Rod Dickinson

Biography Rod Dickinson (UK, 1965) Lives and works in London. Rod Dickinson is an artist and lecturer based in London, his work explores ideas of belief and social control. Using interventions into social groups, and detailed research into moments of the past and present, he has made a series of meticulously re-enacted events that represent both the mechanisms that enable belief, and the social systems that make belief systems function. In 2002 he recreated Dr. Stanley Milgram's infamous 1961 social psychology experiment ‘Obedience to Authority’ at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow. Where participants were asked to give apparently lethal electric shocks to an unwilling victim to test how far they would be prepared to obey an authoritative scientist and inflict pain on a protesting person. Other more recent work has included a re-enactment of the audio-based psychological warfare programme that the FBI conducted in 1993 in Waco, Texas.