Yesterday morning (2/22) I went to Petco and got 10 white male rats. They are living in my studio for the time being. Their names are Aldo, Bruno, Ciro, Dino, Elio, Fausto, Giulio, Ivo, Livio, and Mario. To tell them apart I’m going to write the first letter of their names between their shoulder blades in non-toxic washable marker (standard practice for rat disambiguation in the home). I got 8 ‘medium’ rats, all from the same cage, and separated them 4 and 4 in two duplexes with mezzanines. Shoulda sprung for bigger tanks. I’m going to get another tank on Friday. The two ‘large’ rats are on their own for now because they were not part of the same colony. Another reason for writing letters on their backs is to know how they’re getting mixed up after play/training sessions.

When I got them to the studio yesterday, they were understandably shocked and non-responsive. I suspect they were not hand raised and not hand-fed. It’s only now, 38 hours later, that most of them will take food from my fingers, and one of them is showing a genuine interest in climbing on me, and looks at me like ‘thanks’ when I give him banana. That will be Bruno.

I have a training session planned for the morning.

Snow Leopard footage from BBC Planet Earth, narrated by David Attenborough. When I first saw this I was so blown away that I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days. It gets REALLY amazing at 1’50″.

(notes below are also from a bunch of tiger videos like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE-I3rzjGUk)

True essence of a creature must be seen in nature (true of domestic or urban wildlife who are entrenched in human life and dependent on us?)
establishing shots
tracking shots
still shot, subject pass-through
center framed subject, no matter what
hidden subject, physical obstructions interposed
narrative, telling a story by lining up shots in sequence
close-ups on action
repetition of shots (part of establishing narrative)
depth of field when camera is on same horizontal plane
what the subject looks at can be a cut-away
cutting from individual subject to group and vice versa
subject entering still shot and staying
sequence: close-ups on body parts, then wide shot, then establishing, then anticipatory right before hunt
pan-tilt, camera orientation to subject is key (different angles, pointing up, pointing down)

For all intents and purposes, the title has changed to Body Island at the suggestion of someone who convinced me that it’s more interesting to have the elements in the work be seen as symbolic of other things. If it’s just about rats it’s not as interesting. Good suggestion for this piece, as well as a good reminder for how to approach things in art, in general.

Body Island (working title) is a live-recorded video piece created through an ensemble performance with live rats. The main objective is to produce a stand-alone video work that will outlive the performance, and can be shown in lieu of the performance. The structure of the event is similar to a television show with a live studio audience, except the live viewers of Body Island will not have ‘applause’ signs, only the quiet reflection of their own and others’ reactions. The event and resulting video work challenge the existing relationships between performance and documentation.

The main performer, a bodybuilder playing the role of demigod, is concealed inside a structure shaped like a quarter pyramid. The performer has no contact with the live viewers, and the viewers can only see the performer through live-feed video of the activities within. The camera crew shoots through portholes in the exterior; their actions and decisions are exposed. The camera crew has been directed to choreograph their movements to reflect the performance events emerging in the cinematographic style of wildlife documentary. Decision-making on their part is improvisatory, reactive. A director of photography is editing the video feeds in real-time, which are then projected onto the wall for the viewers to observe and discuss. The final video product will be the outcome of the event.

The opinions of the viewers are emphasized in the resulting video work. The viewers can see the activity behind the walls only through the camera feeds. Microphones are hidden throughout the space to capture the viewers’ conversations about the work. The comments and impressions will be overlaid as a soundtrack to the culminating video. The viewers of Body Island and their articulated opinions have a hand in the creation of meaning in the work. Thus, this performance serves two sets of audiences; live viewers, and the video audience who will then experience the camera feeds as well as the live viewers’ reactions. The performance setting and audience are there as a way to create a context, a driving external component contained within the frame of the video.

The final edit of the live-feed will be composed in real-time by the camera crew; the resulting video work will be the only substantial remnant of the performance.

HOW (60 min):
Viewers entering the space are confronted by set of cages containing brown rats. Two rat wranglers stand on the other side of the cages, in a fenced in area. A free-standing structure, a quarter pyramid, occupies the center of the space. Three video camera operators are situated in turrets built into the exterior of the pyramid structure at different heights, facing inward. Two more camera operators rove the space. A director of photography sits at a table away from the pyramid watching the feeds from the three pyramid cameras, editing them live, and directing the camera operators over headset. Video projections on the walls display the edited live feeds. The live feeds show the interior of the pyramid: a grungy, tiled room reminiscent of a miniaturized communal shower. A small Dutch door is set into one of the pyramid faces. Among miniature sailboats and bits of trash that litter the tiled room lies the bodybuilder,  face-down and unmoving. The entire surface of his body is re-skinned in latex. A pig’s carcass pocketed with holes that lead into the chest cavity is strapped to his back with a tiny saddle.*

The bodybuilder plays little gestural games inside the communal shower. The scaled down tiles and shower heads makes him appear enormous. He mumbles to himself, and engages in a score of improvised micro-movements. The camera feeds show him from various angles.

As though staging a ceremonial rite, the rat wranglers put one rat after another down a tube set into the base of the pyramid like an anus. The projection of the live video feeds shows rats emerge one by one from a crack in the tiles and enter the shower room. The rats explore the contents of the room, returning to the obscured face of the performer over and over again. Some rats venture into the folds and holes of the pig carcass. The bodybuilder talks to the rats, asking them questions. He tries out different parts of the room. After some time, murky water begins to seep into the room through cracks in the tiles. To escape the water, the rats have no choice but to clamor aboard the performer. The water level rises to about six inches and stops, transforming the performer’s body into an island landscape, restructuring social interaction in the new post-catastrophe state.

The bodybuilder and the rats co-exist in the reshaped environment. Miniature sailboats float among the trash and echoing sounds. Over time the human island shifts imperceptibly, forcing the rats to adapt to the changing landscape. The rats have to negotiate the limited real-estate provided by the performer’s body. Time passes and the water eventually empties out of the shower room through a drain in the floor. The bodybuilder opens the Dutch door and plucks a towel hanging from the exterior of the pyramid. One by one he dries the rats and places them in an antechamber located behind several tiles. End.

NOTE:
Despite the limitations placed on the rats and the performer by the controlled environment, the core of the work rests on capturing the unpredictable interaction between the performers, the camera units’ adaptation to those interactions, and the viewers’ articulated impressions.

The rats are hired actors, brown rats identical to the kind of reviled rats one might see in the subway or on the street at night, but hand-raised and accustomed to direct contact with humans. Neither the bodybuilder nor the rats are playing to their stereotypes. Using rat actors, as opposed to city rats, lessens the tension between the hoard (rat) and the individual (human) while pushing perceptions of unsanitary and menacing conditions. The interaction is portrayed with as much neutrality as possible to elicit a range of responses from the viewers.

*The pig carcass may simply be a structure reminiscent of a carcass skinned with pig hide.

The assignment for Animals/People class: based on your Reaktion book animal, make TWO pin-up works of the animal – one cute / one monstrous. Two studies should be related in format.  One should be cute and the other monstrous. How you define this pairing is up to you. Example of pairings: teddy bear and mythical killer bear.

Of course I chose Rat by Jonathan Burt. This book is chock full of great anecdotes and historical accounts. Burt does a great job of situating rats in our social and cultural narratives, being as they are our “dark shadow.” I’m sure I will constantly refer back to this book for inspiration and information.

For this assignment I looked at rats in captivity, pets and laboratory rats. Wild rats are really amazing, with their ability to get around our extermination agenda and take advantage of our wasteful lifestyles. But the rats we have brought willingly into our homes and laboratories tell a different story. They speak to different areas of our culture than the mysterious dark shadow– in a way they are the dark shadow in broad day light. There are great things that occur because of these two kinds of captive rat, and yet they can be seen as a symptom of our species’ need to supplement another species to achieve something as grand as curing cancer or as mundane as companionship. My experience with pet rats and laboratory rats (out of the lab context) have informed this assignment.

The rats that one may purchase from a pet store are the same species as those in the laboratory, and those one finds lurking in alleyways and subways: rattus norvegicus. Pet store rats are almost entirely derived from laboratory rats. One can find the black hooded rat, the gray, the albino, the champagne, and the champagne hooded rats in both contexts. There are no discernible biological differences between standard specimen pet and lab rat, in fact, the differences are contextual. One can order them in bulk from distributors much like one would order cat food or dog toys. One of the first distributors, “Harlan Sprague-Dawley Inc., founded in 1931, began by breeding wild rats taken from a company dump.” (Burt pg 96). The earliest intentional strains were hailed for their lack of genetic variety, an attribute that also accounts for their health problems. When separated into categories based on transgenics, basically the “same” rat could be used over and over for different experiments without having to take unintended genetic differences into account.

There are rat breeders who supply the most enthusiastic pet owners. These individuals have taken it upon themselves to breed for traits such as rex fur (curly), hairless, dumbo (droopy ears), and so on. These rats are known as fancy rats, and while they differ from wild rats and lab rats in fur color or minor anatomy, they can still interbreed with fertile offspring. Mary Douglas started fancy rat competitions over a hundred years ago. Fancy rats are gaining popularity, and have bled into other genres such as the Rat Olympics (which had to change their name to the Nebraska Wesleyan Xtreme Rat Challenge after the Olympic board put pressure on them). Presumably a pet rat owner would not want to participate in a rat experiment (excluding training), and presumably a lab technician working with rats would not want a pet rat. These presumptions are the basis for the form I chose to dichotomize pet rats (cute) and lab rats (monstrous) under the influence of their human handlers.

We project our desires and fears onto rats, and those in the home or in the lab are not exempt. In addition to the typical representations of cute and monstrous, I decided to use the projections of human emotion, utility and caution.

The pitiable pet rat

The cute rat in this case is the pet rat. Pet rats provide companionship, an “Oedipal” relationship, according to Deleuze and Gottari. We can take the role of “daddy” or “mommy.” The post-op pet rat is seen as a pitiable thing, a defenseless creature one must care for. The sutured incision on the back speaks to the removal of malignancy. The uneven sutures indicate a human hand. The pet rat is diagnosed, saved and mended. In terms of Francis Richard’s 15 Theses on The Cute, appendages are missing or reduced to simplified shapes, the shapes are rounded and wholesome, harmless. The position of the body, facing the viewer, cowering or pleading, deferring, speak to humility and vulnerability– the abject. The cute rat drools and tears: side-effects of general anesthesia? Or demanding care from an attentive owner? The stereotypical associations with the color white (innocence, nicety, purity) are played up.

The demon lab rat

The laboratory rat is Frankenstein’s monster. An cranial excavation with perfect angles marks the empty slate of the lab rat’s existence. They can be programmed to do things, their brain is an open book waiting to be read or written. The gaping hole references the large number of rats in labs who have electrodes implanted in their brains like this. The hole marks the absence of individual thought, because in the end they are unable to change the conditions of their Orwellian situation– the machine is too big and too strong, and are they even aware there is an alternative? The antenna (or is it a toggle switch?) protruding from the back signifies some kind of input or output to be initiated or received by someone on the outside. The red and black colors say “death” or “danger,” to continue the stereotypes of color. Here is where my intentions do not correspond to the creation: the body is turned away, hidden, mysterious, or as though the rat has been banished or punished. The tail protrudes from under the squat body, whiplike and phallic, ready to penetrate like a snake. These qualities put forth something menacing and monstrous, but more in realm of the wild rat, the heathen creature waiting at Deleuze and Gottari’s “anomolous” pack.

I started creating the design before I knew what I wanted to say about rats as cute or monstrous. Some of the design came out of instinct, and some came out of feeling around in the dark. The image, though it looks Banksy enough, came from this website.

I knew I wanted to do something on the laser cutter. After I settled on the image and experimented with live trace in Illustrator, came up with the concept and design: game pieces for backgammon, checkers, poker and chess. With chess you’d have to remember which pieces started off as what for the duration of the game, an allusion to the deft spatial memory of the rat. After laser etching the images on acrylic plexi-glass, I used a silk screen squeegee to smooth in the slow drying acrylic paint. I used slow drying rather acrylic than oil because it’s water-based yet won’t dry before I have time to clean the smudges and excess paint.

Below is a mock-up of the chess/checkers side of the game board. A grid of red and white squares, 8 x 8, made of felt. These fabric samples are not felt. On the other side would be a backgammon board. Each disk has a head on one side and the full body on the other. Heads and tails, as it were. I sandwiched them, glued with cyanoacrylite.

To place the pieces back into the container the players stack them in a pillar, like a roll of coins or a stack of poker chips, and roll them up in the felt game board. Black pieces are at the bottom in this shot.

Below, a mock-up of the rolled up game pieces. This is made of felt. What’s not shown here is the PVC or cardboard tube this would go in to keep it clean. Also not shown are the dice rollers or the dice for backgammon, and the fact that it would be longer.

While writing this entry over the last 48 hours I’ve been reading the Deleuze and Gottari Becoming-Animal chapter in The Animal Reader. I’m continuously blown away by their ideas about how becoming-animal is not the same as imitating an animal. It’s something between self and animal. (I had this experience while working with my friend Emma on being dogs for two hours a day. We weren’t indicating dog, or imitating dog, we became something halfway between dog and human). D&G start talking about lines and borderlines and multiplicity, all of which seem to retroactively affirm the choice of making packs of rats for games, competing against each other under the hands of humans, in the minds of humans. Veritable pawns. The pack is the becoming-animal for the individual human. “We do not become animal without a fascination for the pack, for multiplicity.” (Kaloff/Fitzgerald pg 40). This is a hugely rich text (especially with all the references to rats). I’m literally splitting my skin with anticipation…

Disclaimer: I grew up in a family where we went to every length for the health of our pets. Sometimes too far… We are a compassionate family. Having raised companion rats from pet stores and laboratories, three from the former, six from the latter, I can testify to the fragile health of these captive animals. Tracy, my first rat, black hooded, had a series of mammary tumors, which we removed through successive surgeries, but in the end she didn’t make it through the last one– she was one and a half. Then there were Hilary and Harriet, champagne hooded and champagne full– Harriet died of a speedy degenerative neural disease at the age of one, and Hilary died at the age of two from a different kind of neural disease. Ratsputin, black hooded, had mammary tumors, and Snowflake, albino, had respiratory issues (which didn’t improve inside an oxygen tent). Both were hand-raised from lab stock but never experienced the lab. Guido, Francis and Pablo all died young from unknown causes, and Sanchez had a degenerative spine condition, though he lived to three. All four adopted after high school psychology experiments.

This is the updated list of projects I’m planning, as they exist in my head right now. It’s really hard to make the transition from pure envisioning and writing to actually making. It’s like a giant turd one puts off releasing in anticipation of the pain and suffering. It only gets worse. Sometimes there is pleasure in pain, but I’d rather have the stuff I think talk to the stuff I make, and vice versa, back and forth, forever.

The real world rarely measures up to the way things are in raw imagery in my head. There is a compromise with real space that is similar to the compromise that happens when a raw work or raw performance is developed and refined– the trade-off is ecstatic rawness for intention and design. It’s very hard to do both, especially in improvisatory performance where the excitement one perceives when it’s known the artist is composing in real-time, the raw decision-making process is very difficult to maintain through the refining and editing process. I’m dragging on… more on those ideas later. Now, onto the ideas:

1) The rat costume. This costume will be used to enact scenarios and behavior in a variety of contexts, from unmitigated street interaction, to composed fairytale, to a series of syllogisms that deal with duality of contemporary rats as perceived by humans, hated vermin or clever pet, etc. This costume is also meant to reference the notion that more mediation is more effective/better– more technology will enhance experience, more immersion will create deeper meaning.

A question: to what extent does the artist/researcher go to understand the subject? In this case, and in the cases of Timothy Treadwell and Barbara Smuts, there are very few boundaries between the studier and the studied. Treadwell’s work with Grizzlies and Smuts’s work with baboons read closer to the work of ethnographers like Napoleon Chagnon, who spent time with the Yanomamo in the Amazon. There is nothing distant or objective about embedded observation/study. In my case I make performances with the intention of someday showing something to someone. The assumption is that building a new skin for myself will enable me to expand the boundaries of my body as it exists in space, to have the rat costume be an extension of my body the way a car or a horse does. Since I cannot shrink myself to the size of the rat to enter their colony, I will present myself to them as the Rat King, largest of them all, to see if I can gain their allegiance. I will present myself to the public and see if I can gain their acceptance. To see as the rat sees, to hear as the rat hears…

I blogged about some technical aspects here and here. These posts deal primarily with how to make the jaw mechanism. I also want to make pan tilt servo systems for the eyes, which will be micro cameras I will use for vision. The video imagery captured by the cameras will be displayed on micro TFT screens in front of my eyes, stereoscopically, and with night vision via IR LEDs. I already built this part of the system last year (see my banner above!) thanks to this Instructibles tutorial. To add to the head portion of the rat costume, I want to make a self-contained hearing/vocalization system with microphones, speakers and headphones. I also intend to make a system by which I can eat and drink through the mouth of the rat head. On the other end of the costume is a tail, possibly operated by servos to make it swish back and forth, and with a hinge at the base to accommodate sitting up, like a tripod. Lastly, I intend to construct an excretory system to allow me to urinate and defecate out while encased in the rat costume. With all my basic bodily functions taken care of, I could conceivably spend weeks in the costume, taking breaks only to recharge batteries (I could sleep at those times), depending on my level of endurance.

Probably one of my influences in this decision comes from artist Oleg Kulik, who spent time as a dog in a gallery in Soho, titled “I Bite America and America Bites Me,” and obvious nod to influential artist, Joseph Beuys, who spent a week with a coyote in a gallery in Soho, titled “I Like America and America Likes Me.” Here’s a video of Beuys talking about it, with clips of the installation (the full film is on view at the MoMA). The skin of my rat costume might be interchangeable depending on which version of rattus norvegicus I want to represent– for example, a “sewer” rat, an albino lab rat, a lilac rex fur fancy rat. The lab rat skin might have chunks missing, open wounds, velcro points for attaching equipment or probes. A transgenic rat could be hairless, or covered in human hair. The fancy rat could have a diamond harness. The very act of skinning the rat costume could be a process incorporated into the “performance”. I’m envisioning a robust wearable object.  Another interesting aspect that may end up playing a role is that the well-known Hindu deity of wisdom and intellect, Ganesha, is sometimes transported in the belly of a giant rat, and is usually depicted with rats at his feet. It might be interesting explore that idea further in light of the fact that I’ll be inside a giant rat. Tenuous, maybe.

2) The rat catcher. At the end of March I’ll be participating in the Rodent Academy, a free course offered to “train private pest control professionals, building owners, landlords, restaurant operators.” It’s taught by Robert Corrigan, PhD, a rodentologist who is often called in to solve rodent infestation problems and design campaigns toward rodent control in urban settings. I’ve been granted special dispensation to participate in the class. With this class I intend to create a human persona that I can don, like a pair of coveralls, in order to complete a specific task. The task is to kill a rat and use the body in some sculptural way (maybe a mechanized way). I am unopposed to killing animals in a meaningful or purposeful way. Though I have been in the presence of plenty of dead and dying animals, and have held them as they exhale their life, I have never killed an animal myself, with my hands. Certainly that is a product of growing up in the city, and not killing the meat I eat. My relationship to animals thus far has remained in the realm of pets and veterinary practice. Being able to attribute this act to a different person, a role played by me, I imagine I can offset the feelings of guilt and psychological trauma that come with casting oneself as a killer. There will also be aspects of this prong of the rat project that deal with the Warrior’s Code, which appears in this blog post about the Animals/People mid-term.

Why would I feel guilty or have psychological trauma? Aren’t non-pet rats vermin that nobody cares about? Isn’t there a lot of money spent on effectively killing rats? What’s the big deal?

In my life I’ve had nine pet rats, three from pet stores who most likely would have sold them as snake food, two tiny orphan lab rats from my high school who would have died (we hand raised them on Mother’s Milk), and four left over lab rats who would have been sent away for snake food. My intuition tells me to live and let live. Death saddens me. This is in direct conflict with my lifestyle as a meat eater. I’m interested in this dissonance, but to justify killing a rat for art is very difficult. Finding a rat that’s already dead was more desirable but has it’s disadvantages and relies on chance. Since city rats have few if any natural predators, the pest control professional takes on this role. Casting myself in the role of a pest control professional creates a diametrically opposed relationship between me and the rat. I can excuse the act. What I do with the body has yet to be determined.

3) The documentary. I’m interested in playing with narrative forms as a way to encapsulate the disconnected array of projects I’m instigating, to unify them under one name. Given the fact that I intend to pretend I’m something other than myself, a false documentary about an artist or a person who needs to make the projects above in order to understand his own obsession with rats sounds about right. I’d be playing exaggerated versions of myself. I’m interested in finding sincerity in lies, taking a page from Herzog’s idea of the ecstatic truth, “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” When attempting to make a true-to-life documentary account, it is impossible not to inject falsities to a certain degree. It is endemic to the form of cinema– the conscious serial arrangement or exclusion of content in time.

I have seen a lot of documentaries/mockumentaries, but have read little about the form, so these are my assumptions. The difference between a false documentary and a mockumentary is the depth to which the untruth is executed– in a mockumentary the content is not based in true reality, it’s all the made-up characters playing in scripted situations (Christopher Guest is a master of this, as are Ricky Gervais and the American version of The Office). The newer blends of mockumentary include incorporating unsuspecting real people into the story (Andy Kaufman’s I’m From Hollywood, Sasha Baron-Cohen’s work as Borat and Bruno, etc), and these forms blend truth and fiction in such a way that the viewer is aware of the pretense, and the object of humor is realized by exposing taboo opinions of unwitting participants. The teams of John Stuart and Steven Colbert use this technique when interviewing people. A lot happens in editing too. Not to paint myself a particular shade, but the documentary I want to make is something between the work of Andy Kaufman, Herzog’s Grizzly Man, and In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, a true story transposed into the novel form, which is typically associated with fiction. The story is assembled by Capote who acts as a medium, giving voice to events that include central figures, but told from the outside, distantly, despite Capote’s role in the conclusion.

Documentation is a very difficult subject when it comes to performance and time-based art. What is a document of a performance? What is the performance without documentation? I suppose this project falls under the same taxonomy as Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle, rather than the new work of Tino Seghal currently at the Guggenheim. I don’t think I’ll make portraits.

This is a post I meant to finish several weeks ago, but never did. I’ll post it now in the interest of showing how ideas are developing over time, but keep in mind a fair amount of the individual project information is stale. The first two projects are less likely now (though I still intend to taxidermize a rat).

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This rat project is blooming. It feels good to be back tilling the fields after 7 months of fallow with no ideas. I’m still in the mental soup stage, in which I let my free associative brain wander and build connections on its own. This is a crucial stage and can’t be forced. If I try to BE CREATIVE and come up with ideas nothing will happen. It works best when I sit there and daydream, just let my subconscious drive the car and hold the map. It’s not a passive process. It’s like imagining your childhood bedroom in three dimensions and as much detail as possible. It’s like traveling through your neighborhood like a mental Google maps car with a third eye. How much detail can you see? This is when the wildest ideas come and censorship has no apparent role.

This envisioning inevitably produces solid images. The project as it exists in my head now is finished, wrapped up and presentable. What’s in my head is shallow, however, and nothing like the way it will really turn out, but that’s how I move through artistic processes: backwards revisions, like remembering the future. The trick is to be flexible in my thinking so the project can evolve on its own. For this, I allow decisions to be made based on coincidences and confirmations, I follow the serendipitous and the correlative signs that have no place in critical or logical progression of thought. Since I’m neither a scientist nor a truth-seeking artist, necessarily, an allegiance to the empirical is not needed. In a certain way, I have very little interest in truth since fiction can illicit the same emotional responses; a narrative discourse can be truthful without a basis in reality. I thank several artists and writers for this realization, most notably Roland Barthes, Deborah Hay and Omer Fast.

Now onto rats.

There are several projects I’m pursuing that all fall under the rat umbrella. Again, these ideas are imagined final products that help me understand the process as I move through. These are quite literal, with very little nuance. Not all of them will happen as depicted below, and there will be more that come up along the way.  Some of these may never happen at all! Here’s what I have so far:

1. Rat Abortion Apparatus: how to solve the rat problem. Picture this: a brown rat splayed on its back with it’s limbs stretched and pinned back. Brown fur is real, taxidermized from an NYC rat. The mouth is opening and closing ,the limbs are shuddering. A person is allowed to operate the controls, one of which operates a scalpel. Vivisection. The scalpel makes a T-cut from sternum to anus, like in an autopsy. Another control pries the incision open exposing the insides of the rat are exposed, but rather than guts there are countless rat fetuses made of green plastic. The control panel reminiscent of a back-hoe controls a scooper that excavates the rat. It seems rather real even though it is a simulation. The scooper is able to remove several fetuses at once, kind of like one of those games at the arcade that drops a mechanized hand onto a stuffed animal and drops it into a chute. Not a delicate process– brutal, direct, destructive. An antechamber behind the rat is filled with more plastic fetuses that are pushed upward as more are emptied. People can take home their prize. The apparatus distances the person from the repercussions of their actions, it emphasizes the machine as an enabler of gross activity. The entire interface could be viewed through a spy camera, which would add a layer of difficulty as well as distance. This may also draw parallels to surgery on humans. Is that a can of worms worth opening? I’m currently researching how to successfully taxidermize a rat. I have no interest in a store-bought rat or any other rat I would have to kill myself or know that someone killed for this purpose or something similar (feeding a snake or a science experiment). I am interested in a rat that I would find on the street, fresh, poisoned or maybe killed by a dog (I’ve seen this happen in Washington Sq. Park). There is a certain amount of respect and duty I feel towards rats as a species, and rather than using a produced rat, I’d rather use a rat that is the equivalent of road-kill in the country. A wild NYC rat A rat that wouldn’t have to die if we humans were not here. A rat that wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for us.
2. Rat Spermicide: sterilizes, safe and easy to use. Oral. Pellet form. A plastic bottle that looks like it could contain over-the-counter drugs like Advil. A safe alternative to poison. Sprinkle the same as poison, in safe area away from children and pets. Make a mold of a bottle, print label stickers with corporate design. Pellets are little, colorful, candy-like. Make a flowchart for use a la nyc.gov. This could also reference the fact that we humans have our own birth control problems. Why is the onus on the female to protect herself by taking birth control or telling the man to wear a condom? There should have been a male pill long, long ago. Here it is, but with obnoxious comments like: “It is time for men to have some control. I think it would empower men and deter some women out there from their nefarious plans…” According to Caroline Bragdon, an official at the NYC Dept. of Health and Mental Hygiene with whom I spoke on the phone recently, the city has already tried sterilization as a means to control the rat population, but it didn’t work as well as simply killing the rats. One rat can breed hundreds of rats in the lifespan. Humane number reduction/control was trumped by simplicity and efficiency.
3. The rat costume. (will write more later)
4. Tracking wild rats in NYC using RFID, and camera traps. (will write more later)
5. A series of new rat trap designs based on the current relationship we have with rats. (more later)

More past work!

Three works created during International Artist Residency at The Red Stables, Dublin, Ireland, Jan-April 2007. Four-day installation/performance. The Red Stables is located in St Anne’s Park, Dublin 3, and opened in June 2006. The building had recently been restored to its former Victorian glory with period features identifying the horse stables of the former Guinness Family Estate. It is located in of Dublin’s largest parks, St Anne’s covering approximately 270 acres.

Embedded below is the full edited document, at 21’35″. The first part starts at the beginning, the second part (a “videogame”) starts at 3’35″, and the third part (an interactive performance) starts at 7’25″.

This project was meant to emulate the setting and process found in social science experiments. The viewer/participant were meant to form their own conclusions after the process was completed.

A receptionist leads viewers one-by-one through a series of video installations and performances that develop from one to the next. Each piece deals with the construct of ‘evil’ in playful terms, pulling from the discourse on ‘evil’ as learned behavior or genetic predisposition. Simulated violence is combined with saccharine cuteness. In the first video, Furface Surface, a dog plays on the beach with a stick. It is sentimental to the point of annoyance. The receptionist asks each viewer to fill out a form asking them to illustrate or describe an urge or desire they have that makes them fearful.

The second part is Game Over. In a separate room, viewers are seated in front of a television and video game console, and told to use an adapted toy pistol to shoot a werewolf as it appears on the screen. The pistol does not really work, and the video game is actually a fixed animation made to seem as though there are consequences to the actions of the viewer. Slowly the viewer realizes they have no control over their own death in the video game.

Treatment Room comes directly after the videogame. Viewers are led into a tiny space blocked off from the rest of a large room by a wall constructed from scrap wood and doors. They are told that: 1) a baby werewolf is being trained for ‘pure evil’ and 2) they should shoot him with a slingshot if he does anything good or nice. A television is situated on a shelf in a wardrobe; the television shows the first-person viewpoint of the werewolf. During the performance, a slit opens in the wardrobe, exposing the werewolf. Some viewers chose this moment to begin shooting the werewolf as instructed, some disregarded the instructions and fired at will, while others refrained completely.

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 am taking this assignment in a looser way than may have been intended. I’m defining pop culture as anything in the media public domain that may have been seen by many people, or a persona perpetuated by a well-known image.

Rat. It’s the animal I’ve chosen for the “three views of an animal” assignment. It’s one of the universally reviled, thwarted, killed, mocked, and shunned species that exists on Earth today. I am choosing to show the rat as a being of the light rather than the dark, as a public servant hero (in the case of rats that detect landmines), underground art hero (as in the spray stencils of Banksy), and symbol of solidarity against corruption (as in the giant inflatable rats that union workers rally around).

There are places in the world where nobody lives or tills the field, or goes for walks, because there are active landmines from old wars. Starting in 2003, rats (primarily large Gambian pouched rats) were trained to sniff out explosive material in small areas with the hope they could be of service in safe mine detection. The rat was chosen for its size (too light to set off a mine), for its superior sense of smell, low cost maintenance, intelligence and ability to be trained, and ability to navigate space. A small team of rats and handlers can cover a much larger tract in a shorter period of time, in fact, they, “can check an area a man would take two days to cover in 30 minutes.” Far from being “vermin” these rats are saving the lives and limbs of children, adults, livestock and wildlife. Here is a recent article about the humanitarian organization that works in the field. Here is a paper that focuses on methodology.

This image says it all. Underground art hero, Banksy (not to be confused with Blek le Rat), is mysterious as ever. His real name and origin are not well-known, even Wikipedia the Great has very little information about this graffiti art star. One of the reasons he is so popular is that he blurs the line between art and criminal activity, and certainly the rat has ever been charged with misdemeanor upon petty larceny. His images are subliminal, happened upon, like a rat scratching behind the wall, or underneath your bed. One of the recurring personas found in his work is the anarchist rat, seemingly a self-portrait, a clandestine rebel. His art requires the talents of a rat, sneaking around, avoiding detection and detention (especially when making something like this and this) yet the work is for the public viewer not the private buyer. There is no signature except style. The rat in Bansky’s work functions not only as dark knight, critical of The Man, but also functions as a system of values to aspire to:  don’t sell out motherfucker.

The worker unions are plenty and powerful. They have huge influence on corporations, politicians and the course of history. Belonging to a union ensures a worker that certain expectations about pay, hours, safety and quality of life will be met. When an employer does not meet these expectations, or does not hire union labor, the giant inflatable rat descends upon their auspices to show what kind of “rat” runs the place or works there. While originally intended to mock, scare and call attention to such “scum,” the giant air-filled rodent seems to have become a symbol of fidelity around which to rally for a common cause. This representation of a loathed creature has been adopted and re-casted as a political mascot. But ‘lo, the rat was reported “endangered” in NY back in 2005– and was protected as “free” in NJ, according to the first amendment (which was ratified on Dec 15th 1791). Here is a quote within a quote about the rat from this article:

Does the Rat work? “Usually, employers go bonkers when they see it across from their property,” says Randy Mayhew, organizing director of Laborers International Union of North America, which employs about 20 rats. “It’s an effective piece of street theater,” says Peter Jones, executive director of the Labor Heritage Foundation.

So the rat has apparently added to its repertoire. The inflatable rat has also made it out of the political arena and into art and infamy, fascination and cult following.

Other occurrences of rats I considered looking into were:

Splinter

year of the rat

Ratatouille

Templeton

Rat (The Rotter)

Ben (the sequel to Willard)

Rat King from Nutcracker

And this rat king, which is when a large group of rats gets their tails tangled and wreak havoc. Reports date back to the 16th century.

Rat Fink

I tried getting in touch with Sam Easterson to see what kind of cameras he uses and how he attaches them to large wild animals like wolves, and small nearly weightless animals like chicks. I wanted to know about power, transmission, and hardware, but he replied that he is short on time and cannot answer my questions. I hope he finds the time soon…

On a slightly different and somewhat less appetizing note, neuroscientist John Chapin at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn has been affixing cameras to rats for search and rescue missions, as well as to locate bombs. The rats, however, are remote controlled via direct neural interface, with electrodes attached to the portion of the brain that reads impulses from the whiskers, the most sensitive physical sensor on a rat. I heard a rumor from my friend Karl Cronin that rats with cameras had been used in the days following 9/11 to search for people trapped under the rubble.  I know dogs are very good at this task, but rats can navigate much smaller spaces and find their way back out again. Dogs trained in search and recover are divided into two categories through training, 1) search for living people, 2) search for dead people. The former is replaced by the latter after about three days of search because if a dog trained to find living people kept finding dead people it would place a huge amount of emotional stress on the dog, who expects a living person at the end of a search. The reward, in this case, is not a hot-dog, but a reunion with a stranger.