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.

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)

At first, it was a great idea. Then it started to fall apart.

I based my ideas on these newer drawings that show how a compound pulley system might amplify my jaw motion. The drawings show the axis of rotation for the jaw above my forehead, which would put my head in the rats neck. Not quite right. And since I was mentally referring to these drawings when I built the framework and mechanism, those proportions are also incorrect. Back to the drawing board.

The left one above is the closest to what I should have made.

This is an “artistic rendering”.

I ordered parts from Pololu, made by Tamiya, thinking they would suit the nature of the bench build of the mechanism, namely the framework and the mechanical system, but the parts turned out to be difficult to use. First of all, they’re injection molded so in order to use a part I have to cut it away with a blade. The tolerance is not great on some pieces, with too much slip. Girders and shafts can be adjusted to suit the specs of the system, but it’s destructive, and the part may not be useful for another project later. You have to break the plastic pieces and cut the metals ones with a file.Basically you have to buy a crap load of parts and hope you don’t make mistakes. The metal hardware (nuts, bolts, screws, shaft collars, and shafts– no washers!) are quality, and there’s variety, but they don’t give you enough of them to make it easy. I had to dip into other sets for more bolts/nuts and shafts. There are these really horrible plastic nuts that you thread yourself by wrenching them onto the bolts. They only work once, and they don’t work for very long. The pulley wheels are okay, but the rubber bands are not, and neither are the plastic parts that keep the pulleys on the shafts. Those parts are tiny and very similar too each other but not easily identifiable– it would have been nice for there to be a color system. And again, there’s not enough of them. My review: not great for prototyping, but the parts can be used in projects in lieu of building small parts to spec out of wood or aluminum. Legos seem to be comparably priced with a lot more yield, especially reusability.

The disaster area:

So after wallowing for a night, I set out to build the frame and mechanism out of wood and aluminum, with just a smattering of Tamiya parts. I built a curved, aluminum jaw-like part that would interface with my jaw, and placed it between two wooden blocks. To the front of that I attached another piece of aluminum, the curve of which somewhat followed the line the jaw piece draws in the air, but it straightens a bit towards the top. That piece pulls on two cables that are threaded through two pairs of pulleys before reaching the rat jaw piece. A spring causes the rat jaw to recoil back into closed position. It’s basically a third class lever with two parts acting. Behold the phallic torture device reminiscent of a cardinal tombstone:

Main problems with this design are:

• static hang: when the mechanism is in the correct orientation, the minor weight of the wood I used for the jaw pulls on the spring. This problem is exacerbated when any motion is applied because of the uncontrollable bob and dangle action.
• spring tension: as the spring is extended, the tension increases and more power is needed to extend it further. My jaw works hardest when it is closed, and has the least force when fully open.
• there is no comfort.
• it is nowhere near head mountable.

To make it better I will try making the rat jaw lower on my head, closer to mine, and fit it around my head a little closer. Since I don’t want the rat costume to be ENORMOUS and unwieldy, I should spend a lot of time making the head smaller, and have less dead space in the inner real-estate. I need to split the work of the pulleys better, widening the space between them. In v.2 it may be that there are no pulleys and the rotational axis of the rat jaw is placed exactly over my jaw’s axis. If the piece that interfaces with my jaw is melded with the rat jaw, the motion will be 1:1. That would function along the same principal as a small pulley/gear sharing the axis of rotation with a large pulley/gear: the small rotational motion is amplified in size and speed. However, this would mean I need more power in my jaw.

Video of the torture device in action:

More pics/drawings are available in this Flickr set.

I started a flickr set dedicated to rat sightings. It can be a representation of a rat like this one below, or a real rat like the one below that.

Post-mortem for Animals/People mid-term project. Take one animal and create two pieces, “two small companion projects – one from an external POV (objective), and one from an internal POV (subjective).” We made plastic casts of rat parts as the object, and wrote a medieval ballad about the trials and tribulations of RS99GP3, a scientific abomination, the descendant of a lineage dating back to times before rats had names.

Chris Alden and I used the laboratory rat, commonly touted as “the hero of science.” The lab rat happens to be the same species (rattus norvegicus) as the species that ones notices on the subway tracks of New York, the Aleutians, in London, and nearly every continent. The wild rat is considered our sworn enemy, the “shadow” of our species, and humans have long been at total war with them. The rats used in laboratories today are descended from various samples of wild rats from the late 19th and early 20th century, cross-bred and in-bred for various traits. The nearly absent genetic difference between individuals of a strain, the fast rate of reproduction, and the similarity to the make up of humans made rats them perfect Cartesian machines for scientific tests.

In discussing the subjective elements of lab rats Chris and I remembered Elizabeth Costello in Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals drawing the parallel between kept animals and slave races. We took it a step further, based on our war-torn history with rats, and imagined them as ancestors of prisoners of war, a derived from the captured enemy. Our diptych intended to build a mythos around the prototypical lab rat– produced, tortured, used, scrutinized, killed, disposed of– similar to how the martyrdom of some saints might be recounted in medieval modes of storytelling. We wanted to create pseudo-religious icons that symbolize the body of the fallen hero, honored by those by whose hand the hero may have died. Based on first hand accounts of our friends who work in labs, its easier to do things to animals if you see them as objects rather than individuals, like cogs in a giant science wheel. Quoting John Burt in Rat:

“the story of the standardization of the laboratory rat resembles the twentieth-century story of factory farming, as the rat increasingly became a sophisticated factory product . . . the connection between the rat and the machine component seemed to haunt organizational thinking at Wistar [a producer of rats specifically for laboratories], with its interest in the ‘efficient production of large numbers of quality controlled animals’. The 1910Director’s Report reflected this when the Director, Milton Greenman, used as an example of efficiency the standardization of screw threads.”

This seems to contradict the anthropomorphizing notion of the “hero” of science. Paraphrasing Elizabeth Costello, perhaps humans created gods to relieve ourselves from blame accrued by ritualized murder in the form sacrifice, to undo the guilt we feel when we see ourselves committing gross acts to others, be they animal or human. On the one hand the rat is an object bereft of agency, to be pulled apart, and on the other hand the rat is a hero, who conceivably has character traits to which we should aspire.

To understand how science’s treatment of the lab rat (and other species) might be negated, how to retroactively apply acknowledgment and respect, we looked to ideas of chivalry and the “warriors’ code“. These ideas were useful in thinking about the contradictions between scientists objectifying and venerating lab rats:

• “One reason for such warriors’ codes may be to protect the warriors themselves from serious psychological damage.”
• “Grossman writes about the dangers of dehumanizing the enemy in terms of potential damage to the war effort, long-term political fallout, and regional or global instability”
• “In a segment on the “Clinical Importance of Honoring or Dishonoring the Enemy,” psychologist Jonathan Shay describes an intimate connection between the psychological health of the veteran and the respect he feels for those he fought. He stresses how important it is to the warrior to have the conviction that he participated in an honorable endeavor: “Restoring honor to the enemy is an essential step in recovery from combat PTSD. While other things are obviously needed as well, the veteran’s self-respect never fully recovers so long as he is unable to see the enemy as worthy. In the words of one of our patients, a war against subhuman vermin “has no honor.” This is true even in victory; in defeat, the dishonoring absence of human themis [shared values, a common sense of “what’s right”] linking enemy to enemy makes life unendurable”³.

The last quote within a quote may hold the key. “a war against subhuman vermin ‘has no honor’”. Through domestication, production and perceived utility rats have been promoted from vermin to hero, yet in practice they have been denied the honor that noble humans would grant their subdued enemy. It would appear that the title of hero is as much an impotent gesture as the identity-denying objectification is an excuse for carte blanche.

Chris and I began assembling these ideas . We thought about how naming an animal is the simplest way to create a bond, and realized that we had no idea how scientists kept track of lineage. The Google gods pointed us to this site that outlines the MGI guidelines for nomenclature in rats and mice. We were fascinated by the ways in which scientists keep track of which strains are used, and how they insert location of breeding, scientists names, genetic and behavioral traits into the names appending super script, dashes, italics– for example: ”C57BL/6JEi-tth : The tremor with tilted head mutation in the C57BL/6JEi strain.” This method of naming gives detailed personal information about individuals of a particular strain without functioning as our names do; they do not give individuality. We read the interview between artist Kathy High and Joel Taurog, Professor of Internal Medicine and Immunology at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, who co-invented the HLA B27 transgenic rat line. Kathy High adopted some of the HLA B27 transgenic rats and treated them as pets, and included them in her artistic practice. This inspired us to name the rat in our song RS99GP3, and relate the deeds of this rat through the lenses of medieval chivalry, heroism, and martyrdom.

We paired up the dismembered body parts of RS99GP3 (objectified) with a medieval ballad that relates the deeds of an individual rat (subjectified). We both agreed on aspects of each part, and wrote the lyrics together. While I sculpted RS99GP3′s body parts out of plastiline clay, Chris composed the music on his mandolin. To make the music sound more medieval and foreign, he used the mixylodian mode. I molded the body parts in Dragon Skin silicone, and then casted in Smooth Cast 300, liquid plastic. For the presentation in class, we wanted to push the sense of honoring the fallen hero/foe. Chris and I appropriated the archetypal white lab coats that are commonly associated with scientists, and eulogized the body parts with our song, The Ballad of RS99GP3. The lyrics are below. More pics of making are in this Flickr set. Pics of the finished product as we presented it, and video to follow.

The Ballad of RS99GP3

Here lies a hero of great comport,
Not for naught died she.
Her life lost thrice under the knife,
And back but not free.
Though names are but numbers and letters between,
A home beyond cages sterile and clean.
For Rat begat Rat begat Rat begat Rat,
Begat RS99GP3.

Rat begat Rat begat Rat begat Rat,
Begat RS99GP3,
Rat begat Rat begat Rat begat Rat,
Begat RS99GP3.

A rat was born an abomination,
But destined for valor was he.
Placed in the labyrinth hideously wrought,
But soon again she was free.
Upon him rubbed the most noxious unctions,
With resolve he chose to survive.
For Rat begat Rat begat Rat begat Rat,
Begat RS68DI5.

Rat begat Rat begat Rat begat Rat,
Begat RS68DI5,
Rat begat Rat begat Rat begat Rat,
Begat RS68DI5.

Her blood was let and dripped and drained,
Into a thousand vats.
He was denied the brotherhood,
Of any fellow rats.
Given neither sword nor shield,
To defend against scalpels that hands do wield.
For Rat begat Rat begat Rat begat Rat,
Begat hung, flayed and peeled.

Rat begat Rat begat Rat begat Rat,
Begat RS99GP3.
Rat begat Rat begat Rat begat Rat,
Begat RS99GP3.

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.

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.