I’m performing in an Yvonne Meier show (Brother of Gogolorez) at the end of February, and creating a dance performance (Shitopia) with Igal Nassima (sound) for the week right after that. At least I’m not silly enough to make something completely unrelated! Shitopia is drawing some of the same material and concepts as Body Island, but set in a different context and as a solo dance performance. Different but the same.

Performance score in process:

Shape in space of the score:

The performative aspects of the Time Map table created for mid-terms by Igal Nassima, Sooyun Yun and myself partially originated in the transformative experiences I have had working as a performer in the last twelve years. As I continue to grow, accruing new information in my body and revisiting old information, I am struck by the shrinking boundary between art and life. It might be inherent to the specific choices I make as an artist, or it might be the choices I make in life that open me up to transformation. Either way, both ways, I love it.

The Time Map table asked people to hammer a nail into a box that represented the exact minute in which they exist, within a grid layout of minutes contained in a week (10,080 little boxes). We wanted this marking of time, a violent act, to focus concentration on a task in a particular meaning-laden place (the ITP floor), the physical operations of the body in space and time, as well as the existential questions of what it means to be participating in, or be locked into, the space/time continuum. The hammering person could attach some representation of their identity to the nail (one among many, identical) using a marker, thus rendering each nail unique yet somewhat anonymous, for the head of a nail cannot contain much more than a set of initials or a reductive icon. Each nail is like a tiny person, occupying a modicum of space in a crowded plane, vying for real-estate. The pattern created by the nails on the tabletop shows the accumulation of participation in the project at that location, but more blatantly, it points to itself.

For me, the intersection (or overlap, depending on the subject at hand) of art and life is a very deep and personal inquiry. The questions that keep coming up are, “why do I choose to occupy my limited space/time with art process and production?” and, “how does the work that I do impact the space/time I occupy?” and, “what is it that makes me do what I do?” It was only very recently that I found some form of direction in those questions. Certainly there are no answers, but proceeding with direction comes close. And for me, performance comes the closest to reifying that direction.

Recently, I engaged in a performance at Performance Space 122 that blew the top off my up-until-now intellectual pursuit of finding the intersection between art and life. The performance was a revival of a work called THEM, created between 1984 and 1986, by Ishmael Houston-Jones (dance), Dennis Cooper (words) and Chris Cochrane (music), in collaboration with the dancers. Originally generated during the rise of the AIDS epidemic (aka “the gay cancer”), THEM gets to the heart of what it means to create art in a time when one’s existence is on the verge of being extinguished. The work is dark and raw. It is physically, emotionally and psychologically challenging for the performers and vicariously for the audience. Like the original 1986 version, most of the dance exists as improvisations within movement scores—embodying unique and original behavior within a structured yet open series of tasks. For me, this is the ultimate analog to daily life.

My role in THEM was brief, but intense. I had a couple of small duets in the beginning of the piece to set up the part I did at the end. When asked, the way I described that part to friends and family was, “I have a blindfolded duet with a dead goat.” This short statement, minimally descriptive, says nothing of the extreme emotions and psychological upheaval this act caused within me and the other cast members. It is hard to write about it. The goats (three of them, because it was a two-week run) were purchased from a Halal butcher; it came gutted and drained, but complete with hooves, head and fur. The throat was brutally slashed, the insides humiliatingly naked. The first goat arrived twenty minutes before the dress rehearsal, completely limp and caked in blood and shit, and still warm. Before that night I had only practiced the two-minute duet with blankets or a cast member as a stand-in. I had no time to prepare myself for the reality of the dead flesh, once alive, now an object—the liminal state of a fresh corpse. The encounter will stand out in my memory for the rest of my life. When I finished the improvised duet, which is scored as a frantic oscillation between wrestling, fucking, tender love-making, mourning, refusal, fear, and loathing, I was covered in blood, as was the mattress where the duet took place. I was shaking. The meaning of the work as a whole had come sickly into focus.

Quoted below is an extract of an email I sent to the cast after the dress-rehearsal, in response to an email Ishmael sent. He said that naming the goat would help, to which I replied:

I haven’t named it. I think goats don’t name themselves or each other, and naming the goat would make it more impersonal to me, oddly enough. A distancing. This work is extremely personal to me.

I had a really hard time with it last night. …I know tonight won’t be the same as last night, less blood will help. The arrival of the goat right before dress, and actually having to face it, totally changed the work for me.

I just had a conversation with Dennis [cooper] about the goat, and how neither of us are okay with it. But we’ll do it anyway. We’re both a little worried what our friends will think of us. And that’s okay because it means the work is effective and people should question the validity of what we’re doing. Because it’s both valid and immoral, people who see it will be changed somehow, which is the root of art for me.

[The work] is not just a reminder of mortality for us. It’s really complicated. Problematic. I have multiple perspectives on the same exact thing (the presence and use of the goat), and those perspectives conflict. On the one hand I eat meat and on the other hand I love animals and have never killed one myself beyond insects. I’ve participated in euthanasias [I worked as a veterinary technician for two years]. I still don’t know the ramifications of those either, but they play into how I inhabit the world, how I interact with other beings on this planet in this life. How and why I am an artist is impacted by what I do in life and what I acknowledge as valid source material. That makes the remorse a useful thing instead of stultifying. Anxiety = future, remorse = past, ??? = present. Real life and art have collapsed in this piece for me. It could not have happened without the goat.

The goat had a hard day yesterday. I take that knowledge into me and ask my deepest self what that means, how it felt, why I am drawn to those things. I am going to die someday, and so will the people I care about. Memories vanish. At that point names don’t matter. So I don’t name the goat. I touch the goat and think about what it means to be just like him.

The two weeks following that initial encounter contained more emotional turbulence for me than the two preceding years. I felt simultaneously enriched and drained. I had asked for the part with the goat, nearly begged, because it was a personal challenge, and because I had already known about it for a long time.

Ishmael Houston-Jones has been one of my mentors for some years now. I met him in 2003 when he taught a class at my university. He showed us videos of his old work, including THEM. I was pretty green and had no idea that performance could be made in such a loose way, or be so visceral. Revisiting the work at this age, and being given the role I was given, is an honor. Hearing Ishmael and the other original creators of the work talk about what it meant to be living and making art in that time gave weight to the fact that we were choosing to spend our space/time as artists. Ishmael writes:

I think my […] point here is that we all just wanted to be doing then what you all are doing now – making our art and our mistakes; having sex, having love, getting wasted, loving NYC, leaving NYC, dancing, loving our friends. But there was this pall over everything we did (in addition to the usual, wars, ecological disasters, right winger homophobe/racist/misogynists,) We couldn’t French kiss without thinking we might get sick and die. Sharing a swig from a friend’s beer was suspect. And friends and lovers were dying. It led to some pretty insane reactions. Wrestling with a dead goat on a mattress is just one of them.

Dennis Cooper also had strong reactions to the presence of the goat after the dress rehearsal:

It’s simultaneously like a violent battle, like sex, like an outpouring of uncontrollable grief … it’s very much supposed to reference what it felt like in the early 80s to have friends dying around you constantly and to have to think of sex as a terrifying, possibly fatal act, and so on.

As artists we are remiss if we do not scrutinize the world (including our own actions) and feed it back into the work. Part of art is creating or recreating the world around you. Because after all is said and done, there is only one form of closure for everyone.
Participating in THEM was a wake-up call. It was the first time art and life were joined for me in a matrimony of emotion and function. The work conjured long-dormant memories, and reconstituted personality traits and immature behavior patterns I thought I had put behind me. Being in this show was one of those turning points in life, where the past, present and future collapse into a heap of dust. It was not unlike gestalt therapy, but self-directed. Even though I have had a life-long obsession with death, up until this show I had only vaguely gestured at mortality as an artist, like hammering a nail into a piece of wood. The pre-occupation with death as an inescapable fact of life was revived in me. It made me live harder, love harder and appreciate how I spend my time/space. The rupture will no doubt change how I make work. For a brief span of time, life and art were on a feedback loop, inextricably linked. Now the question is, how the hell do I find that again?

Reviews of the show:
NY Times
Culture Vulture
CultureBot 1
CultureBot 2
Infinite Body
TheaterMania

The work of Arturo Vidich consists of actions and artifacts that revolve around his long-time fascination with bodies and behavior, both human and non-human. Working primarily in performance, objects and video, improvisation is essential to his artistic practice. Guided by the concept of ‘becoming-animal’, Vidich operates under the belief that to examine human-animal relationships is to reach understanding of the self for the performer, and, vicariously, the viewers. He creates open social situations within designed boundaries that expose him to unpredictable encounters, and urgency of thought. Vidich views his art works as “games of the outsider,” and uses the metaphor of the container to layer frames of reference in depth. The result is an artwork where viewers face a collapsed set of poetic, informative, enticing, and earth-shattering impulses.

Last night I dreamt I was working in the studio. A scratching sound drew my attention to the wall where the tools and shelves are. It was dark in that area. Something was behind a cardboard patch on the wall– gnawing, ripping. I tapped the cardboard below the origin of the sounds and a hole opened up. In the dim light I saw a rat poke its nose out, and then its head. The hole widened and, like an anus releasing a furry stool, the rat plopped out onto the shelf. I tried to scare the rat back into the hole, but it wasn’t intimidated.

There were five light-switches in the shelf area, but none of them illuminated the rat. It was like the rat repelled light. I tried to corner the rat, who would pause and look at me when I changed position. I left the rat to find a container– large jars that had covers– but thought it would suffocate. Trapping the rat would be tough, but if I could do it, then I might be able to tame it. Taming a city rat. One of my fantasies, I guess.

Last weekend I performed in the Brucennial, 2010: Miseducation. My coffin/shack/outhouse will be on display there (350 w. Broadway) until April 3rd, set-up and ready for performance. I’ll be rebuilding the shack in LA in May for a performance in Atwater. Here’s a flickr set with pics, and some nice videos of the shack’s progeny getting cut on the laser.

Last January I performed at Judson Church with Aki Sasamoto and Igal Nassima. It was the last performance as a Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, which I’ll finish in June. It was weird, fun, scary and sharky all at once. On Feb 20th we’re performing it again at Center for Performance Research in Williamsburg. Thanks to guys at Catch.

Here’s the vid!

And here’s an interesting blog post by Alissa Hororwitz about it: http://www.artandculture.com/feature/2183

I received an email back from Biotrack (which is now a part of Lotek Wireless), a company that produces radio collars and other tracking devices.  Probably not what I need anyway– I’m not tracking in a huge territory, nor do I need to ruggedize so thoroughly. Plus they’re prohibitively expensive, unless I can borrow a receiver that can listen to the device… No GPS sized for rats! But Lotek does have these amazing pit tag data logging GPS devices for fish and birds that, at first glance, seem pretty amazing. Datasheets for several different kinds are downloadable here: LotekGPS and here: lat-tdr.

Jan 17

Dear BioTrack,
My name is Arturo Vidich and I am a graduate student at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. I am tracking wild rats in New York City to find out more about their secret social lives when they’re out and about, as well as in the burrow. This project will be funded (hopefully) by iLand arts residency and NYU.  Below are some questions and general interests in your products:

-Rats can sometimes get out of collars and chew through harnesses, so I am looking into biodegradable/ingestible glue solutions to affix the tracking devices. That way I don’t have to catch the same rat twice– the device will fall off on its own, and on the off chance the device is found it can be returned. Another option I’m looking into is a harness or collar that has a biodegradable clasp that will cause it to fall off within 7-14 days. Do you offer something like that?

-Given the short nature of the study period, a stronger signal with a shorter battery life would seem to make sense. The area I’m going to cover (pending rat range assessments) will probably not be very large, but I’m concerned about on-board data storage when the rats go into enclosed areas– I want to be sure that as much in-burrow activity as possible will be stored for logging later when the rat emerges– is that possible with your line of devices?

-One aspect of this project that I am considering is affixing a video recording device to get visual contact once the rat is out of sight. Does your company make any device, or have an interface on existing devices that could pair with something I build myself?

Lastly, if possible, could I have some quotes for this species, with the various options you offer?
Thank you!
Arturo

Jan 18

Dear Arturo,

Thank you for your enquiry and your interest in our products.

Biotrack specialise in VHF radio-tracking equipment for wildlife. I am afraid that none of our transmitters currently store data on board. The VHF transmitters emit a signal that can be detected with a receiver and antenna to locate each individual animal when you want to.

However, we do have receivers that can be set-up and left to detect presence or absence of the individuals in certain areas, the SRX-DL. I have attached the datasheet for this receiver for more information.

Previously for Rats we have supplied our transmitters on Brass or cable-tie collars. The brass makes the collars much more difficult to chew through. We can also supply transmitters that can be glued to the fur and these transmitters will fall off over time. The time that they will take to fall off is variable, especially if the rats will attempt to prise the tag off themselves. I have attached the datasheet for our small mammal collars for more information.

We do not make any collars with biodegradable clasps or similar break-away options but would be happy to make the collars so that you can add in your own break-away section.

We can also make these transmitters with activity sensors which change the speed of the VHF signal when the animal is moving and this signal rate can be logged by the DataSika.

Do you think that our transmitters and receivers could be suitable for your study?

Glue-on backpack transmitters start from 165 US Dollars and collars from 195 US Dollars. All prices exclude taxes, duty and shipping.

Our manual tracking receiver, the Sika or Biotracker, starts from 2,780 US Dollars, and with this you will need an antenna at 370 US Dollars. The SRX-DL (model B) for tracking our beeper transmitters is 2,995 US Dollars.

If you are looking for tags that continuously store location (and activity) data, you will need a GPS collar/backpack. However, these will not work underground as they will not be able to communicate with the satellites. We do not currently have any GPS collars small enough for Rats.

Please feel free to ask any questions and I look forward to hearing more about your study.

Best wishes,

Sarah

Sarah Walley
Technical Sales Advisor

Biotrack Ltd, 52 Furzebrook Road, Wareham, Dorset, BH20 5AX
Tel: +44 (0)1929 552992, Fax +44 (0)1929 554948

Biotrack is now part of Lotek Wireless.
Together we offer a greatly expanded range of telemetry equipment and expertise.

Small Mammal Collar

SRX-DL

I’ve compiled a list of people with whom I’ve had email contact in the last two weeks about my NYC rat tracking project. Some have been very helpful, and others have yet to reply.  If anyone reading this has any other insights into non-ITP people who would have useful expertise, or who might want to collaborate on this project, email me. The Wildlife Observation Tools class with Tom Igoe and Tony di Fiore is already panning out, and Marina Zurkow will be an informal adviser.

-Carolyn Kurle PhD (Dept. of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology, UCSB)
-Dr. Robert Corrigan (senior scientist in NYC Dept. of Health)
-Katherine McFadden PhD (Dept. of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology, Columbia University)
-Natalie Jeremijenko (artist, engineer and scientist)
-Sam Easterson (artist and wildlife documentation specialist)
-Jennifer Monson (dance artist and iLand Arts director)
-Caroline Bragdon (NYC Health Dept.)
-Carolyn Weiss (Co-producer, “The World Without…” Science Channel)
-Cathy High (visual/media artist, independent curator, educator, possible dramaturge)
-Lorie Bierbrier DVM (Veterinarian specializing in rodents, dogs, cats)

COLLABORATORS I’M STILL LOOKING FOR:

-rat (a docile pet rat that I can size/fit tracking equipment to for non-invasive testing/optimization)
-tech (tracking devices, attaching sound/video to rats, visualizing data)
-video documentation (it’s really going to be a mockumentary, in a way)
-costume (I’m going to need help with this giant rat suit with motors, moving parts…)
-dramaturge (someone who will work on research and development, both conceptually and pragmatically)

These roles will be as collaborative as possible, but with any project, people end up doing more of one thing than another. Ideally, all these elements would be in dialogue towards an ultimate end project.

Skimming the internets looking for whatever I can feast my eyes on, I found this crazy paper written by Carolyn Kurle, a researcher in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology at UC, Santa Cruz. Written in 2003 it’s an account of her fieldwork in the Aleutian Islands, trying to establish the impact of invasive species (Norway rat, same as what we have in NYC) on intertidal flora and fauna (crabs, algae, seabirds). Her conclusion is that the invasive rat species, while not entirely destructive, has decimated a large swath of the native species and steps should be taken to eradicate them. It’s not named Rat Island for nothing.

Aleutian Islands, Rat Island close-up

Interestingly, rats have been successfully eradicated from over 240 islands worldwide to preserve native wildlife. I guess that’s one way to make-up for the problems we cause with our own migration… I downloaded the paper from her website, read it and emailed her with questions pertaining to my NYC rat project. Her enthusiastic response is below. I sent a follow up, also below, and will update this post with further correspondences.

1/17/10
Dear Miss Kurle,

My name is Arturo Vidich and I am a graduate student at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. I am embarking on a (more…)

First week back at ITP, and already planning for projects outside. This semester I’m planning to be smart about it. If possible, the non-ITP projects will be supported and informed by the classes I’m taking and colleagues, who have skillz.

Last week I received a call for submission for the iLab residency, which is one of the many offerings of iLand, an arts organization that brings movement practitioners, artists, and scientists together for collaborative projects that deal with the New  York City landscape and its inhabitants. I’m friends with Jennifer Monson, the director of iLand, so I’m familiar with the organization. As soon as I read the call, though, something massive clicked into place and I envisioned a project.

RATS.

The Norway rat is not indigenous to New York. They were brought over on ships from Europe centuries ago, landed on multiple sites along the waterfront and planted themselves quite successfully. Currently the Norway rat is the most successful species on the planet second to humans, they live on every continent except Antarctica, and have infested many small islands around the world with disastrous results. What is a day in the life of an NYC rat really like? How do we live with rats? What do they mean to us and how far are we willing to acknowledge them? I want to problematize this ongoing relationship we have with rats, show that it is not so cut-and-dry that they are “evil”. When a species is demonized it makes it very easy to eradicate them. This project is not meant to be an exclusively scientific endeavor– there will be some sort of artistic output that take a closer look into the lives of these long-stigmatized immigrants of the New York underworld through the lenses of wildlife tracking science, and literary or cultural metaphor as movement and text.

I am hoping Wildlife Observation Tools class led by Tom Igoe will give me insight into the methods of obtaining behavioral and movement data. Telemetric devices are expensive and I’d like to try building my own.  The interest in tracking wild rats in New York City to find out more about their secret social lives when they’re out and about, as well as in the burrow. To this end, I’m eager to figure out if there is a way to attach a video capture device as well.

Current areas of interest/questions:

-Documentation is something I’m thinking about differently than how it is usually done.  Part of the project I’m envisioning is an experimental approach to documentation using video and still photography, as well as raw data from tracking devices. How the documenter uses his or her body could be planned or self-directed based on play and animal behavior. I’m imagining something like “authentic documentation”. This is how I work when I document others, so I would probably be deeply involved in the execution of that particular aspect. That said, I’m interested in partnering up with someone who is damn good with cameras for the times I’m otherwise occupied.

-Rats can sometimes get out of collars and chew through harnesses, so I am looking into biodegradable/ingestible glue solutions to affix the tracking devices. That way I don’t have to catch the same rat twice– the device will fall off on its own, and on the off chance the device is found it can be returned. Another option I’m looking into is a harness or collar that has a biodegradable clasp that will cause it to fall off within 7-14 days. Anesthesia is usually a controlled substance. How to trap and anesthetize rats?

-Given the short nature of the study period (a few weeks this summer), a stronger signal with a shorter battery life would seem to make sense. The area I’m going to cover (pending rat movement range assessments) will probably not be very large, but I’m concerned about on-board data storage when the rats go into enclosed areas– I want to be sure that as much in-burrow activity as possible will be stored for logging later when the rat emerges. This is essential for video as well. Is that even possible?

-The Brooklyn Greenway Initiative seems like the right place for this project, given that the Norway rat is not indigenous to New York. I am going to email one of the leaders of the iniative, Meg Fellerath to see if she’d have time to discuss the Greenway in more depth, in terms of sites, permissions, and other ideas. She is interested in having one of the two iLab residency projects take place on the Greenway.

-I am planning to collaborate with an urban wildlife specialist or New York wildlife historian, a programmer, a rodent-specialized veterinarian, a technologist who knows about tracking devices, and maybe others, or people who know about more than one area mentioned above (multi-taskers). Since the residency is aimed at producing collaborations, I am not thinking about an end product just yet.  I’m eager to get other people on board so the project can evolve and take a more well-rounded, solid shape in reality.

I have been in touch with some rat scientists and companies that produce telemetric tracking devices. Email responses to follow in a later post.