Saturday, March 2, 2002

Birds and bees (see below), late 20th century: A quote from a museum catalog, "Wierd Science," which documents the work of Mark Dion, Gregory Green, Margeret Honda and Andrea Zittel; all (with the exception of Greg Green, whose queasily self-reflexive obsession is recreating Sputnik as 'Gregnik') pretty much represent the zukunft of zookunst. In the early 1990s, Zittel launched a series of controlled chicken breeding experiments as a biotech critique. One of these wound up in the window of the New Museum in Manhattan, but, the catalog explains, Zittel finally "...put her breeding work on hold. Not only did she receive countless citations from New York City officials for possession of "livestock" during this period, but she began to realize that viewers were distracted and even angered by the presence of chickens in her work and were unable to see beyond them to her exploration of the function of human desire." Don't know why, but I find the image of chickens serving as a barrier at the gates of human desire very compelling. I did once know a chicken that served as a displacement for desire; the chicken lived in a backyard in Brentwood, California. I believe it was called Alice, and when she was no longer needed (desire having been, for the moment, set out on the table and consumated), she met a fate her owners didn't discuss. 6:13:26 PM

TV for the TV-less: RedTV , a series of video interviews made with public intellectuals concerned with emancipatory political thought. These are raw interviews; what mainstream documentary filmmakers would call "talking heads." The first piece is discussion with Ulus Baker, one of the founders of korotonomedya, an autonomist political/artistic collective based in Ankara. In this interview he traces the notion of opinion back from its Ancient Greek origins following the major schools of western thought, and criticizes today's sociology of opinions. 1:13:34 PM

Birds and Bees, early 20th century, or more on the researcher as artist (see 2/26). J.H Fabre's "Social Life in the Insect World," first published in the U.S. in 1914. Painleve became a filmmaker to make amends to a spurned lady octopus (again, see previous post); one might speculate that a more human-based spurning threw Fabre into speculating on the grim sexual politics of insects. Overall, "Social Life" is truly one of the great invertebrate page turners, but it's at its most gripping when Fabre thinks about mantid sex. An excerpt from his meditation on the fate of the mantid male: "Alas! The facts force me to reject the statement that the males have time to escape; for I once suprised the male, apparently in the performance of his vital function, holding the female tightly embraced -- but he had no head, no neck, scarcely any thorax! The female, her head tuned over her shoulder, was peacefully browsing on the remains of her lover! And the masculine remnant, firmly anchored, continued its duty! "Love, it is said, is stronger than death! Taken literally, never has an aphorism reached a more striking confirmation. Here was a creature decapitated, amputated as far as the middle of the thorax; a corpse which still struggled to give life. It would not release its hold until the abdomen itself, the seat of the organs of procreation, was attacked." 11:39:08 AM

Guerrila Girl: The Next Generation? Salon.com has a piece this week about Netochka Nezvanova, who may or may not be the designer of NATO 0+55, a software which is used to sample and morph digital video in real time, and which is frequently deployed by laptop electronica wizards during live performances. 'May or may not' refers not only to the fact that Netochka's name is a psuedonym - roughly translating as Nameless Nobody - but to the fact that when Netocka gives interviews and makes appearances at digital art and technology conferences, she's frequently embodied by different women. She could be a collective, she could be one of several programmers living in Iceland, New Zealand or Eastern Europe...or she could be some guy living in the East Village with a lot of girlfriends willing to give interviews in his/her name. Whoever she is, she's a major flamer. As the article explains, Netochka's got fans who see her as waging a one-woman guerilla war against the genteel, hegemonicaly correct atmosphere of the mailing list. She moves in, and with a few shattering ripostes she's shattered whatever fragile community might exist. Her fans laud her as an important "female presence" in web boysland, who pushes her audience to engage in the rather-not-think-about-it aspects of cyberdemocracy. But what's creepy about Netochka is her decision to revoke the software licenses of her detractors: that is, if you buy her software and cross her path, she won't give you updates or support. There's nothing to be said in defense of this: it's a meme waiting to curl itself around the brain of Bill Gates. Yeah, he'd never get away with it. Right. We'll never see the day when we go to a party, get drunk, say a few things about Autoformat, and wake up the next morning with a pounding headache to find that Word, all of Office, has been sucked off of our desktop. Couldn't happen. 11:11:20 AM

© Copyright 2002 Lisa Lynch.