Aaron Moulton, a curator and anthropologist, discusses his project The Influencing Machine, a large-scale exhibition and publication examining the legacy of the Soros Center for Contemporary Arts (SCCA), a network of twenty Soros Centres for Contemporary Art that sprung up across Eastern Europe from the early to mid-1990s. Examining the mission of these centres, funded by Geroge Soros’ Open Society Institute (OSI), Moulton discusses how he first exposed his ideas at an online conference in 2020 where he elaborated how these networks pioneered forms of socially-engaged artistic practices that anticipated forms developed in Western art capitals while also serving as neoliberal social engineering projects. Critiquing how NGOs like the Open Society are supra-governmental forces that escape scrutiny while wielding a dangerous amount of power that approximates “a political party unto themselves,” Moulton observes how the fundamental failure of Soros’ project is that “it didn’t understand life without an opposition and how it would create a lot of hungry activists.” Moulton elaborates how The Influencing Machine is fundamentally an ethnography of the SCCA’s influence in the region where this NGO insinuated woke culture within curatorial practice as coercive philanthropy and corporations influenced creative practices that resulted in propaganda, not art. Noting how the SCCA created these museums of false consciousness throughout Eastern Europe, Moulton analyses the astroturfing of the art world at the hands of the Open Society Foundation and the tactics and strategies used to manipulate people into ideological obedience that has had enormous resonance throughout the west in recent years through identity politics’ tremendous ideological capture within western societies.

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