Hasta La Creative!

Instead of following my natural instinct and turn this blog into the usual happy bordello where unrelated posts follow one another, i’m going to try and focus my reports over the next few days on the projects i saw last week at the RCA Graduate Summer Show in London.

Revital Cohen‘s final project at the Design Interactions department looked at how cross-breeding man with machines or other species can open up new design opportunities and a space for debate (see her previous project the Telepresence Frame.) I realize that most of the readers are familiar with this concept of ‘design for debate’ but to avoid any misunderstanding, let’s just remind that design for debate explores how design can be used as a medium to draw attention to the social, cultural and ethical implications of new technologies. The resulting design proposals do not provide answers, but they make complex issues tangible, and therefore debatable (via).

Revital’s Life Support project looks for way of disconnecting people from the therapeutic machines and cold technologies they are harnessed to. Assistance animals – from guide dogs to psychiatric service dogs and other emotional support animals – unlike machines, can establish a natural symbiosis with the patients who rely on them. Would it be possible to go a step further and transform animals into medical devices?

This project proposes using animals usually bred commercially for consumption or entertainment as companions and providers of external organ replacement, offering an alternative to inhumane medical therapies.

The first part of the project revolves around a concept of Respiratory Dog. Today greyhound racing remains a very lucrative business. Tens of thousands of these dogs are bred annually in an attempt to create the fastest dogs. Most of them are killed if at any time it is determined that they don’t have potential to be good racers. The dogs are a mere commercial product and because they constitute a major expense, many of them are killed as soon as it is determined that they don’t have value anymore as a racer at a track.

Greyhound race. Image Valkama

In 2003 alone, an estimated 7,500 to 20,000 greyhounds were euthanized simply because they couldn’t run fast enough. There are more heart-breaking (even for me who could never be accused of being dog’s best friend) facts about their sad existence on the PETA website.

In Revital’s scenario, a pedigreed greyhound spends the first twelve months of his life being trained by the racing industry to chase a lure. Over the next three to five years the dog spends his days at kennels and is taken racing weekly to make profit for its owners.

So far, nothing new. However, as soon as its time has come to retire from the racetracks, the greyhound is not euthanised (as happens nowadays to thousands of retired greyhounds), it is collected by the NHS and goes through complimentary training in order to become a respiratory assistance dog.

When training is completed, the greyhound is adopted by a patient dependent on mechanical ventilation and begins a second career as a respiratory ‘device’. The greyhound and its new owner develop a relationship of mutual reliance through keeping each other alive.

A new apparatus is used to converts the greyhound’s lung movement into mechanical ventilation: the dog is fitted with a harness and placed on a treadmill where it will start running, stimulated by the same mechanical lure employed in its previous training. The treadmill functions as the interface and on/off switch. The harness uses the dog’s rapid chest movement to pump a bellows that pushes air into the patient’s lungs.

A second scenario envisions substituting a dialysis machine with a sheep. The concept is inspired by several advances of science such as the creation of cows and sheep cloned to have human blood in their bodies. Much research is also carried out to design animals which would carry organs compatible with humans. When one organ would be needed for transplantation the animal would probably be killed to provide the precious body part.

On the other hand, current, mechanical, dialysis treatments are far from being perfect.

Revital’s scenario imagine that, in the future, a patient suffering from kidney failure would give a blood sample to lab scientists who then isolate in the genome the regions that code for blood production (bone marrow tissues), and immune response (the major histocompatibility complex), extract the genome from the nucleus of a somatic cell taken from a sheep and substitute the corresponding regions of the sheep’s genome with the DNA from the patients’ genome.

This recombinant DNA is then inserted into the nucleus of a pre-prepared sheep egg cell. After cell division in the egg is initiated, the egg is implanted into a surrogate ewe which will eventually give birth to a transgenic lamb.

During the day, the dialysis sheep roams in the donor patient’s back garden, grazes to cleanse its kidneys, and drinks water containing salt minerals, calcium and glucose.

At night, the sheep is placed at the patient’s bedside. The transgenic sheep’s kidneys are connected via blood lines to the patient’s fistula (a surgically enlarged vein). During the night, waste products from the patient’s blood are pumped out of the body, filtered through the sheep’s kidney and the blood is returned, cleaned, to the patient.

This happens over and over again throughout the night. The day after, the sheep urinates the toxins.

Related: Utility Pets, myBio dolls, The Race, health benefits of robotic pets.

Although i tend to spend most of my time inside every single branch of Sephora when i’m in New York, i got to see some pretty interesting exhibitions while i was there. Daneyal Mahmood Gallery is hosting until June 14 an arresting installation and series of photographies by Justine Cooper.

Sally, 2008

Cooper has an unquestionable interest for science. The Australian artist is known for having spent one year snooping around the storerooms of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Charles, 2008

According to an interview she gave to Trace blog, the Terminal portraits she is currently exhibiting are inspired by the formal portraitists of the late 19th century and by the scientific work of Bernice Abbott. The stars of Cooper’s photographs are medical mannequins (just like Tomer Ganihar‘s hospital series) and robots. Highly sophisticated, they have been designed to simulate human traumas for training doctors and surgeons.

During her research, the artist found that the personnel charged with the care of the mannequins had humanized these objects into subjects by calling them Sally, Peter, Charles or Mandy. They dress them as if they were about to leave for the Bahamas and even construct a narrative through their care.

Peter, 2008

Also on show, RAPT I is a computer animation created 10 years ago from hundreds of images produced when Cooper voluntarily underwent six hours of MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanning (video). RAPT II is a fascinating installation comprised of 76 of the MRI axial scans, printed on architectural film, suspended and aligned to create a 24 foot long floating body. I found very distressing the idea that i was able to pass my hand between the slices of her body.

Rapt II, Detail, 1998

Rapt is what the artist calls a universal Self Portrait, originally posing the question of if and how new technologies shift the way we can conceive of space, by presenting us with an alternate, elastic interpretation of the body.. “Just as the body is re-codified through medical technology, so its internal spaces and brute physicality are remapped and made accessible in these works. Living flesh is translated into malleable data”

The exhibition is on view at Daneyal Mahmood Gallery until June 14, 2008.

Reading the lovely blog of Cati Vaucelle, i discovered the work of Kate James. Kate is a second year graduate student in the Visual Arts Program at MIT. After having studied dance/kinesthesia and architectural history at Brown University, she did a Master of Architecture at MIT before transferring into the Visual Arts program.

Her design, fashion, performative, video and space projects focus on the body, its habits, movements, and the dynamic sectional relationship to its surrounding structures. They have this wonderful mix of quirkiness and deep relevance to the issues she investigates.

You have a background in both dance/choreography and architecture. How does your knowledge of the body and its dynamics feeds your thoughts and creativity in architecture? How do you make these two seemingly different fields meet?

I started studying dance and architecture at the same time, during my first year as an undergraduate. Maybe because of that, my understanding of architecture has always been rooted in the body. I think of architecture as a built echo of body itself: corporeal issues of public/ private, structural systems, skins, orifice and interface all resound in architecture.

Now, I often site my art practice between the body and its surrounding structures. This dynamic negative space houses habitual life and cultural inscription, and is therefore subject to interrogation through artistic intervention.

Your MIT page says that your work attempts to “question and complicate the interfaces between the corporeal and the environmental”. In a time when most designers talk about “making it simple”, why do you think it is important to “complicate”? Which form does this complication take?

I guess by ‘complicate’ I mean to acknowledge and engage with the complexity of the interfaces already in play. We so easily naturalize our interactions and surroundings, ignoring the layers of choreography imposed on the everyday. By tweaking and reframing the everyday relations between the body and its environment, my work refutes the source and nature of that everyday ritual.

I was very intrigued by the atHABITat costumes. There is one for vacuuming, one for serving food and a third one for putting away the dishes.
What was the inspiration for them?
Can you describe us what they are about and how each of them should be used?

The atHABITat costumes are about a contemporary vision of the woman in the home, and a need to multi-task and overlap the upkeep habits of the body and the home. They are costumes worn to augment the household maintenance task, transforming it into an iso-kinetic exercise. Each costume records and accentuates the ergonomics of the activity.

In one, resistance band connects the vacuum wand to the wearer, intensifying the sweeping motion of the vacuuming. The ‘putting away dishes’ costume attaches a similar resistance band between the dishwasher and the wearer’s vinyl gloves. In the ‘serving food’ costume, bands run through an oven mitt corset piece to accentuate the tension in the serving motion.

Once you have an idea for a project how do you push it forward and bring it to life? Do you test the idea on other people? Ask for feedbacks? Get depressed because it is technologically impossible to prototype it? What is the path that leads from idea to working prototype?

I would say the process goes like this: dream, doodle, make, discuss, research, make more, research more, discuss, display.

In terms of the making, I’m not a pre-planning type. I design and make things in one fluid mess of a step, whether this involves sewing, welding, or performing. The concept and research frame are usually fixed, but the work formally develops in an organic way as it goes along.

My biggest frustration is usually the scope of the projects compared to my personal capabilities. Because my work is very much about self-production, and because of the flow of my design process, I am committed to be involved with the craft and production of my costumes and props. But this production can involve 200 pounds of steel to weld or 60 hours of hand-sewing on a particular project.

Kate’s working space

The garments you create are very well-designed. But do they function purely as accessories for performances or could you imagine everyday people wearing a modified version of them?

When I make costumes, they aren’t intended as prototypes for products. They are very individuated, for one thing, designed specifically for my own home and body(both formally and functionally).

The costumes are an integral part of my performance practice. They are there to suggest that there is a latent potential for self-production in the scene of the everyday, and to transform actions into performances.

What was the inspiration for Dressails?

As a dancer, I was fascinated with falling. I studied how to fall, and tested gravity all the time.

I also sailed a lot when I was younger. I was terrified of, and in love with, especially strong winds that would tip the boat up on its edge and press hard on the sail.

I thought about this moment of negotiation between the control of the boat and the natural force of the wind. I wanted to give over some control of my body’s movements to the wind in the same way, and used clothing design to achieve that. The dresses cause the wearer’s body to teeter, spin, and lean, to be engaged with a natural and sporadic force a way that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

Could you tell us about some of your recent projects?

One thing I’m working on in an ongoing way is a series of videos about my (7) vacuum cleaners. One piece involves assessing the manual instruction versus reality of use. Another documents a normal vacuuming session that turns into a full-on wrestling bout with the machine.

I also made some wearable trampolines last year, and performed with them in a piece called ‘Six Corners’. There is a dynamic relationship between the body and the material and weight of the skirts. They are meant to discuss movement pattern, issues of personal boundaries, and body extension.

Which artists or designer do you find most inspiring and why?

Artists whose work I look most often at include Rebecca Horn, Martha Rosler, Bruce Nauman, Miranda July, Joan Jonas (who is my thesis advisor, which is an amazing privilege), Nina Yuen.

More and more I find myself looking at dancers/ choreographers who make art, especially Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, Ann Carlson.

I look at screen stars as well, those who use their bodies to tell stories: Lucille Ball, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, the cast of Three’s Company.

Any upcoming projects you could share with us?

I’m working on a project right now in conjunction with my thesis (titled ‘homebody’). I’m making more home maintenance costumes and associated performances. So far, I’ve made a video of a phone conversation I had with my mortgage agent while wearing/using a dress constructed of Swiffer rosettes.

A last one: what is your relationship with fashion?

As an artist, I certainly engage with fashion. By this I mean that I think closely about how the body is clad, and how clothing can inform the body and vice-versa. Fashion becomes a key interface in the investigation of the body in the environment.

In terms of performance and the impact of costuming, fashion offers a fantastic bank of codified aesthetics, which can be drawn from for conceptual and phenomenal meaning.

Thanks Katherine!

Sensorium. Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art, edited by Caroline A. Jones, Director, History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art and Professor of the History of Art at MIT (Amazon UK and USA)

Publisher MIT Press says:The relationship between the body and electronic technology, extensively theorized through the 1980s and 1990s, has reached a new technosensual comfort zone in the early twenty-first century. In Sensorium, contemporary artists and writers explore the implications of the techno-human interface. Ten artists offer their own edgy investigations of embodied technology and the technologized body. These range from Matthieu Briand’s experiment in “controlled schizophrenia” and Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller’s uneasy psychological soundscapes to Bruce Nauman’s uncanny night visions and François Roche’s destabilized architecture. (…) Artwork by each artist appears with an analytical essay by a curator, all of it prefaced by an anchoring essay on “The Mediated Sensorium” by Caroline Jones. In the second half of Sensorium, scholars, scientists, and writers contribute entries to an “Abecedarius of the New Sensorium.” (…) Sensorium is both forensic and diagnostic, viewing the culture of the technologized body from the inside, by means of contemporary artists’ provocations, and from a distance, in essays that situate it historically and intellectually.

The book is actually the catalog of an exhibition of the same name which was curated by by Bill Arning, Jane Farver, Yuko Hasegawa, Marjory Jacobson and Caroline A. Jones in 2006 at the MIT List Visual Arts Center.

Installation view: Sensorium Part I

Sensorium explores the ways artists address the physical and emotional aspects of our increasing engagement with technology. I missed the exhibition so i found it a bit difficult to engage with the chapter that focuses on the show. Nevertheless i found the book extremely engaging and caught myself adding loads of notes in the margins of the pages or underlying sentences i didn’t want to forget. Starting at page 2 of the book: “The only way to produce a techno-culture of debate at the speed of technological innovation itself is to take up these technologies in the service of aesthetics. Aesthetic contemplation buys us time and space.” Not bad for a start.

Janet Cardiff and George Burns Miller, Opera For A Small Room, interior, 2005. Photo by Markus Tretter

After an essay by Jones on “The Mediated Sensorium”, the book includes curatorial essays and artists statements on each works participating to the Sensorium exhibition. Artists includes Mathieu Briand, Yuko Hasegawa, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Ryoji Ikeda, Bruce Nauman, Sissel Tolaas, etc. But also François Roche and R&Sie(n) which means that i have to contradict the statement above about my lack of interest for an exhibition i have not seen.

In his contribution to the exhibition, R&Sie(n) introduced the notion of repulsion and taboo in architecture by proposing the Mi(pi) Bar. Meant to look like a “physical secretion” from I.M. Pei’s Wiesner Building where the Visual Arts Center List resides. Mi(pi) Bar is in fact a tearoom in which people drink tea made using their own recycled urine. The outer shape of the tea room is based on the forms of bubbles produced in urination.

The project was never executed but it certainly sparkled some debate. Will knowledge of the tea origin create repulsion, paranoia? Will it change how water seems to taste? After all, rumor has it that from 2009, astronauts will drink their own urine, sweat, and even rat pee recycled and purified by a high-tech machine. In her essay about the project Jane Farver recalls that although clean water is a readily commodity on the MIT campus, it comes at a great expense as the majority of the state’s lakes, rivers and estuaries have pollution problems.

The chapter worth its weight in gold is the Abecedarium, a series of 36 essays which will bring you from the most mundane (an essay on the yuck factor!) to the most unexpected (Turner’s paintings) entries to a re-thinking of our sensory relationship with technology.

Image discover magazine

Starting with “Air” where Bruno Latour explains how WW1 soldiers realized that air shouldn’t be taken for granted when chlorine gas was thrown at them in Ypres; Michael Bull writes about society’s ipodization in “auditory”; Caroline Jones investigates the increasingly porous boundaries between the biological and the mechanical in “biomimetics”; Chris Csikszentmihalyi draws our attention to the central role that “Control” plays in technology; in “Corpus” Stephen Wilson campaigns for the involvement of art in biological research; Constance Classen wrote a fascinating study on the odor of sanctity; i discovered the “Godscans” in Peter Lunenfeld’d essay about Andrew Newberg‘s affirmation that he had uncovered some evidence of the “biology of belief”; Caroline Bassett wrote about how identity theft is giving rise to governmental claims that we need a digital shadow to match our physical bodies; Peter Galison’s “Nanofacture” essay mentions the dimension that art can take in nanotechnology; William J. Mitchell has a fascinating text on the role of camera phones in the development of a new panopticon of networked consumer electronics; Sherry Turkle explores the way mobile phones transport us to the state of a new ether and have given rise to the tethered self; Iroko Kikuchi recalls the culinary and cultural importance in Japan of the umami (the “fifth taste”), etc.

Sensorium is not one of those easy-to-review and flaunt-it-on-your-livingroom-table glossy volumes that you flip through more than you read. It’s solid, it has depth, historical knowledge and a 360 degrees perspective of what notions related to “embodied technology and the technologized body” mean and involve.

More images of the exhibition.

Image on the homepage: Sissel Tolaas whose contribution to Sensorium was an to embed synthesized human sweat pheromones into the white paint on the gallery’s walls in order to give visitor an idea of what the “smell of fear” is.

Found on the flickr sets for unofficial ‘favorite photos’ of the staff of the Otis Historical Archives of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, in Washington DC: set 1, 2 and 3.

Orthopedics; feet of Chinese woman, bound, compared with tea cup and American woman’s shoe. World War 1 era

See also: Four x-ray views of footbinding, ca. 1948

Rhinoplasty. Loss of nose due to an injury, and replacement by a finger in 1880. Surgery by Dr. E. Hart, photo by OG Mason, both of Bellevue Hospital, NY

Ambulance drill. Four litters loaded. World War 1

On the homepage: Masks worn during experiments with Plague. Philippines, probably around 1912.

Via morbid anatomy.

Animals have senses beyond human experience, they instinctively feel approaching tsunamis through low frequencies, communicate through pheromones or can navigate through magnetic fields.

Students of Design Interactions Chris Woebken and Kenichi Okada, in collaboration with MBA students from the Oxford Said Business-school, have been developing a series of sensory enhancements toys for children to experience “animal superpowers.” Each prototype allows the kid to change perspective or feel empathy with animals.

At the work in progress show of the Royal College of Art in London a few weeks ago there were showing 3 of their prototypes:

The ground as seen through the “Ant” apparatus

Ant – feeling like an ant magnifying your vision 50x through microscope antennas on your hands
Bird – gaining a sense for magnetic fields
Giraffe – a child to adult converter changing your voice & perspective

They are also developing Elephant shoes that pick up transmitting vibrations from fellows and a head mounted Theremin (!) to provide children with an enhanced spatial vision similar to the one of an electric Eel.

I played with the ant and giraffe devices while visiting the RCA show and found out that the objects do exactly what their description says: i felt humbled by the ant devices (i could not see anything of what was around me but could perceive all the tiny cracks and details on the surface of of the table i was exploring) and while doning the giraffe helmet i could only perceive the head of the tallest people in the room. Anyway, time for a few questions to Kenichi and Chris:

How does the Bird device work?

K&C: Birds find direction through sensing geomagnetic fields to find their way migrating from their summer territory to where they are spending the winter months.

Rather than translating the sense of geomagnetic fields literally, we designed a device that can be set to basic children’s needs sensing the direction of home, icecream-shops or your friends.

Tiny motors in the device create a haptic sensation on the skin when you tune into the direction and create a new relationship to your environment. It not just creates a haptic sensation for yourself but as part of the superheros it also displays the direction and visualizes it to your friends.

Which technique did you use to change the voice in the giraffe helmet?

K&C: We are using a telephone voice changer to make a kids voice sound like an adult.

Has working on this project taught you something you were not expecting about body perception and possible future body extensions?

K&C: All the devices in this series are working experiential prototypes so we could test the devices with kids. We were quite surprised how extreme the ant device changes the children’s behaviors. Even a hyperactive kid moves very slow because the new 50x scale makes you feel sick if you would move at normal speed.

We are interested in perception and sensory enhancements for the body and we are also considering a series of toys that uses bio-sensors and can tune into biochemical animal communication.

C: The animal project inspired me to explore new ways of interacting with our instinctual animal-self, taking it from the toy level to an adult training tool. Our senses evolved to operate in a networked information age and the sense of smell for example is currently degenerated because we have fire-alarms. Evolutionary our emotions are still controlled with the reptile part of our brain. I am exploring how networked technology and human augmentation training tools can create a new awareness, augment instincts and train new reflexes and for today’s survival.

Thanks Chris and Kenichi!

Images by Chris Woebken.

UPDATE:
Jim Rokos just told me about a low-tech device that, although it does not enhance our sensory range like the Animal Superpowers project, alters a user’s perception of the space (in this case Kensington Gardens in London) by giving the sensation of being a rabbit.

Designed by Rokos in collaboration with in collaboration with Kathrin Bohm and Andreas Lang, the object lowered your vision to ground level, and outwards, by the use of periscopes. The device was set off centre on a wheel to create the sensation of hopping.

The device comes with ears and a tail, so that onlookers can also understand the product’s purpose.

Fernando Orellana and Brendan Burns have collaborated on a new art work which investigates one of the possible human-robot relationships.

Using recorded brainwave activity and eye movements during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep to determine robot behaviors and head positions, “Sleep Waking” acts as a way to “play-back” dreams.

I asked Fernando to give us more details about the robot:

How does Sleep Waking work exactly?

I spent a night at The Albany Regional Sleep Disorder Center in Albany, NY. There they wired me up with a variety of sensors, recording everything from EEG to EKG to eye positioning data. We then took that data and interpreted it in two ways:

The eye position data we simply apply to the position the robot’s heads is looking. So if my eye was looking left, the robot looks left.

The use of the EEG data is a bit more complex. Running it through a machine learning algorithm, we identified several patterns from a sample of the data set (both REM and non-REM events). We then associated preprogrammed robot behaviors to these patterns. Using the patterns like filters, we process the entire data set, letting the robot act out each behavior as each pattern surfaces in the signal. Periods of high activity (REM) where associated with dynamic behaviors (flying, scared, etc.) and low activity with more subtle ones (gesturing, looking around, etc.). The “behaviors” the robot demonstrates are some of the actions I might do (along with everyone else) in a dream.

We also use robot vision for navigation and keeping the robot on its pedestal. This camera is mounted about three feet above the robot and it not shown in the documentation.

Video:

What do you think the robot can bring to our understanding of possible human-robot relationships?

Sleep Waking is a metaphor for a reality that could be in our future. In the piece we use a fair amount of artistic license. Though the eye positioning data is a literal interpretation, what we do with the EEG data is a bit more subjective. However, perhaps one day we will have the technology to literally allow a robot to act out what we do in our dreams. What could we learn from seeing our dreams played back for us? Will we save our dreams like we save our photographs?

Taking a wider view, robots are increasingly used to augment human experience. From robotic prosthetic devices, personalized web presences, and implanted RFID chips, technology is moving from being an externalized tool, to being a literal extension of who we are. By giving an example of and drawing attention to this process. We hope to give people the opportunity to think critically what personalized technology actually means.

Did you use an existing robot or did you build it from scratch?

We used a modified Kondo KHR-2HV humaniod robot. In the next iteration of this piece, we will be fabricating my own design for a humanoid robot.

Thanks Fernando!

See Sleep Waking at the BRAINWAVE: Common Senses exhibition which opens on February 16 at Exit Art.

Another of Fernando’s work, 8520 S.W.27th Pl. v.2, is still on view at the Emergentes exhibition at the LABoral center in Gijon, Spain until May 12, 2008.

One more from the work in progress exhibition at the Royal College of Art in London.

Tuur Van Balen, student of Design Interactions turned his attention to drinking water.

Water service companies add fluoride to the water to reduce tooth decay, in the UK, in the US and other countries. It has also been said that the army in some countries added bromide to drinking water in order to quell sexual arousal amongst male soldiers. Male fish in some area turn female because the oestrogen in birth-control pills ends up in the river.

My City = My Body is part of ongoing research into future biological interactions with the city and more precisely into how the increasing understanding of our DNA and the rise of bio-technologies will change the way we interact with each other and our environment.

The first chapter of this exploration of new biological interactions is dedicated to Thames Water, London’s largest ‘drinking water and wastewater service company’. Making use of the work-in-progress-show at RCA, he offered tap water (kindly provided by Thames Water) and asked visitors to donate a urine sample along with their postcode. He added the samples and postcodes to a map of London which contains biological information.

Because i liked his project a lot and wanted to make sure i wouldn’t write anything too silly about it, i asked Tuur to give us more details about his research. I’m passing the microphone to him:

The installation / intervention in the show is part of a bigger, ongoing project called My City = My Body. I’m interested in how cities are not as much made up by streets and buildings as they are made up by our behaviour and experiences. (The London of a design-student, cycling around from Shoreditch to South-Ken is totally different from the London of a banker in a black cab with his blackberry and a loft in Notting Hill) These experiences are heavily mediated by technology, just look at the way mobile communication networks totally reshaped our cities.

What I’m interested in, is how future technologies might influence our urban behaviour. We’re on the verge of a new area, an area that relies on the understanding of our body and the understanding of our DNA. What does this mean for the cities of tomorrow? Will we have DNA-surveillance and discrimination? Bio-identities and communities? …

The biological map in the interim show was an ‘intervention’ using the show as a platform to get feedback on these ideas. By gathering urine samples, I want to make people think about how their biological waste contains information. Pissing in public might become like leaving your digital data up for grabs, spitting in the streets like leaving your computer unprotected on the internet.

Unfortunately, I was not allowed to test the urine samples in the show. As England is the Mecca of Health&Safety, it was a struggle which took me up to Senior Management to even exhibit my project in this form (“Bio-hazard, sir!”) Continuing this research, I’m trying to contact a laboratory to look at bacteria, how bacteria could be a possible way of transforming our biological waste into information (inspired by Drew Endy‘s BioBricks project) and what the consequences in our everyday lives could be…

Thanks Tuur!

Images of the project courtesy of Tuur van Balen.

Ever since i heard the endearing and hilarious talk of Wim Delvoye (ha! every single gesture or word from this guy screams “Belgium!”) at ars electronica last September, i’m trying to follow the episodes of his Cloaca adventure.

Wim Delvoye, Untitled, 2004

The Casino de Luxembourg has recently held a retrospective exhibition of Delvoye’s defecating machines.

The whole family was there: Cloaca Original, Cloaca – New & Improved, Cloaca Turbo, Cloaca Quattro, Cloaca N° 5, Super Cloaca and Personal Cloaca. Plus original drawings, 3D and x-ray photographs, models of Cloaca Clinic gates, videos, sealed bags of Cloaca Faeces and other paraphernalia.

The brand new 8th Cloaca, Mini Cloaca (on the left), was premiered at the Casino. The tubular structure is made of metal and glass, and composed of mechanical organs that swallow, grind, digest and defecate a given amount of food. While Super Cloaca consumes 300 kg of food and produces 80 kg of faeces per day, the quantity of food ingested by the dwarfed one is equivalent to that of a breakfast.

The idea of a mechanical reproduction of the human digestive system goes back to the Digesting Duck by 18th century engineer Jacques de Vaucanson and just like Piero Manzoni ‘s Merda d’artista [Artist’s shit] Delvoye’s machines can be regarded as an assault on the system of art.

The best part of the exhibition for me were the video extracts of tv films about Cloaca.

Favourite is an extract of “Is This Sh*t Art”, an episode from the very very brilliantissimo Art Safari.

Ben Lewis had a series for BBC4 where he’d go and meet the most iconic figures of contemporary art. He condensed his approach in an article he wrote about his encounter with Delvoye:

I will go to any lengths to find out if art means something. Just talking to the artist and looking at the work is never enough. The artists are usually inarticulate, or English is their second language, or they’re just not very bright. None of these criticisms was true of Delvoye – but his art was so ambiguous it was impossible to work out what it meant. Was it raising up the lowly, or humbling the mighty? Was it optimistic or cynical?

In this case not only did Lewis get himself the same tattoo as one of Delvoye’s pigs (video extract), he also ate the same meal as a Cloaca machine, gathered some of the product of its digestion, went to the toilet, collected some of his own faecal matter and brought the two samples to a laboratory. The scientist compared the two samples bacteriologically and found them very similar. Video:

I could not find the other videos online, except this extract from Eurotrash. Definitely not the best of what i’ve seen there but if you’re interested in cloaca’s farting problems and the solution to it…
Video:

I realized that what i liked best in Delvoye’s work was not that much the work itself but to listen to Delvoye talk about it. Cloaca, he said in an interview, is not about aesthetics. Each machine is in total synchronicity with the advances of technology, there is no frivolity. Every single element you see has its function: you pour the food into the “oral” side of the machine, it is then processed by a series of mechanical organs (there is the stomach, the small intestine and the colon). Yet, Cloaca is not a commentary of science and is not either meant to be useful. The artist actually refused to sell one of his machines to a diaper company that hoped to use it for tests.

Delvoye also set himself the task to insert the products of Cloaca in the global economic system. The Casino Luxembourg had a special Wim shop where you could buy a Wim action figure but also a whole range of Cloaca products: Cloaca T-shirts, a 3D Viewmaster, Cloaca toilet paper, posters, etc. But that’s just a merchandising detail: the Cloaca machines are works of art which produce works of art. On show were dozens of vacuum-packed Cloaca eliminations made during the 5 first exhibits of the machine around the world. There’s apparently a waiting list of collectors eager to buy one of those, and the faeces made during the New York exhibition are the most sought-after. The matter is irradiated with gamma rays to kill bacteria, dried and vacuum-packed. After that they are packed air-tight in a plexiglass box. In 2003, they were offered for sale online. The faeces were also integrated into the company Cloaca Limited as a contribution in nature.

Cloaca-X-Rayed, 2003

Cloaca X-Rayed immediately brings to mind another famous art piece by Delvoye: his X-ray views of people having sex which he then turned into stained-glass church windows. Utilizing mammograms, sonograms and MRI’s in addition to standard X rays, the artist captured skinny (they had to fit inside the machines) models tongue kissing, masturbating, or doing blow jobs. The key to getting such images was to slather the models with barium powder mixed with Nivea cream in order to “illuminate” the bones during x-raying.

I give the microphone back to Ben Lewis: Delvoye’s work satirises the art world, with its inflated prices and daft intellectual cul-de-sacs. Cloaca makes the ultimate criticism of modern art – that most of it is crap; that the art world has finally disappeared up its own backside. ‘When I was going to art school, all my family said I was wasting my time, and now I have made a work of art about waste,’ he told me happily.

My set of images.