I almost dropped the entire rat project. The semester ended and I felt empty, like I hadn’t accomplished what I’d set out to do (rat costume, documentary, among others). Then summer started and lots of other tasks shifted my priorities away… but in the back of my head, and in my dreams, rats lurked on.

The rat dreams I’ve had this summer have had rats cast as independent friends, or as a group I’m responsible for, creatures to take care of and watch out for. In one dream I protected baby and adult rats escaping from two plastic bags from my parents’ cats, who are mouse killers. The rats in my dreams have been benign, even benevolent, yet uncontrollable.

The Rat Island video idea has percolated back to the front of my consciousness. I really want to do it, even if it’s the swan song of rats in my work. The peripheral logistics are not terribly complex. The most complicated part of realizing this project is designing and setting up the structure to ensure the safety of the rats, and myself, and to ensure that those practicalities do not interfere with the [undeveloped] vision for what the whole thing means. It’s not a very deep idea right now. I need to make some drawings…

From the website of the animal agency where I may be renting the rats and trainers.

New developments: While I’m still undecided about the details of the interior/exterior design of the structure I’ll build, and the costume, I’ve come to the conclusion that the video shoot should be a live performance. Basic elements of live performance are essential to how I choose to engage people as an artist. I’m interested in how live performance and documentation can be inseparable and rely on each other. I’m interested in residue.

The structure containing the rats, myself, and the water will be in the middle of the room, with three camera operators and two rat trainers positioned around. The interior of the structure will not be visible to the viewers. There will be a live feed from the three cameras projected into the space, or maybe onto the structure itself. The event will be treated more like an opening than a theatrical performance, serving stale or half-eaten food, and half-consumed wine and beer. Viewers will be able to walk around and converse however they like. Hopefully the video projections and structure will be conversation starters. The room will be mic’d and so those conversations can be layered onto the video composition I’ll create from the footage of the three cameras. I think I might move around a little more in the chamber as well.

Just ideas. Press onward.

“I know of no one thing so universally detested, or so unjustly charged with everything that is foul, treacherous, and disgusting, as the rat.” –James Rodwell (aka Uncle James), The Rat: It’s History and Destructive Character, 1858

Rat Island:

(Link to the video on Blip)

What is it about rats that makes people hate them?

I’m asking you. Most people say it’s the tail, or disease, or that they’re greedy and quickly outnumber us, or some combination. I am interested in understanding rats as more than these fear-based surface attributes. I’m also interested in understanding rats as a threat to our way of life, and why efforts to eradicate them have been so wide-spread, long-standing, and unsuccessful. I don’t have any answers, even after all the research and work I’ve done in the last few months. If nothing else, I have more questions.

Rats, specifically Rattus Norvegicus (AKA the brown rat AKA sewer rat AKA wharf rat AKA the Norway Rat) live because we support them. They are our pets, our laboratory heroes, our dark half scuttling through our garbage. I have to ask myself, where does my interest in rats come from? Being our more uncivilized neighbors marks rats as a reflection of our ways and attitudes. Being a close genetic relative proves useful to our scientific quests. Rat bodies are boundary breaking. They fit neatly into the physical and analogous boxes we describe for them in some contexts, and yet we cannot control them in others. They have a dark vitality we cannot overcome. Simply put: they are awesome. I am in awe of them.

Rat Island, the video above, is an effort to show rats (as represented by an individual) in what I hope is an unfamiliar light. The tub is grungy. The rat is a fancy rat: Russian Blue, rex fur, Dumbo, yet still Rattus Norvegicus. I am an island upon which the rat is trapped. The island is also a boon for the rat, who would be swimming in the water otherwise, with drowning as a real risk. For the first time, as a performer I disappear with little effort, all the focus is on the rat.

This video will be scaled up, with more rats and a larger container. It may be a companion video rather than treating this first one as a sketch. I may be looking to have the scaled up video emphasize different elements, for example, the interaction between the rats. Their reaction to me as an inanimate object, and their reaction to their situation will still be important. Will they fight? Will males and females mate? I am less concerned about my own well-being, though I will likely spread a bad-tasting ointment on any exposed skin to prevent tasting/biting. As Molly aptly put it, “swarming creatures can easily become disgusting.”

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Daily Life:

(Link to the video on Blip).

We all have an inner rat. I understand my own inner rat through practicing not-knowing. To enable a different part of my consciousness I must restrict my anatomy and my orientation to the earth. Resistance and limitation beget new ideas. Self-knowledge through experimentation, I am the test subject. I cannot write a script, or build a structure to understand the inner rat, rather, those conscious choices are stripped away and replaced with action and reaction. Pre-conceived sets of boundaries, closed systems that elicit behavior, are the materials. Through repeated daily practice of these boundaries, for a duration, an understanding emerges. What at first might have seemed unfamiliar becomes habitual, what felt shallow becomes deep. I am creating a repository for new behavior, accessible at any time, that communicates the cumulative involution concerning all things Rat.

This video was the result of an hour or two of recording video in the forest with Sofy Yuditskaya. The next step for this part of the project is to work consistently in the studio, or another private space, until I have achieved a certain level of Ratness. At that point I will move the practice to the streets of NYC. This work is under development.

I intend to create a series of interactive sculptures and performances that double as footage for a video documentary about the problematic relationship between humans and wild rats in New York City. The performances will be informed by observing rats in their urban habitats. I will collect field data about rats through immersion. I will spend time watching rats, recording their activities, imagining the world from a height of three inches. In my preliminary plans one exciting question about creative research has already emerged: to what extent does the artist/researcher go to understand the subject? Once raw data has been collected, how might it be used in an artistic context? I will explore the notion of wildlife ethnography by embodying the data.

I plan to inhabit an anatomically correct rat costume and engage the public. The costume will be used for improvising behavior in a variety of contexts, from street interaction to installation, enacting scenarios that deal with duality in contemporary rats as perceived by humans: hated vermin or clever pet, intelligent adversary or negative force of nature. In chapter 10 of A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari develop the concept “becoming-animal” to capture the notion of human-animal relationships based on affinity rather than identity or imitation. I will inhabit this costume daily for a specific duration. Video and sound equipment embedded in the costume will provide me with an augmented reality, with all first-person POV encounters and activities recorded wirelessly to a computer, and possibly streamed live to the web. My assumption is that building a new skin will enable me to physically expand the boundaries of the data-conscious body as it exists in space. The broadcast performance, in addition to the live-stream rat burrows, will take the data collected in a specific site and distribute it virtually, thereby recasting the information as a non-local phenomenon.

Another aspect of the rat costume will be explored by making rudimentary rat body parts out of garbage and raw materials. These parts will be worn all at once, or alone, to help understand the form factor of a rat as it exists in space, to reference the ways in which rats sense and influence the environment around them, and comment on the problematic relationship we have with rats in New York– they live off of our trash. Their existence and ability to propagate directly correlates to our inability to keep our own environment free of refuse. As humans, refuse and waste are endemic to our existence. These garbage elements are a more poetic approach to embodying the rat, they don’t hide the human underneath, rather they seem to bring attention to the human condition of lower sensory resolution (except sight). One example is a oblong shape reminiscent of an analog TV antenna jutting from the top of my head: it speaks to the science fiction of human mind control (which is currently being done to rats in labs), as well as referencing the direct neural stimulation rats receive when their whiskers encounter an object in their environment.

Here is a link to my budget as of now. The project will move forward beyond the end of class, thus some elements are not included because they are as of yet unknown.

These are previous posts to my blog that outline a bit more detail for some of the mechanisms and wearables that I’ve been working on.

http://itp.nyu.edu/~av849/blog/?p=632

http://itp.nyu.edu/~av849/blog/?p=640

http://itp.nyu.edu/~av849/blog/?p=591

In order to bear the weight of my body and the entire rat costume without getting exhausted and TOTALLY sore, I’m building a partial exoskeleton that will relieve some of the load, even if it does end up limiting my ROM a bit. It’s still really basic. I have to make a wrist joint (I’m thinking torsion springs– from a rat snap trap!), secure things, and make a ball-and-socket-esque joint for the part that goes on my chest.

This mechanism will only bear my weight when I’m in a specific position, with the stock of the modified crutch aligned perfectly over the base, making a pillar. That’s tough to build onto a body that’s going to be moving around and changing orientation in relation gravity. Refining the relationship between the massive tension springs (Ace Hardware, $10) and the aluminum tubing will help the springs lock and prevent buckling. The shafts inside the spring are about 3 inches apart to allow for more flexion, with loose bolts preventing spring slippage along the shaft, but allowing slippage around the rotational axis. That means at the wrong orientation the springs easily buckle. Too many degrees of movement… must find the happy balance.

The spring on the rear side is placed lower on the shaft to allow for spiraling around my arm, similar to how our muscles spiral/wrap around our bones, which are also spirals. The whole dang human body is a collection of spirals. Eventually I want my hand to be completely free, not holding on to the handle of the crutch, so thumbs can operate the pan-tilt camera eyes and the fingers can puppeteer the rat fingers.

I’m imagining something similar to chest armor, but without the faux leather pants and pads, though I like the rigid plastic spine– good for mods. Right now the center of gravity falls into the crook of my arm, but if I modify that part into an L shape going towards my center, with a joint that allows weight bearing and a quarter sphere’s worth of ROM, and increase the surface area that interfaces with my chest, I can spread the load from one point to possibly my entire upper torso.

Below is the demo-video with a free stand. Imagine both arms having this mechanism.

General sketches, not much detail– it’s hard to imagine the detail of specific parts without having built much. Gotta start building. Four weeks left!

Inside the rat suit I’ll need supports and struts to build up the bulk that my body doesn’t have. The proportions of a rat are very different than that of a human. One-to-one from top to bottom, my feet end up in the rat’s balls, my pelvis in the stomach. The mobility and expressiveness of a rat’s head and upper torso are very important to maintain, so I will try to fill those spaces as much as I can with my own body parts. The lower half will not need to be as expressive. It’ll serve me well to create an ease to the functionality of the hind legs. My feet will be in the ankle, flexed on the toes, and the rest of my legs off-set from where the rat’s legs would have to go. I may have to fudge the position of my knee just to make it feasible to walk around in the suit. Then my ankle would be the rat’s ankle. The foot/leg joint would have torsion springs to make me bouncy and relieve strain. In order to sit upright as the rat without putting excess strain on my ankles and knees, I’d build in a hard chair-like block that I could sit on, and that would lend a rigidity to the lower spine/sacral area. The tail will likely need to be controlled by servos, and the servos in turn controlled by my hands.

Each hand will have a set of dual-axis potentiometers and buttons encased in some material (silicone most likely, for the flexibility and shock absorption) casted to fit my hand. One pair of potentiometers would control the pan-tilt servo camera eyes in parallel, and the other pot would control the expression of the ears, flat back to erect, rotate. The switches, or another pair of pots, would control the tail. The tail would have articulated vertebrae with excessive recoil controlled by torsion springs or extension springs, or both. The fingers will be articulated by track-wire system such that each of my fingers will have direct control over the tip of each rat finger. The hands, without electro-mechanical elements, will be gloves made of some durable, flexible, expressive material– silicone? Or something lighter weight with just the ground interfacing a really tough material. The back feet will also be made of this. Whatever part of the rat interfaces with the abrasive ground will need to be robust. Time to make a trip to the Materials Connexion…

Drawing human bodies over photos of rat skeletons or xrays is a good way to understand how the two anatomies intersect, or don’t.

After making two laps of the ITP floor on all fours, imagining I was in the heavy costume, getting out of breath and thirsty, pausing to listen and look, sniff and feel, I realized that I’ll need some kind of lightweight exoskeleton to relieve my arms of some of the strain and lactic acid build up that will occur quite quickly. In each of the joints will be a high torque torsion spring that will want to make the arms straight. It’ll add a spring to my foreleg steps. I shall need to train, as well. Cardio, strength, endurance, stamina. I guess it’s time to get back into shape… I hate the gym.

In 2006 I spent a lot of time as a dog. It was a different sense of the world. Not acting, or imitating, but actually being a dog. Becoming-dog. This was well before I’d heard of D&G (Deleuze and Gottari, not Dolce and Gabana). This will be good to do for rats too.

Hahaha someone left the harassing note below at my workstation and made me feel so funny inside. I certainly hope it’s not in earnest! Well, either someone is reading my blog (hope of all hopes!) and cracking a joke at me, or I should watch my back– friends and enemies, they wear the same face.

Stemming from Antonius’s email to the Animals/People list about a conversation between Morrisey and Linder:

Two of my fave punk stars bitch about Damien Hirst in this month’s Interview mag…

MORRISSEY: I dislike the “use” of animals in art, such as in the work of Damien Hirst. But in your latest performance piece, “Your Actions Are My Dreams,” you have a woman serenely sitting atop a calmly satisfied horse, which is, of course, alive and healthy. Do you agree that Hirst’s head should be kept in a bag for the way he’s utilized—and sold—dead animals?

LINDER: Dead butterflies, cows, horses, humans, sheep, and sharks—it reads like the inventory of a funerary Noah. How many halved calves suspended in formaldehyde does the world need? To my way of thinking, none.

I like their quip on Hirst’s work, though I disagree. Is it really any better to use live “calmly satisfied” animals rather than taxidermy? I kind of think it’s worse.

There’s a great debate in my head about this very issue. And not just about whether or not taxidermy and real animal parts are warranted in this age of synthetics, but also how the animal is procured for a work, how it lived before, etc. There is a relationship that occurs between an artist and the material (alive, dead, whatever) that is undeniable, and can change the meaning of a work. It would be very different if Hirst went out and caught that shark himself, or if he raised those calves from birth. That would add a layer of meaning that might be extraneous to Hirst’s intentions. There’s the work, and there’s the back-story. Sometimes I think it makes a work richer to know the narrative history of specific elements that have been transformed or repurposed– the meta-narrative of the work– and sometimes it dilutes the meaning or gives answers where questions would better serve the work.  While I wish I could focus only on my impression of a given work, I’m always curious for the back-story, especially when there are living or dead creatures, people…

I haven’t really done the research, but my impression of so-called Relational Aesthetics (or Misery Porn, as my Colombian friend calls it) is that it’s a Humans Only discrimination. Living animals in work are treated differently than humans. Is this because they can’t speak for themselves, like a human baby, and are somehow off-limits due to that? Does it tread too closely to the edge of forced labor politics or slavery or concentration camps a la E. Costello? As students (and prof!) who relate to animals on a deep, carnal, existential layer, I would like to know what you all think about an artist “using,” though I prefer the term incorporating or integrating, the being/remains of an animal into a given piece (sculpture, performance, video, etc). Does the medium or media or genre make a difference in how this display of life/death/decay can be distanced from the art viewer, or can we say that the artistic use of a old giraffe snuff video has the same impact as an artfully framed live webstream of a giraffe hunt, or a giraffe being shot onstage in an symbolic gesture? Degrees of framing, sensationalizing, rawness. All use pre-existing materials and shape them in a meaningful way. I would say in the case of performed vs documented harm, yes, there is a big difference in degrees of challenging the viewer’s complacence, not interfering. And there’s a huge difference in the artist being complicit.

I’m questioning the difference between a “found” carcass being used in a work and killing the animal yourself. Emily Mayer says she’d never do it, which I understand. That, and a long conversation with my parents, led me to this weird renaissance trend of urban dwellers wanting to participate in the raising, slaughter and dressing of their meat. I can’t tell if this is “worse” than conscientiously raised anonymous meat, or better. It’s certainly more responsibility, psychologically and ecologically, etc. It’s also a way to come to terms with eating meat, but it’s also a way of excusing yourself from the animals-as-industry-product argument. So, how is that different than raising your own rabbit to kill and use in a work of art? Why should art, rather than economy or farming, require ethical treatment when it comes to sentient beings?

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These are questions I’m asking myself because I’m considering embodying one of these rat pieces from the perspective of the pest control professional. That could entail being complicit in the death of a rat, or killing one myself. I had a really long talk with my parents last weekend about this idea. They questioned the role of animal in art. My mom called me a Nazi. She said, “anything you do to a rat  think about doing to me.” My father said that the rat has no agency in the creation of said work. I brought up that animals that we eat and that they eat have no agency in the food industry. Animals in the pet industry have no agency either. My dad said that the taking on of a character is basically too thin of a reason. My mom said, why can’t you just follow an exterminator and watch. I’d be complicit without getting my hands dirty, I said. My father said the debate is interesting. I said, our distance from everyday death is what I want to question. He said, if you get to that moment where you’re going to kill the rat you can make the choice to do it, or let it go. “Like the lizard and the crickets,” said my mom.

I said, the point is to not ignore Death because it’s all around us and there’s nothing we can do about it. We are responsible in our actions or lack of action. I have strong principles like many people, and they’re pretty ethical for the most part. But I thought what would happen if I went against those principles? What is the difference between killing “vermin” hordes that populate parks and streets for population control and killing an individual rat as a performed persona within the context of a documentary? Certainly no creature need die for art, but need a creature die for human encroachment or sanitation? How do we draw those distinctions? Certainly the rat, who rivals us in ingenuity and survival skills is killed to conserve our way of life. The rat is a destructive force, a non-person, a non-pet animal that interferes. Is there a way to coexist, or must we attempt to control them, i.e. kill them?

Partly it’s curiosity. I have never killed an animal but have assisted in more than enough euthanasias. I know what they look like when they die. It no longer induces that familiar catch in my throat, the melting sensation under my skin. Maybe because I don’t know them, I didn’t grow up with them. Thicker skin or reduced compassion? Movies make me sadder.

Factory farms. Horrible lives. My mom said sometimes she wants to, “rescue lambs and spend money on intensive care. Meanwhile people are killing them and eating them. People who go out to kill the deer hunting– but remember when we went to Africa? I got the clearest picture of stark wild. Kill your own food. I don’t want to be a predator. But what about prey animals? Well, herd animals. Lions have to kill every day.” She doesn’t want that.

What if I ate the rat?

“That would be better,” said my mom, “I don’t give a fat shit about a lot of things but when it comes to animals and children I’ll defend them to the death.” I said, “you know I’m quoting you on my blog, right?” My mom said, “I don’t know about blogs.”

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.

Walking home late last night in downtown Brooklyn, I happened upon a colony of rats on the corner of Lawrence and Willoughby. There were about ten rats, males, females, very young to adult. For example, these five rats:

The group was originating from the fenced off area that had construction materials, and crossing over to garbage bags on another part of the sidewalk. The construction area had i-beams, long tubes and pipes, perfect byways for rats. A few of the rats looked to be about 12-13 inches, about 2lbs. I couldn’t tell what they were eating, but at one point one of the rats dashed back to the site with what looked like a giant bread crust. I spoke to a guy who wanted to know what I was doing, he worked for the MTA. He said that this corner has long had a problem with rats, and told me of other sites that would be worth checking out. For example, Battery Park, near the WTC sculpture. The rats were ultimately unnerved by my presence, taking photos with the flash, and sitting not so far away from their route to the garbage bags. This one was another chance pic, where I wasn’t sure if there was a rat in the frame because it was too dark, but the flash reveals much much more!