. But because of the strange dread I’d felt all morning, my eyes were not looking down at a book but were looking up at the world. I watched him continue down the sidewalk and lunge at another woman with the knife. She too noticed in time and moved out of the way. I turned the corner to try to get a photo of his face, but he was gone. Not vanished, just couldn’t find him. I went home early that day, deeply shaken. While driving home, I unpaused the podcast. Almost immediately, the man began talking about his experiences with the Gateway Tapes. I’m sure it’s nothing.
Later, when I listened to the tapes, I intended on asking, rather frantically, why this had happened to me. What was I supposed to learn from it? I woke up feeling much worse. I couldn’t tell whether I’d received an answer that disturbed me, or whether it was not receiving an answer that disturbed me.
Later again, I pathetically relay to my friend George what had happened and how I thought that maybe I had brought this about with all this escaping of the physical realm and clear addiction to synchronicity, how maybe seeing an onslaught of videos of Iryna Zarutska being stabbed in the neck during a pre-sleep doomscroll had sent me into a manifesting state of hypnagogia, how it had to mean something. He tells me, familiar with my leanings, in what I understood to be an act of George-Lennie mercy, that I had not brought this upon myself but that I simply witnessed pure cold-equation evil mere hours ago and it reverberated to other parts of my day. Moments later, having calmed down, I receive a text from a different friend. She had sent me a picture of a party decoration at our friend’s house, a ‘Wanted Undead or Alive’ poster, one customized for everyone who had planned on attending. This picture was of me, wanted undead or alive, for the crime of demon summoning. I figured it was time for me to go to bed.
While I was driving home, I noticed the car in front of me was taking the exact same route I was. I wasn’t intentionally following it, we just happened to be going in the same direction. That’s when I noticed it had a vanity license plate. The first three characters are 764. I’m sure it’s nothing.
From January 10th to April 18th, I have a solo show up at /Slash/ called Who’s Pulling Your Strings?. The title comes from the essay of the same name by Mark Fisher of the CCRU. The essay is framed as a transcribed speech given to a victim’s support group that a ‘bemused colleague’ found online and shared with the CCRU. The original author of the speech, Justine Morrison, accuses the CCRU of, in short, doing ritualistic trauma-based mind control as part of Project Monarch, an alleged offshoot of MK-Ultra. Morrison says she was kidnapped/rescued by the Kowalskys, who themselves had escaped soviet mind-control, before putting her through intense deprogramming. Reading between the lines, one can see that the deprogramming she was put through likely consisted of the same tactics the CCRU was accused of doing. This echoes the actions of the real-life Cult Awareness Network, an anti-cult organization that would put people through intense ‘deprogramming’ sessions, seemingly identical to brainwashing. As Fisher puts it, “Deprogramming simultaneously retro-produced the program, just as witch-trials preceded devil-worship and regressive hypnotherapy preceded false memory syndrome. Yet, once these ‘fictions’ are produced, they function in and as reality.”
The show is yet another one of my attempts to, as the exhibition text says, explore “the effects of our unprecedented exposure to algorithmic flows of images and symbols.” It is heavily inspired by text, namely the essay mentioned above, Aberration in the Heartland of the Real by Dr. Wendy Painting, Chaos by Tom O’Neill, Hallucinating Sense in the Era of Infinity-Content by Caroline Busta, Poisoner in Chief by Stephen Kinzer, and Society of the Psyop by Trevor Paglen.
When I research these things, there is no standing outside of them. It’s this meta-dynamic that interests me. Very frequently, there is a much more material basis for these beliefs than one would think. The things you thought are totally untrue are actually very reasonable extrapolations of increasingly insane histories. There is no inoculation to learning about these things, no containment, no safety from infohazard infection. It is hard to believe that the project of behavioral modification, MKULTRA, was a failure — we literally have dopamine-milking media networks that do a great job of modifying behavior. It is hard to believe that the project of developing remote viewing via psychics, Project Stargate, was a failure — we have global surveillance sensing apparatuses that can predict our feelings and track us in real time. As with most things, they are just now privatized and automated.
On March 15th, I did a panel with Jak Ritger and Tibor Dieters about the show and these topics:
We live in the world where it all means something. We do not live in the solely material world, cordoned off from the spiritual world. Borders are breached, containment is never held, a million ghostly Wuhan’s bloom.
DNR used me as a science experiment, I'm gonna kill someone and I hope they get to listen in on it.
goated as always