Looking for Ely Bahiana

There is a tool on the Internet that searches recent tweets for a given word or phrase, and tells you how people feel about the string based on the other words in the tweet. The tool itself is not especially accurate. I showed it to a classmate during a tutorial.

We found Ely Bahiana when we searched for “coca cola.”

“AMERICA is COCA COLA destroy COCA COLA Is PUERTO RICO destroy IT AMERICA is TEXAS DESTROY IT is HUSTON do it! IS SAN FRANCISCO do IT ALL”

Attached to the tweet was this image:

I was immediately drawn in. “America is Texas”?

The tweet was posted on October 16th 2017. The image features, purportedly, a photo-graph of the artist. She has posted a huge amount of these mostly-incomprehensible tweets dating back to 2010. There is a different name a little further down her feed – not Ely Bahiana, but Ely S. Kosanovich.

Her Twitter feed is full of very similar media, and article retweets that suggest a right-wing leaning, and conspiracy theories in the liberal-elite vein. A few words keep repeating, all relatively out of context - kings, princes, and saints. The faces of tech gurus like Gates, Brin and Page pop up in disconcerting photoshopped images that suggest a mood of rev-erence.

This is the woman from the first photo we found. Light brown hair, with bangs down past her eyebrows. Denim jacket, sunglasses – a seemingly normal photograph.

Obviously she has an artistic leaning – but judging only by her tweets, it is difficult to know whether she is acting with irony or sincerity. From her Twitter feed, I can see two possibili-ties for who this person is - if she really exists.

She might be the web identity of some kind of experimental net artist, fluent in the nuances of the internet’s stranger corners. I guessed that this self-effacing artistry was probably the case because of the commitment the author has to the sheer volume of content and its absurdity. Ely posts photographs of creepy masks similar to Zardulu’s – the anonymous quasi-performance artist investigated in an episode of Reply All. The slapdash, Web 1.0 aesthetic she employs would feel a lot more comfortable among MySpace-inspired net artists, post-ironic Facebook meme pages or vaporwave album art.

The other possibility, more disconcertingly, is that Kosanovich is a real person, genuinely driven by fragmented and indecipherable conspiracy theories. Perhaps she could be de-scribed as an outsider artist, filled with genuine delusion but an overriding, self-justifying artistic passion. After all – very, very few of her tweets have ever been liked.

There is a link in one of her tweets, from three days before. Mystified at this point, but with morbid fascination, I click. elykosanovichgallery.jimdo.com. What first catches my eye is the header. “YOU are WELCOME by Ely Kosanovich Q & E. THE 26 WESTERN KINGS page & LINKS RELATED to 26 WK.” WK - "Western kings”.

My ethno-nationalist radar begins to ping. It’s a symptom of spending too much time on the internet, where fascist ideology breeds like black mould.

In the lengthier header, she also presents:

“Ms. Ely Kosanovich Queen and EmPRESS ROYAL Eli of Allah of Madina Q.E.M.A.A.S.”. “Baroness message plaza”. Message board and comments page. EK Blog writings po-ems. Sponsors, products, contribuitions[sic]. “REAL ESTATE for SALE? -wordings NO PHOTOS- US$ 10.00 PREPAID PAYPAL.”

This immediately stops feeling like a publicity stunt for a quirky artist. This feels, instead, like the work of someone obsessed, for over seven years, with curating a web presence that is, for all her effort, virtually buried.

Who the hell is Ely Kosanovich?

If you scroll down, you see more of the same apparently randomly-capitalised, barely co-herent text. She talks about the Bible. She talks about the 26 Western kings and the 18 Occident kings again. She talks about Allah and selling bread. There is just so much con-tent here, paragraphs and paragraphs of it, each accompanied by these images that just defy explanation. I scroll further like a mistranslated final boss speech in a Final Fantasy game.

She states she is selling:

• The King’s blue rings ($2500); • The red Prince ring ($2200); • The green ring of the knights and ninjas; • Silver red stone ($1800); • Princess ring ($2200); • The bracelet ($350.00, to wear only on the right side wrist); • the T-shirt;

The list continues like this - the perfume, the dress, et cetera. It’s an entire brand.

She lists a few of her 51 kings:

• Bill Gates (Master of Cerymony) • Michael Bloomberg & Raymond Myles • Jack Dorsey & Joao Doria • Jeff Bewkes & Sam Altman • Jeff Bezos & Steve Morgan • Jack Ma & Larry Kim • Pete Cashmore & Larry Page • Elon Musk & Dieter Knechtel • Donald Trump & Peter Thiel. • “MORE KINGS TO COME” (Looks like we’ll have to wait.)

I notice that “6th” keeps coming up – linked, apparently, to the “Royal 6th Order”. There seem to be 26 kings, and 25 parallel kings, but Bill Gates does not have a parallel king, because he is the “Master of Cerymony”. This adds up to 51 kings.

Kosanovich wants money to buy a ranch so that she may raise horses. These horses will be used in a horse race for the 26 Western kings. She encourages all 51 kings to own their own fast horses. Billions will be made for the city which hosts these annual races. Kosanovich owns 40% of the shares going debut or IPO in China.

The previously-incomplete list of kings continues:

• Warren Buffett & Julian Robertson • Arnold Schwazznnegger[sic] & Jes Staley • Robert Herjavac & Robert Kovacik • Robert Mercer & Brian Williams • Larry Ellison & Pedro Caixinha • Steve Case & Anthony Robbins • Steve Forbes & Roy Beck • Eugene Kaspersky & Vladimir Putin • Steve Wynn & Steve Madden • Ben Carson & Herman Cain • Richard Branson & Morgan Freeman • Karl Largefeld[sic] & Manolo Blahnik • Guy Kawasaki & George Takei • Carlos Slim & Oscar Amancio • Al Gore & ———— (“will fill in here soon”) • Tim Cook & J.P. Morgan • Sergey Brin & ?

Well, she’s right. There are 26 kings here

Most are, evidently, politicians, investors, CEOs, Hollywood A-listers and the like. But those criteria are not explicitly laid out. The plutocratic Koch brothers (#8 on Forbes’ Rich List) are missing, as are the Waltons (#15, 16, 17), which is a clue that there’s something a little more mysterious going on. These kings, much like the news articles she often retweets, are varied in their politics - they don’t seem to have anything in common, no substantial ‘leaning’, besides their substantial wealth and influence.

Kosanovich announced on the 2nd of May that Brendan Wallace is now Sergey Brin’s par-allel king. She states that only one more king is needed before she can begin, ominously, “ACTIVE PRODUCTIVE.”

A hint of a selection process emerges when she discusses the princesses, more concrete than my guesses before. Kosanovich is awaiting the princess’s “royal signs of budness” before she declares them. When a woman exhibits her royal sign of budness, she either becomes, or is revealed to be, a princess. Among those listed are:

• Laura Dern

• Zoe Kravitz

• Julia Louis Dreyfus

• Margaret Atwood

All of the princesses listed in this particular section won Emmys in 2017.What could it mean? Could it mean anything at all?

When I trawl a little deeper, I discover her Facebook profile. Ely has 4,202 friends. She shares a lot of content: articles on current affairs, celebrities, politics, a few times per hour.

She makes the claim that the California wildfires were “commissioned”. Just like her Twit-ter feed, the engagement on these posts is minimal.

A Google search reveals relationships I can only assume to be based on her ex-husband, another Kosanovich. From the information I found (privacy law in the U.S. from what I hear, is lacking) they no longer live at the same address. I guess that Bahiana is her maiden name.

I find a YouTube video with her name in the title, from Psychic Eye Books in Sherman Oaks. And here she is, finally - the reclusive Kosanovich, née Bahiana, herself. She speaks flu-ent English, and she seems lucid, well-spoken, even funny. “Why don’t you come and see me?” she asks. Ely, I wish I could.

Queen and Empress Royal Eli of Allah of Madina seems to believe that the 26 kings, their 25 parallel kings, the mysterious, innumerable princes, and Emmy-award winning princesses, will one day come together to create Heaven’s kingdom on Earth - the Royal 6th Order. It’s reminiscent of flat-earth, millenarianism, numerology, or Illuminati conspira-cy theories. Hardly an unusual theme, but the details certainly are.

I find myself kind of wishing that my first guess had been correct - that Bahiana/Kosanovich was just some kind of self-obfuscating artwork. It all seemed like too much. A former ‘celebrity psychic reader’, and now, well, you can look at her blog for yourself. What

drew me to her in the first place - those bewildering digital artworks - seem so kitschy, so contrived, so anachronistic, so much in common with early internet aesthetics, and the in-ternet’s brief avant-garde obsession with them. But the text, so utterly kludgy, all felt so wrong.

Every time I read her writing, I feel like I’m peering into the mind of someone who is deeply convinced of some broad, eldritch conspiracy theory. Every time I see her artwork, I feel certain again that this is all part of some post-identity performance art.

It deeply bothers me that I haven’t heard of anything like this before - “26 western kings”, “Royal 6th Order”, and “royal God buds” - no matter how hard I search, it all turns up zero results.

I had found a mailing address, but it turned out to only belong to a commercial mailbox. All my trails have gone cold. I’m stumped.

I’ve sent her an email. Maybe one day I’ll get a reply from Ely herself, and understand what’s going on. Or maybe I never will.