Paul Catanese, Hybrid Media Artist
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MEDICINAL CRAFT OF CEPHALOPODS
RECOLLECTIONS OF A SOMNAMBULIST
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE BEZOAR STONE
2004 | Digital Cornell Boxes for Gameboy Advance


Super Ichthyologist Advance
LAUNCH QUICKTIME (Documentation Video)
In completion of a residency awarded through the 2004 artist fellowship program at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, California I created three digital Cornell boxes for the Gameboy Advance: Medicinal Craft of Cephalopods, Recollections of a Somnambulist and A Short History of the Bezoar Stone. Each of these pieces exist separately although they are often installed together as they are formally and conceptually complimentary to one another.
MEDICINAL CRAFT OF CEPHALOPODS
About this work
This work explores an imagined immunology and structural medicine of the Cephalopods (squid, octopus, cuttlefish) through a collection of illustrations depicting their knowledge. While they represent relatively common ingredients within Asian herbalist traditions, the cephalopods are highly intelligent; morphologically and behaviorally complex organisms with a little understood social structure, although it is known that they are among the most ancient organisms, with a fossil record dating to the Mesozoic.

Cephalopods bring to me a great deal of inspiration. They are so alien, so foreign and yet so intelligent I find it impossible to not imagine that they are wildly more complex than we know – that they in fact observe us from their watery lairs and that any possible nourishment we gain from their bodies is part of some covert planning to infiltrate our thoughts and minds through an offering of their flesh.  Significantly, that flesh in life is covered with small luminescent cells that allow the creatures to flash patterns and shapes with the relative ease and immediacy that I associate with the pixels of LCD computer and television screens – only these “screens” are wrapped around the bodies of these animals. I view that luminescent skin as one which consists of a network of stars – interconnected and intelligently controlled – the celestial sky of their skin allows them to communicate by flashing constellations across their bodies where whole universes are formed and die in an instant.



RECOLLECTIONS OF A SOMNAMBULIST
About this work
A collection of animated tracings of moments as seen through closed eyelids: perhaps described more correctly as moments distilled from a journey taken, yet veiled by sleep. Or perhaps most correctly described as those images that form and disappear on the rear side of eyelids which can only seen when ones eyes are closed. If one were to imagine standing at the edge of a continent: where the sea exchanges its force with cliffs to pulverize the borders between them, the roar is less important than the foam which floats up from the depths, above the waves and deep into the heart of extinct, unknown constellations. These animated moments depict a vast, yet intimate experience where the boundaries between physical aspects of nature and internalized aspects of the individual blur with one another – hinting at a deeper cosmology which binds them.
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE BEZOAR STONE
About this work
A Bezoar is a type of pearl that grows in the stomachs of ruminant animals like goats and cows – a concretion of foreign elements such as roots and grasses grown around a small rock or some other cyst. There are also Bezoars that grow in other animals, among them, humans – often because of psychological afflictions such as the consumption of hair, although it can occur with large amounts of undigested medications or chunks of food. For centuries, these rare stones were sought after as an antidote against all poisons (and were placed in the bottom of royal chalices).

I began by considering all of the different “pearls” that may grow within: bezoars of goats and cows, bezoars of sheep, bezoars of humans, hairballs within felines, pearls within oysters and so on.  In my imagined cosmology, I draw connections between pearls and stars and interchangeably associate the growing pearl within with stars forming within.  I interchangeably associate our inner, unknown, but growing “star / pearl” as relating to the formation of constellations between us – as if they were emanating from our viscera.