TED-SHED revisits the spectacular case of the so-called Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski, who used parcel bombs to maim and kill people in the USA in the 1980s and 90s. Kaczynski, originally a professor of mathematics, wrote anarchist manifestos calling for a completely new social order. The only way out of the dominant capitalist system that he could see was to destroy it. Hermit-like, he withdrew to a cabin in the woods from where, over many years, he carried out attacks using letter bombs, until he was arrested in 1998 and imprisoned for life.

 A total of three motifs are repeated over the wallpaper: a facial composite of the wanted terrorist, Kaczynski’s typewriter, and a box with assorted parcel bomb paraphernalia. The background is a numeric table, a list of numbers that contains a hidden code.

 In the center of the papered wall hangs a framed drawing of a wooden hut in the forest.

Aficionados will note that the picture doesn’t show Kaczynski’s cabin. It is a reproduction of a drawing from Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden, of 1854. Walden is one of the most influential works in the whole of American literature. It served as inspiration to both the environmental movement and the counterculture of the 1960s.

 In the space between these two opposites – Kaczynski, branded a terrorist, and the transcendentalist Thoreau, who even in pre-Marxist times had become an idol for a libertarian, self-sufficient, and nature-focused lifestyle – a charged field of meaning arises.

John Bock, 2023

Translation: Paul Richards