MEDICINAL CRAFT OF CEPHALOPODS
RECOLLECTIONS OF A SOMNAMBULIST
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE BEZOAR STONE
2004 | Digital Cornell Boxes for Gameboy Advance
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| 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. |
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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.
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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. |
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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. |
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