The series meta content, 2001-3 began with a series of black and white photographs I took in
Macedonia during the 1990s.

In 2001 I was working with the idea of conceptual trompe l'oeil images - manipulating photo-
graphs to make them appear as paintings, video stills, etc. In late 2001 I began experimenting
with the idea of making 'faux-night vision' images which imitated military surveillance technology.

At about the same time I became acquainted with a text by the new media scholar Denisa Kera.
The text was part of a larger project by scholars at the Charles University in Prague, in coopera-
tion with the Open Society Fund, researching myths and archetypes and Balkan nationalism. The
text in question was part of a larger analysis of nationalist websites. The text on Macedonia pos-
ited a unique paradigm for Macedonian sites. Instead of concentrating on Macedonian nationalist
myths these websites seemed obsessed by the myths of their neighbors- what Ms. Kera referred
to as 'mythophobia

For me the ideas of 'mythophobia' and fear of ones neighbors fit well with the paranoic images I
was creating. Furthermore it was very much the opposite of the grand myths found in those neigh-
boring countries- a kind of negative (like a photographic negative) of 'Greater Serbia' or the Greek
'Megala Idea'.

I have incorporated source code from Denisa Kera's original site (http://balkan2001.webpark.cz)
into the images, which are all taken in Skopje. To further the 'negative effect' many of the images
I have used point to the minority and non-Macedonian (Slav) population (Albanian, Roma, Turkish).