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This is the portal to our laboratory.
The laboratory has links to pages based on each projects.
•Evolving Moisture
•An Improbable Waveform
•Vectors
•The Laughing Death
•Germ Theory
•Ondine's Curse
•The Flesh Touch •Disquietly Encased In Skin
•In Which Nature •Abhors a Vacuum •Bleeding Ground •Prototype/Implant
•Methods of Understanding
Vectors 2001-2004
photographs • text • installation
Its not science fiction its bio fiction. The fantasy of future colonization of the new frontier is taking place not in outer space but in inner space. The terrain in and under our skin maps out the building material and the architectural blue prints for the 21st century. Vectors, the photographic project which I am presenting participates in the investigation of dermal and sub-dermal schemas or strains. It posits the question; where does the system end and I begin? Has the complexity of our web of communication and information exchange permeated our skin — our first defense against infection? Are we trapped in a labyrinth, doomed to be hypnotized watching mass data exchanges, cheep flashing lights, all the while listening to poor quality audio? Or, has our culture and its artifacts illuminated a conclusion drawn long ago that we are the system and the systems in us. How much longer can we stand by mesmerized in an electronic feedback loop enjoying the falsity of the show, in a self deceptive jouissane- or painful pleasure as the theorist Slavoj Zizek has described it or would say.
Baudrillard in his essay "The Ecstasy of Communication" asks the questions.
And what is reality dissolved before our very eyes? Not into nothingness, but into the more real than real (the triumph of simulacra)? What if the modern universe of communication, of hyper-communication, had plunged us, not into the senseless, but into a tremendous saturation of meaning entirely consumed by its success- without the game, the secret, or distance? If all publicity were the apology, not of a [product, but of publicity? If information no longer had anything to do with an event, but were concerned with promoting information itself as the event? If history were only an accumulative, instantaneous memory without a past? If our society were no longer that of the "spectacle" as was said in í68, but. Cynically, that of ceremony? If politics were increasingly a dated continent, replaced by the dizziness of terrorism, of a generalized hostage-taking, this very figure of an impossible exchange? If all this mutation did not arise out of a manipulation of subjects and opinions, as some believed, but out of a logic without subject, a logic in which opinion has collapsed into fascination? If pornography signified the end of the sexual as such, from the instant that sex in its obscene from has invaded everything? If seduction followed desire and love, that is, once again the reign of the object and that of the subject? If as a result, strategy replaced psychology? If it were no longer a question of setting truth against illusion, but of perceiving the prevalent illusion as truer than truth? If no other behavior were possible but to learn, ironically, to disappear? If there were no more fractures, no more vanishing lines, no more lines of rupture, but only a surface that is full and continuous, surface without depth, without interruprion? And if all this were neither exciting, nor despairing, but fatal?
The vectors are armed and are demanding that we acknowledge our complicity in the proliferating immune and communication systems. Modern immunological studies tells us that our immune system has a consciousness or at least a memory and recall information system. Our white blood cells record a history of past encounters with certain infectious agents, proteins, or inorganic allergens and uses this memory when faced with similar agents in the future. The model of an immune reaction is changing from a martial model of confrontation to a model of dynamic communication, from invaders vs. repellers to misinformation, deceit, double agents, impostors, moles, informants, special forces, and assassins. The Military paradigms used to describe how our bodies fight foreign agents is archaic and being replace by this new model. The agents of infection have the most in common with communication systems. The act of transmission is invisible, it is only made apparent by its clinical symptoms: a cough, a blister, a newscast, a news conference.
Does the Vectors project make visible the invisible trends and growing strains of communication in our socio cultural techno meshing world? I am reminded of Meret Oppenheim's "Breakfast in Fur," which brings together two things that are inappropriately conjoined, Fur, a tea cup and a spoon. Once combined they void each others cultural purpose. This art object, from a Freudian perspective suggests that " it is sexual nature that binds us to the animal kingdom and threatens civilization, it is also an object which manifests" - the fetish.
What is a vector? A vector is an inorganic object that transmits biological information. In this age of bacteriological warfare, an age of meshing inorganic and organic material we finds ourselves paranoid of deviant biology being transmitted in or on an unassuming device.
Using the model of the immune system, which has as its primary directive distinguishing self from non-self it is the dissolution of this dichotomy which is forming our emerging quantum and inter connective web based reality. The web is the model for how we are organizing our information. It shapes the way we think. Our immune system shares structural similarities with web information storage, our immune system is decentralized, information is stored in cells, peripherally grouped in nodes, and is transferred to where the information is needed via lymphatic and circulatory conduits.
These photos are directing attention toward the seeding event in information transfer. The prodromal phase after implantation between exposure and the manifestation of being infected. They re-image the archaic paradigm of weaponry attacking pathogens. They are repackaged, skinned over, combined in one image, fused intone. we are an ecosystem of organisms a warehouse of information a web of complexity which extends far from beneath the surface of our skin. We are the material and interface, we are in the soup and enjoying it for lunch, we are the hand, the trigger and the explosion.