0:18

welcome my name is stephanie nadeau i’m the curator of public engagement at the ottawa art gallery i do wish to

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acknowledge that we are in the ancestral traditional and unseated territory of the algonquin people thank you all for

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coming to tonight’s event in conversation uh with exhibition artist nicola feldman kiss

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and uh hosted by the artistic director of art engine ryan’s deck

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the talk is being recorded so i just want to be clear about that it’s for broadcast purposes so we’re just an

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audio will be put onto youtube so just bear that in mind when you’re asking your questions um also we have a

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that your voice is is being put out into the ether also we have a sign up sheet outside if

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you’d like to hear more about our programming you can feel free to put your email down there and i invite you all to join us after

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the talk for drinks and nibbles uh which will be provided for you at the table outside um so thank you all for coming

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tonight and as always i’d like to thank our funders the city of ottawa the ontario

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arts council and the canada council for the arts so i’m going to read out our speaker’s

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bios we have ryan steck who is an artist producer and designer working in both

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research and production he’s interested in the cross sections of technology creativity and the built

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environment his most recent work is focused on interventions that redefine how we

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experience the city around us he is artistic director of art engine as

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i mentioned which is a center for art design and research here in the capital and has been heavily involved in the

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artist uh in artist-run culture of ottawa since 1998.

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he is currently pursuing a phd in architecture at carleton university nicola feldman kiss is a toronto-based

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artist or i like to say an ottawa artist currently based in toronto

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she explores relational interpretations of body and embodiment identity and autobiography witness and

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traumatic memory her she’s a multilingual artist of canadian german and jamaican ancestry

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whose work examines autobiographical themes and acts as a socio-political commentary addressing among other topics

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the impact and traces of her own german jamaican heritage on the development of a plural identity

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feldman kiss earned a bfa in photography at the university of ottawa in 1991

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and an mfa in photography and art criticism studies or pardon me art and

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critical studies at the california institute of arts in 1996. feldman kiss’s work has

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been featured uh in many exhibitions a solo exhibition entitled nicola

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feldman kiss mean body 2006 to 2008 it toured to venues in

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ontario and quebec italy the uk finland sweden mexico

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switzerland and the us recent works relating to conflict culture and mass migration have been the

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subject of the cross canada touring exhibition terms of engagement

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which first came out in 2014. she’s participated in many residencies and worked with

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several research institutes i’m sure we’ll hear about some of those

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projects in your talk so thank you and please join me in welcoming nicola and ryan

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um

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uh um you what is the relationship between the tools and the variety of tools that you use but also um that

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relationship to process how you think about the tools you

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take up and

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i’m not good at very precise and incisive questions

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i guess i like tools i had a professor in graduate school at

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cal arts which is just north of los angeles

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a conceptual artist named michael lasher and

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he and i work closely together in my second year of my graduate studies

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and for my thesis show i produced

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a series of work for both sculptural and photographic

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and i first use a router on a piece of aluminum for that work

5:45

and i’ve been very in love

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of the interface between the rabbit and the aluminum uh taught me a lot about what materiality is and i started to

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think of things that were solid as liquid and i was so excited about this revelation i

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was ready to wear a rather on my neck as a you know piece of jewelry and he said to me

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let go of the tools an artist should never own tools and an artist should never be committed to tools

6:30

because once we get a commitment to tools we’re compelled to use them and then the tool drives the work as opposed

6:37

to the idea and i think that was the first time i really decided to

6:44

let down the tools and at that point also kind of abandoned the camera as a

6:49

principal tool in my toolkit although i still relate to

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photography as my primary discipline and i relate very strongly to the idea of

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counter vision as what i bring into my practice so whether i’m making sculpture or

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bed glass or writing text i still really do believe i’m making

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photographs so there are a few people like michael snow for example he says i don’t know

7:21

what he makes whether it’s a drawing or a sculpture or a film or a photograph or any other kind

7:27

of intervention he always enters those words as a filmmaker and so like like

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michael i enter all my work um as a photographer but it’s interesting you know what in what you know that kind of revelation

7:39

and kind of let’s say uh create a distance between the tool and not becoming necessarily simply

7:46

outputting other tools but trying to somehow subvert it and yet

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you end up with a very deep relationship to a variety of tools and i mean the mean body

7:56

grouping of work is quite a profound relationship to a set of tools that aren’t necessarily considered

8:03

um artistic tools typically meanwhiling being this body of work when she’s you know the 360 degree standard herself

8:10

and the production of the the sort of the small figures that we see there that are very precisely done with a set of

8:17

scientific introduction tools and so your in the end your process is you

8:23

threw yourself into these tools for them to also uh to see how much perhaps you could

8:29

change them and get out of something out of it but there must have been a lot of things that you never knew were going to come out of it because of

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what the tools and infrastructure around the tools were

8:41

well certainly one thing leads to another and the getting myself scanned

8:46

in the main body project and that little bronze we see here is a derivative of that work

8:54

came out of the reliquarium which we see as a grid on the wall and through the reliquarium i spent a year in 2000

9:01

scanning objects on my desktop scanner and it was rather exciting to make

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photographs at that time having bypassed the camera all together

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and in fact at that time in the development of technology i was able to get

9:19

a super high resolution image out of an extremely you know

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middle of the road uh not you know a medium quality consumer scanner that was

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already kind of updated and that scanner was able to produce

9:39

photographs of much higher resolution than any digital camera that i might have dreamed of affording at the time

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and so as i progressed through the year of this diary um scanning more and more things in

9:52

developing my scanning skills i began to scan things that were

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you know more complicated and and ultimately much bigger than the

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scanner and i would scan them in parts and assemble them together uh

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the fact that the objects that i wanted to image in the scanner

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outgrew the size of the scanner that brought me to this 3d scanner because at

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once it dawned on me that the scanner was too small and the thing i wanted to scan that was too big for

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the scanner and too complex to do in parts was my body and so towards the end

10:33

of that project i really turned myself and my you know my the primary thrust of my

10:40

work to figuring out how i could scan my body and it was the idea of scanning my

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body that brought me to the 3d scanner i didn’t really know about 3d scanners when i decided to get myself scanned so

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it was the you know it was the vision of scanning a body that brought me into knowledge of a

11:00

set of tools and um and ultimately uh inspired me to build the necessary

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partnerships to fulfill you know the artistic vision and sort of

11:13

can you see through it was there a very similar arc for that process um that you

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went through with saying a lot of the other works and i mean i think in particular there but but probably

11:24

through also the eyepiece uh not just an intense engagement with tools in order to figure

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out how to get you towards the arc of this scanning of your body but also

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the technicians and this kind of collaborative relationship or do you see it as a collaborative relationship with

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the technicians who sort of mediate your relationship to increasingly sophisticated tools

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oh definitely i see it as a collaboration i don’t think that the people who i work

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with generally see it as a collaboration though because they really are working towards my vision on their

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i’m exploiting other people’s skills usually to help me to meet my artistic goals

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however uh people who work with me work with me because they’re inspired by my work uh it’s not for financial

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compensation and sometimes my projects inspire growth and

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innovations within uh their works and their their research processes

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um i call it a collaboration because i’m in independence

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and without the skills of these fine craftsmen and researchers and

12:38

technicians i would not be able to get my work out of the imaginary and into

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the material and it’s interesting too i’ve never really thought of it in this way when you’re describing it there’s a lot of

12:50

vulnerability in your work in general and that’s actually a quite a significant other layer of vulnerability which is probably not necessarily

12:57

directly accessible in the work but in order to the kind of technicians that you know you

13:02

you need to do not typically technicians who are dealing with artwork in any capacity and so

13:08

not only are you trying to get them to do a piece of creative work but it’s a creative work that’s usually fairly

13:13

challenging and and perhaps difficult to explain so it must be that in and of itself must also be quite a process of

13:20

vulnerability well certainly with

13:25

the mean bodywork there was a lot of vulnerability and it was also the first

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major work that i did completely dependent on technical collaborators and

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there was a discomfort that i needed to get past

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especially working on my naked body so i had myself skinned but

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when somebody when a body is scanned it is not immediately ready to output as a 3d

13:56

print or even as just a digital file so there’s a tremendous amount of modeling and

14:02

digital sculpting that has to happen and to be working with my naked body with a

14:08

young male technician there were moments of vulnerability and feeling of extreme nakedness you know

14:15

when we’re modeling my crotch for example you know it’s not that

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working within a kind of a scientific domain data is just data and i had to sort of adopt that

14:28

perspective onto my data and in a way dissociate from my representation in order

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to be a comfortable position in that collaboration and

14:41

you see you’re mentioning there the idea of working within a kind of scientific context and one of the questions i was

14:46

thinking about is is how you understand them and also kind of navigate

14:53

your own personal definition what you see is where sort of science begins and where technology begins because there’s

14:58

a you know you can see science as a kind of we can see technology as a kind of applied

15:04

science but you can also see science as a kind of collection of technologies and they we i think we each have our own

15:11

sort of understanding of where we might think science and technology can end or overlap or what their relationship is

15:16

but you’ve spent quite a lot of time uh over the years in engaging in those in those communities not just the lean body

15:23

but also with the eye and then i think also you know intellectually and artistically even when projects aren’t directly related

15:33

um my uh sort of exploitation of the

15:38

science to pursue my vision is

15:44

it’s rather instrumental i think that once upon a time like in the early years

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when i was working out of the national research council i might have had some ideas that i was

15:55

contributing to science but in retrospect

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i think that the science was contributing to me and

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and certainly i was contributing to the um sort of expanding the

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the ideas um of the scientists in the work that they do for sure like

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when i when i did get scanned and i was working with the visual information technology group at the national research council um you know they were

16:28

always astounded with the extremely relevant questions that i came up with and the limits that i pushed the

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technologies that they were developing to but it wasn’t necessarily because i had

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any particular science knowledge or science or particular science comfort for

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example it was i really think that as an artist i come in

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wide open without limitations and the more we know about a subject sometimes the less we know about a subject and so

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if i go to a senior scientist and i say you know i want to do this that and the other and he says oh well that’s not

17:10

even done we don’t know if we can do it we’ll try and then it happens

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the piece isn’t in the show but as part of the main body project i produced a book called

17:21

classically bound and that book was um you know almost 8 000 pages of source code just showing the graphic

17:27

representation it was really just three columns of numbers showing the position

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in 3d of all of the data points necessary to

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form basically a 3d graph which was the body shape from the scan

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and i was sitting with the technician one day and we were working on

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developing um developing some algorithms to abstract some of the body forms and suddenly it

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dawned on me well what’s behind the graphical user interface well we all know it’s called a

18:03

graphical user interface and so something is feeding the data into the image i’d like

18:08

to see the data that’s supporting the image and so we opened up the file in a text

18:16

uh software instead of a 3d graphic software and that became the book it was just a very simple question it

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dawned on me in that moment that those algebraic equations that i did in you

18:29

know high school math that resulted in a pyramid or a cone represented on a 2d graph

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were very simple objects that were

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directly related to the very complex object of the body shape and uh

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i i didn’t think there was any particular brilliance in that but it shows that i didn’t have a limitation on

18:55

my thinking and the technician did have a limitation on his thinking and at that point he

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said to me that well i was a very abstract thinker and i don’t know if i’m an abstract

19:07

thinker or not but somehow i asked a very little simple question that really

19:13

exploded into a new new sort of idea of representation

19:19

and and so for

19:25

um i think in terms of the um let’s say the representation of the

19:31

south or the extension of the south and in your early work there’s there’s a lot

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of stuff around that extension through technology um i think you know particularly

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um uh i can’t remember the name of the project where your your your webcam and your

19:49

network and your business

19:55

these projects here still have uh even though they’re not so directly looking at uh technology like a more obvious

20:03

version of technology as as an extension of the stuff but i think there’s still that that in there how do you see that

20:09

that kind of navigation of that extension both is it is it mainly in the idea of

20:14

content is there also something in the kind of tools in the process well

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you know i i had a conceptual art education even though my work doesn’t particularly look

20:26

like conceptual part because it’s so representational um

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but i learned early that the meaning begins at the most granular level so the

20:38

meaning and the artwork begins with the selection of the tool and the selection

20:43

of the materials and so um

20:48

and so if i if i do a work in photography such as this

20:53

one or a work in performance the first thing i decide is i have i have an idea that needs to get out and what’s the

21:00

best mechanism for its release and that’s where the

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tool choices are made and the material choices are made but my works really start as visions and the

21:12

choices of tool and material come second and so it’s really the vision that i am

21:18

most interested in pursuing um but just just to comment about me uh

21:23

about that project molly this was um in 2002

21:29

or 2001 or 2 or something and i was hanging out at the national research council and i had a desk there

21:35

and they had been given a

21:42

wearable computer by a company called cybernoct and um i don’t really know

21:49

why exactly that they were given that tool but nobody knew what to do with it so they

21:55

gave it to me and said maybe you can do something with it and that’s the unique project that i’ve entered through the

22:01

tool and i have a very uncomfortable relationship with that work and

22:07

because i didn’t choose it in a way you know in a way it was it felt it feels more

22:12

like a commission than a piece of of like i certainly put my imprint on onto the tool with my work

22:19

but it really felt more like you know it came from an external book that couldn’t have been that wasn’t

22:25

part of your vision the book was just one of the very powerful parts of mean body wasn’t

22:31

you had no idea that that book was going to emerge right uh and so it’s there is

22:37

a you know a very significant and and what probably was this quite arduous process

22:42

to get such a large uh book made uh becomes a kind of result of that

22:48

of that interaction as well but it certainly isn’t i i don’t see a kind of

22:53

mapped arc towards the enactment of your vision there’s still quite a lot of happy

22:58

accidents let’s say or revelations that come through that person yeah that’s absolutely true especially with that

23:04

particular body of work because i was really pursuing a a project that

23:11

was about abstract in the body and de-categorizing the body and dissecting the body into fragments that weren’t of

23:18

traditional categories that come out of anatomy and so i was really working at the national

23:24

research council to develop a set of algorithms to give a little logic to my dissection and

23:30

everything else and that project became the chimera set and everything else that

23:35

came out of that body of work which is a lot of work uh or projects that oh on

23:41

the way i can make this and on the way i can make that so one of the pieces i did was a grid of

23:47

360 images of that particular model that’s standing there and

23:53

what i did is i i made a very simple small script asking the software to

23:58

rotate the 3d model and take a picture of it every one degree

24:04

and that was very instrumental because at that time in 2001 there was no viewer

24:10

that i i work on a map environment and there was no viewer for 3d models for

24:17

macintosh at that time and so in order to view the scan models i needed to make movies

24:24

out of them you helped me make one of the movies out of them actually and so i would i think we’re like very simple gif

24:31

animations and i would scroll in order to edit down my i had you know i had over i had maybe

24:38

160 original scans and i edit it down to i think 84 is in the final database but

24:46

i had to view all of those and understand them and decide which ones i would work on

24:52

and so this grid of 360 photos was sort of already made because um because you

24:59

know it was just sort of a practical exercise so a lot of the pieces in that particular body of work are like that

25:06

and the eye has a bunch of different derivative parts as well and have come out incidentally on the way

25:13

and do you think i mean in you were saying you know in terms of looking for mechanisms to kind of

25:19

release ideas or deliver ideas and and for you

25:25

how how important are or you know how do you like people to

25:31

access the the sort of range of the ideas and then i think the mean body um

25:36

it’s maybe a bit more it’s a bit more legible the the feeling

25:41

of your engagement with technology it’s certainly the feeling of the 3d scanner

25:46

and that it’s it’s written all over the kind of computer but there are and so it’s we see the

25:52

technology and i think in work here um it’s not there’s still an engagement

25:59

with other kinds of technologies and let’s say apparatuses as well that it’s not quite as legible and so how does the

26:06

how does the viewer coming into it um access those things and where is it important for you to support that like

26:12

is this for instance this kind of conversation in the panel that was run here or publications do all those all

26:18

play a key role in kind of bringing the ideas um to the

26:24

viewer or is it are those is it really all uh you hope it’s all sort of up on the wall

26:31

well certainly i told you there were

26:37

answers so that might questions be very direct um you know

26:42

like this piece the rel aquarium the fact that it was a list served diary

26:49

in the days before spam we’ve been had a name it was a spam diary i mean it was

26:54

both spam and elicit because people had an option to subscribe but mostly people were subscribed and they had an option

27:01

to unsubscribe it was very important for the first

27:06

little while after i made it that it was an email performance but now it’s a database

27:12

and uh and i think it adds it adds sort of richness to the piece to know that i

27:18

made it in dialogue with these you know sort of uh 1700

27:23

to 2000 and sometimes 900 the number of subscribers went up and down and it was

27:29

very interesting to see you know i wouldn’t get a flurry of unsubscribes if i put on anything sort

27:35

of sexually provocative and i would get you know a flurry of subscribes if i got

27:42

uh if i put on things that were political for example and it was interesting to watch people’s tolerances

27:49

and and and some of the very kind of more painful texts that are maybe more personally revealing solicited

27:56

all kinds of feedback are you okay dear rel aquarium did you sleep last night you’re a rel aquarium i noticed you sent

28:03

out the post at 4 30 in the morning are you sleeping and people would

28:09

constantly give me this kind of feedback or hey where are you you’ve missed three days in a row are you well and so it

28:16

created a very intimate and intense relationship between me and all of these people who

28:23

were supporting me with their audiences and in a way that’s another project

28:28

and this is a remnant of that project and it’s either sort of it’s

28:36

sort of further derived because now i’ve taken the material of 254 pairs and i

28:43

think there’s 92 pieces here so that’s a very small fraction of what’s in the database so the fact that i’m now using

28:51

it to storytell yeah is a yet another project from the same content well i think that’s i mean it’s over the years

28:58

of knowing you and you’re in your engagement with the projects the the storytelling around those projects

29:05

you know the work really comes alive in a whole other way um that where the richness and the depth

29:12

and sometimes you think how how how do you pull a lot of those threads is there is there

29:18

uh and i guess it’s interesting to hear you see it as a sort of set of projects

29:23

that kind of um are almost discreet in a way i’ve never sort of really thought of it

29:29

that way but thought of it as a kind of really fascinating messy kind of moving

29:35

aspect in which you know a context like this and i watched the

29:41

the panel as well that you guys did and that that you know

29:46

in those contexts the work opens up in a way that lots of other work it just just can’t it doesn’t have that

29:53

kind of richness and depth and the narrative and that’s still only a fraction of it i mean we could probably

29:59

spend a series of evenings talking about each of the works and the kind of stories that come

30:04

but i think then what i’m curious about and uh to ask is in in that context how

30:11

um how do you see what the audience will experience when they’re when they’re in the gallery without this activation

30:18

um how do you how do you imagine them sort of pulling all those threads

30:25

wow that’s a really good question um mostly i try not to imagine i’ll make a

30:32

lot of threads and i mostly try to sort of make in

30:38

my sort of autonomous mental state but it is true that for every decision i

30:45

make i seriously consider how it could be read in a multiplicity of

30:52

takes if you will and um and and i look at my work and i sit with my work the thing

30:59

that i do most with my work is sit in silence with the work and i decide what it’s saying and if i adopt this posture

31:05

what i said and if i adopt this posture then what i’m saying and and if i have you know the third one from the top you

31:12

know on the whatever fifth one in whichever if it’s in that place or if it’s in that place

31:19

then how does it perturb the narrative and which is the narrative that i can

31:25

that i stand behind the strongest which is the one that speaks to me the loudest

31:32

and i really sort of i feel like i usher my works

31:37

in a way in a way they’re not mine works anymore in a way they’re children in a way they’re

31:42

they’re living things and i always believe that it’s important to let the idea have a life of its own and to go

31:49

into dialogue with the work as opposed to trying to kind of wrestle it into a

31:55

predetermined form that for which the artist is sort of an

32:00

executive producer of the work um

32:06

so i really try to be much more organic in my process than it kind of looks on

32:11

the surface and for that reason sometimes it takes me a long long time to get the works to a sense where i feel

32:19

it’s completed and because i kind of relate to them as living things i fall

32:24

in love with them i fall out of love with them i fall into

32:30

and as i start to understand my relation to the work into the content then i can

32:36

let it go into the world and be its own thing and i think there’s this i mean there’s a great element of that

32:43

in walter benjamin’s the storyteller where one of these sort of key aspects of

32:49

defining what we understand the storyteller to be is that we when we’re listening to them tell the

32:54

story we feel that the storytelling themselves have been implicated somehow in the story even if just as a witness

33:01

they are somehow related and so i think there’s something um that that comes up in that element in your

33:08

work that it’s not they are you your process of looking for ideas but it’s also an

33:15

authorship of a story that we want to see how you are implicated at the

33:20

storyteller where does that come from i think about the publication for you like what role does the

33:26

publication play in really in expanding the space of your work or is it

33:31

something that other people kind of do

33:36

um i think you know i haven’t had a whole lot of publications to so

33:43

maybe i don’t have a fully formed idea about that but

33:49

i think the publication is gathering together in the various stories and um

33:55

you know wrapping um but also something else entirely

34:03

the catalog that we’re making for this show we’re really approaching it as a thing in and of itself as opposed to a

34:09

document gathering the exhibition and

34:14

and that that works for me because it sort of releases it from a didactic responsibility

34:23

um you know i think that good artworks can inspire conversations and more

34:29

conversation more conversations and there are always a zillion entry points like it’s very

34:35

difficult for me to say that this work is about this because there are so many entry points what i

34:40

need to take into consideration is the whole of my sort of creative emotional landscape in

34:46

the context of my life when the thing was being made and what was i studied and why was i studying that and how did

34:53

certain decisions perturb me into other sort of research paths and

34:59

it’s not really possible to tell that whole story and so i i recognize that

35:06

my story of the work is just mine once it’s in the world it does just doesn’t belong to me anymore and i don’t have

35:13

control over it and i don’t think the the publication um

35:21

i think the publication just gives people like a springboard to into their own

35:26

understanding of what they might be working on the idea of the the personal um

35:34

this comes from watching your uh the discussion in the panel one of the things you said

35:41

uh one of the things we said in the work in the other room with the the cougar remains um and your the the

35:49

time in which it took you to open um the box so this this there’s a six month period

35:56

that it took you to actually engage directly with the thing inside and that

36:02

that journey there took you um to another comment uh to order to figure

36:07

out go through this process and one of the things you said that really struck me about the idea um that the

36:14

this idea of the personal and really the individual is a very culturally relative

36:20

term a culturally relative idea that you’re and i i was struck with the thought of

36:26

that you have this body of work however that is deeply personal um and how does

36:32

that how did that process uh that experience affect the way you saw your own work in the work not just

36:39

as say a shift in a before or after but in terms of reading the kind of work that you’ve done but suddenly you have

36:45

this this feeling that that this personal idea this similarity that i you

36:50

know have been working with

36:58

um one of the works that i that i have completed as part of the childish

37:04

objects body of work that’s not in this exhibition is a credit of

37:11

four neon little poems and one says we can’t recoil reflect

37:20

and one says breathe and one says let go and one says ah

37:27

and that’s the process i take to my ideas so whenever i start a project

37:34

i do have a vision but as i said i let go of the vision it comes it does

37:40

come from within but i also have to let go of it and go into dialogue with it as

37:45

if it were another person or as if it were a child and i was just raising the child my job is only to usher the work

37:53

into being so i’m in a constant state of

37:58

letting go of my preconception letting go of my vision and

38:04

not dominating the peace but ushering us sharing the peace so

38:10

the bones that are in between here and there came to me over years over years i was thinking

38:18

about this material that when it wasn’t in my possession and

38:23

imagining what it might be what it might feel like um the kind of a little bit of

38:28

the creepy object feeling when i encountered the opportunity to to buy them to begin with and

38:35

now that i’ve become informed and educated about the market in human materials

38:41

i just don’t have that abject creepy feeling anymore and i think about that

38:46

as part of my um my cultural specificity and before the

38:51

show opened there was a flurry of attention around those bones and who were those bones and where did they come

38:57

from and as i educated myself about the medical market and the market in human materials

39:03

i realized that it’s inappropriate to cast an individual onto that set of bonds and i don’t relate to it as an

39:10

individual it’s not an individual it’s a collection of osteological specimens that make up a complete human body but

39:18

there’s no individual left in there but i had very sentimental and romantic ideas

39:26

about this individual that was in the box as if it was a child that was killed in a war zone

39:33

after the trip to india and in fact it didn’t take much discipline to not open the box i was

39:39

very i was very sort of uh decided that there’s all kinds of stuff i need to

39:45

learn and i have this idea i’m going to open the box and there’s going to be this aura that comes out of it and it’s

39:50

going to be like that scene in pulp fiction where the light comes out of the briefcase in the diner and

39:58

well you know there was none of that so i thought you know well before i kind of you know

40:04

lose that opportunity to experience the aura i’m gonna really know everything about it but knowing everything as much

40:10

as i could about the materials really dismantled the possibility of aura in

40:15

fact and and

40:21

i now know that those bones mean something here that they do not mean in india and that they do not mean in the

40:29

medical market in general and for people who work with human materials and

40:34

specimens and and anthropology and medical researchers and educators

40:40

bones don’t carry an aura bones are instrumental to knowledge

40:45

but is that something that that that shift is that something that’s a personal observation for yourself or

40:51

that’s something that you want to come through in the work in terms of the kind of

40:58

the kind of let’s say scientific distance that kind of

41:03

emerges there a kind of disinterested relationship and i don’t need this interested in a sense of dispassion but

41:10

but a kind of distance

41:16

before i started before i opened the box and while i was in my fundraising phase

41:21

i had all kinds of ideas what to do with the bones even before i knew what they both looked like and

41:27

most of the ideas uh included assembling the bones into a specific posture to

41:33

evoke a certain set of narratives about conflict and poverty and

41:39

over there out of sight of mind and and and once

41:45

i opened the bones i realized that my primary engagement was with my sort of

41:51

imaginary of what it might be like to get an individual in a box in the mail

41:56

and this was not it just didn’t hold up this was this was

42:02

my own sentimentality the product of my acculturation and i didn’t feel it was responsible to

42:10

bring that narrative to the bones at the end of the day once i really knew what they were

42:15

and also um as the years have gone on and now it’s five years and i’ve been

42:21

doing really hard work about conflict and i realize that the narratives that i’m deploying and

42:28

the pieces that i’m asking my audiences to consider are hard and difficult and i try really

42:35

hard not to be heavy-handed like i don’t want to hammer anybody over the head of

42:40

my content i do want to ask you to ask yourselves these questions i do want to

42:48

acknowledge my complicity in the work in

42:53

in the stories that i’m critiquing i do benefit from you know

43:00

the oil the plastics that are produced from the oil and industry and i do benefit from you know

43:08

unpaid labor in bangladesh and i do benefit from the very seedy market in

43:15

human materials and i want to put myself at the center of the

43:21

critique as well it’s really important for me to take like an ethical posture in particular

43:29

with my choice of imagery and my choice of materials

43:35

however with those bones now i realize that because there are so many

43:41

complicated narratives that we all have different narratives about bones and

43:47

funerary practices and how we ritualize and celebrate

43:53

life and death and um and i would it became imperative to me to leave it

44:00

as open as possible but also as respectful as possible

44:06

within my own sort of belief system and so

44:11

i in organizing the bones as i do in the shipping box the very shipping box that

44:17

they came delivered to me and i asked my audience to consider the same questions that i considered what do we

44:24

do with this i haven’t disassembled them they’re still tied with nylon filament but i have

44:30

at the same time attempted to give it a respectful sort of closure

44:36

by upholstery in the box as a funerary container

44:43

but in in in the end when you have that that approach to it as an

44:54

those layers of the story from i mean you can imagine then that your story and specifically your

45:01

relationship to the box it must be very difficult to to interrogate the audience’s possible experiences and how

45:08

those players the narrative that they might have access to when there is is this just

45:13

this kind of the box is the only because there’s i can imagine the layers of

45:19

communication and administration of bureaucracy a paper trail uh kind of almost

45:26

unfoundable uh layers of of bureaucracy really uh you know sort of apparatus technology

45:32

all of these things that come into and surround what is a very simple box of very

45:39

powerful organic material and so i wouldn’t say that i just wonder about

45:47

how difficult that process is to kind of figure out how people are going to approach it

45:53

or not you know i can’t figure it out i guess but you know

45:59

imagine that that process and think of what that relationship would be yeah that’s an interesting question ryan

46:06

but it goes back to for me it goes back to that i can’t anticipate what people

46:11

are going to take away i just can’t like if we lived in some sort of like cultural singularity where everybody was

46:19

subject to the same traditions

46:25

that maybe i might anticipate

46:37

but there is something um it’s not a

46:43

it’s not a journalistic piece it’s not a museum piece it’s not a it’s not a formative piece it’s you know it’s uh

46:50

but there is something there’s a kind of a motivation um

46:57

to create an experience and i guess that’s even if you can’t

47:02

figure out what they’re doing you know how that process is

47:10

i went through a lot to give myself permission to put the loose bones in the box as they arrived in the mail i spent

47:16

thousands of dollars in order to you know release myself from some sort of

47:26

let me know that sentimentality is the best way i can describe it i traveled to india i traveled with my daughter

47:32

we went we breathed a lot of bad air we met some very interesting people and

47:38

we went on quite an adventure to try and understand what a set of osteological specimen

47:46

might be outside of our cultural context and i i don’t know where these bones

47:51

came from they might have come from india they might have come from taiwan they might have come from china i don’t know

47:58

how long they’ve been in canada i don’t know how long they’ve been out of the ground i just it’s

48:11

um but at the end of the day i kind of felt like i understand now that there are multiple

48:18

possible readings for these bones and one is scientific and one is you know emotional and when i entered

48:24

into the project i thought i was going to make something that was like significantly more heartstring than

48:30

what i’ve presented but ultimately i decided to like this is a really difficult task for me to decide what you

48:38

know whether it’s okay for me to assemble the bones in my personal kind of ethical

48:43

position i didn’t want to penetrate the bones i felt

48:51

of individual lives had already been instrumentalized enough and i didn’t

48:56

want to contribute more than necessary so i ultimately you know i i have hardware for assembling it

49:04

and ultimately i decided that the best thing to do is just

49:10

you know to leave it it was loud enough as the loose packaged bones

49:18

um but ultimately i am deploying those bones for a very specific narrative

49:23

about conflict and the narrative about conflict culture in our global

49:29

geopolitical situation has very little to do with the bone industry

49:35

it is possible to draw lines between conflict and the history of medicine for

49:40

sure those narratives intersect um but that’s not really the story that

49:50

i’m promoting with that work i’m really trying to use those votes to say hey we’re making dead people you

49:57

know we’re benefiting benefiting from the making of dead people are we aware

50:02

of that do we want to i mean do we stand by that do we choose that position and

50:08

if we do and if we don’t well we should do something different

50:14

um and does it um i don’t know frustrating but are you

50:19

surprised that that that sometimes the discussion may be sideways to where

50:25

you know where that that particular question itself about this and does it fall into a kind of uh or are we

50:32

preoccupied with the well how how does this arrive here at this uh rather than sort of

50:38

um the conversation that you’re pointing to right there well yeah if you watch that

50:45

that transcript of the panel you’ll see that i’m frustrated but um

50:51

i uh the the stories that we’ve got to keep our

50:57

head in the sand are sometimes surprising but not surprising that we want to keep our head in the

51:03

center like i can completely i have spent most of my life

51:09

trying to keep my head in the sand so that i can help you with these children i’ve taken my head out of the scent

51:16

and i’m looking around and i’m looking deeply and this is what i’m seeing and i’m reading it like a messenger i’m

51:22

bringing it when i having been to sudan going to sudan it was like opening the

51:28

paranor as well so i can’t close the pandora’s box now and

51:34

and so

51:40

it feels to me that there’s an urgency in in giving a very clear message and helping

51:49

other people just take their head a little bit out of the sand but it’s um

51:55

it’s amazing the things that we don’t want to know so that way it almost becomes kind of part

52:01

of the of the artistic strategy right that that that that the

52:07

it’s only with the kind of uh reaction of a a public and kind of maybe you know

52:14

somewhat sideways narrative that it’s talked about about what the work is talking

52:19

about that that enables a more uh more direct and passionate access to

52:24

this to this discussion whereas you know if you say it directly it sort of ends up being kind of

52:31

yes we realize we’re putting our hands in the sand but when you present something so powerful that way um and

52:36

the reaction is to as it was in the panel you said where it’s the end of talking about the bones and where the bones come from as opposed to this kind

52:43

of other um more pressing ideas that you want to put on the table

52:49

it gives you that which then again it cycles back to this really kind of fascinating place where how important

52:56

these elements for your work are they really begin to open up and not just here in this context but as

53:03

it plays out in a kind of in an immediate discussion about it as it might play out in a publication

53:09

all these different ways where the works expands and pushes up these

53:17

i think it’s very hard to know what’s going on in the world we’re saturated with you know very controlled

53:22

information and propaganda and unless you actually see it but he wants to

53:28

actually go and see the world it’s not possible to know i always thought that i was

53:34

kind of an intense looker and traveled to places where i

53:39

traveled to haiti as a teenager with my mother and saw lots of babies with bloated bellies and you know

53:47

the novelties of malnutrition and but when i went to sudan i thought that

53:53

i had seen stuff you know i’d seen poverty in the caribbean numerous trips i’ve seen poverty in

54:00

canada i’ve seen poverty and road trips across the states shanty towns in the midwest and new south wales it doesn’t

54:07

look like america it looks like developing the world in a lot of places on our continent

54:13

and kind of had that bit of arrogance about me when i went to sedan i had no idea

54:23

how difficult it would be i had no idea that there were people in the world who

54:28

had no clothes and no pot for cooking you know i didn’t know that there was

54:35

an entire country with zero infrastructure not even a bridge not even roads

54:41

um kind of their life

54:46

that exists outside of what we take for granted it’s very very intense

54:53

it’s very awakening to go looking around and looking deeply you know if i were a tourist and i had

54:59

gone to spain i might have gone to cartoon i might have gone to juba these are the two cities that people know

55:06

wow is another city that some people know in sudan but i went to these little villages and they

55:13

knew the mountains who were subject to daily bombings by antonov

55:18

you know carriers that came from the north and it’s

55:24

it’s unimaginable to live in those conditions

55:30

i have some questions about photography that probably seemed slightly sidetracked by hands we’re going to keep

55:36

going on the uh on uh well you speak of uh

55:43

very life then we’ve talked about gambin and this kind

55:48

i was thinking about uh the apparatus but i wonder if another another word that that is appropriate to this idea of

55:55

your your interest in systems and your willing desire i guess to to sort of push

56:00

yourself and insert yourself into you know systems of research and the military as a system um these

56:08

kind of uh system of research as it relates to both

56:13

the bones but also the research and imaging and the research and as it relates to the eye and production so

56:20

there’s there’s these um this real desire to sort of uh somehow expose

56:25

yourself very deeply into the into some kind of

56:30

system or apparatus and try and either is it to kind of explore its logic uh or to extract it as

56:37

a as a material itself um what do you when you when you sort of see this kind of sort of this is a field that i’m

56:44

going to insert myself into how do you think as you enter into that

56:53

i guess um i guess in retrospect i don’t really feel like i know anything until

56:59

i’ve experienced the thing you know maybe maybe i’m not such a good reader

57:06

maybe i have um

57:12

maybe seeing it for myself gives me confidence in the knowledge in a way um

57:19

like when i when i participated in the creation of the camera eye

57:25

which i used to think about as a kinetic artwork and now i just think about it as

57:31

an obsession and i ask myself if this piece is

57:40

asked myself if this piece is about you know finishing it or just continuing to make it

57:45

um when i went to i started that piece by participating in an anatomy course at

57:53

the ottawa eye institute where we dissected the it was called the anatomy of the orbit

57:58

and we dissected the face and the head to

58:03

first we took off the face to look at the anatomy around the eye itself the bone

58:11

structure the muscular structures and the lacrimal glands the

58:17

nerves and so on the materials of the eyelid which the eyelid is a fantastic

58:22

and crazy awesome piece of material and then and then the next day we came

58:29

back and the anatomy technicians had removed the skullcaps from the cadavers we were working on and we were we were

58:36

two people per body we were maybe 18 people in the class um

58:42

teams and my partner was a surgical resident and we were given a

58:49

kind of like a treasure hunt we had to find all these features of the vision system so we had to follow

58:55

the optic nerve from the base of the skull into the eye and out the eye and then

59:02

dissect the eye and we weren’t allowed to move on to the next until we had demonstrated we had found the you know

59:08

relevant piece of anatomy

59:15

my biggest takeaway from that experience was that the body is dead and there’s no vision out of a dead eye and

59:21

vision is very much about living and visions is like

59:26

vision can be thought of as mechanically within a cadaver but that ultimately

59:33

vision is the the person the person and the parsing of what is seen by the eye

59:41

and i also discovered that i had no creepy feeling and um

59:47

i was looking for that you just tell them yeah yeah it’s funny that funny i had no i

59:53

was looking for it man i wanted to have a profound experience of the object but there was just sheer fascination and

1:00:00

this body that i was working on with my partner was like an old old man it was

1:00:07

an old old old dead body too and and it was very ugly and smelly like

1:00:14

formaldehyde and but there was an intense and overwhelming beauty that was

1:00:20

unimaginable and i would never have thought that this disgusting bit of post life would be you know the

1:00:27

remnant of a person would be so overwhelmingly awesomely beautiful and

1:00:34

chilly no objection just you know it was a spiritual experience i had no idea how i

1:00:40

was going to end up with the spiritual experience of that so i do know that when you trust when i thrust myself into

1:00:47

a place something else happens like i wouldn’t have known to make that book of source code if i had not been sitting

1:00:54

next to the technician if i was working as an executive prop i would have ordered

1:01:01

the piece from the craftsperson and not have participated and there’s a

1:01:07

whole bunch of work that would never seen the light of days it wouldn’t have dawned on me and so similarly

1:01:13

that experience in the anatomy lab created a whole new path because i had a

1:01:20

transformative spiritual there experience be a shift in language for you as well and

1:01:26

the way that not only you talk about it and describe it to perhaps yourself and to people working closely with you but

1:01:33

but how do you describe it to to those technicians collaborators as you move them along because i’m sure

1:01:39

that the in in those situations where something transformative happens um that

1:01:46

then has to change how you want to get through these other stages of the work i can you know how did that transformative

1:01:53

experience of that affect uh the way that you talk with the 3d modeler which is spent quite a

1:01:59

significant amount of time doing a lot of 3d modeling for this where do you think do you think

1:02:04

there

1:02:11

my relationship with the people i work with on the audi has been several people now

1:02:18

you know through my work they’ve learned the 3d software craft and they’ve grown up and moved on from architects and

1:02:25

animators and other things but the person who i work with now has been the same person who i worked with

1:02:31

on main body who was part of a spin spin-off

1:02:37

company from the national research council so we’ve really been working together for 15 years now we actually

1:02:43

don’t really have to talk you know i make a few notes tell him you know what i’m looking for

1:02:50

and we’re just sort of in sync now after all this time

1:02:55

but it certainly changed the vision for that project the camera eye the camera i was supposed to be roughly what you see

1:03:02

as the army but after the anatomy experience it turned

1:03:07

into an olympic system so now i’ve got this whole steam engine that i’m working on and

1:03:14

the olympic scene olympic system which is the piece of anatomy that um that uh

1:03:21

they call it the animal right and it’s where the deep emotional fight flight

1:03:28

flight freeze type of responses are stored there and to me that became more

1:03:35

the eye than the eye is like i said it’s the it’s the life force that’s projected

1:03:41

through the eye which is for me really really the eye and the life force comes from that place that stores our most

1:03:48

traumatic memories and our fears and you know our compulsions

1:03:54

yeah it’s interesting this you you know started out that question about about tools and the relationship tools and

1:04:00

wanting to have you know this kind of experience of distancing yourself but in that becomes one of the most important

1:04:06

tools that you must have had over these years is is a relationship to communication and in crafting this this not only

1:04:14

communicating ideas through the expression and communicating ideas through material objects but actually

1:04:20

communicating with a whole variety an array and that you must have seen that transform over

1:04:26

the over the years

1:04:34

transformative experiences

1:04:46

to communicate and not just i don’t just mean that in the sense of like make sure i know how to tell them what to do but

1:04:52

the kind of

1:04:57

yes i’ve become a very practical speaker i guess

1:05:04

i remember like in the early 2000s and i was doing a lot of work with um you know policy development with the canada

1:05:11

council and the funders and so on and and the arts funders and academic funders too in fact

1:05:18

in fact our whole spectrum of funding in canada was really looking to what is our

1:05:23

technology and what is art science and i did a lot of research for the canada council on the arts council from the

1:05:28

various funding councils how does art fit into to scientific discovery and how does my scientific discovery fit into

1:05:35

art and how do people work across disciplines of our art technology technologists and it always came down to

1:05:42

language the first thing that anybody needed to do was build a common set of

1:05:47

language tools and along with building the common set of language tools we could build trust because then we could

1:05:53

understand each other and it’s through that communicate trustful communicating that

1:05:58

we can develop innovation what it really comes down to that cross

1:06:03

pollination that was a very important kind of buzzword at the time of you know

1:06:10

pre-2010 and um and and now i find that

1:06:18

that other things happen some serendipities happen in the work that are incredibly

1:06:24

beautiful and in a way they come from not communicating just allowing things

1:06:32

to unfold and accepting how you know like in the in the video piece

1:06:39

for example here we are you know i pull a crew together i’m trying to find a field everything came together in

1:06:46

this magic moment the sun rose and the sun went down and the

1:06:51

halo around the little girl and it just happened to be you know perfectly the piano happened to be perfectly placed um

1:07:00

the crew was i mean for all of us it was meditation it was a very intense project because we

1:07:06

had basically two days and no rehearsal

1:07:13

and a little girl who had not experienced in durational performance that’s for sure i mean i i

1:07:23

i personally didn’t train her on the piano but i funded her training

1:07:29

on the piano to play this particular the particular selections and the

1:07:35

camera guy just victor his name was ended up with a very particular relationship with her and she happened

1:07:43

to be a very precocious and flexible girl who was able to be

1:07:50

directed basically by two directors and have keep her attention on both of us

1:07:55

all the time and the cows come into the scene at exactly the right time and they

1:08:02

and and it was it was just amazing it was it was like the love the inaudible

1:08:08

almost spiritual coming together it just kind of happened and then you know there’s no enemies even

1:08:15

you know it just go with the flow and then it just sometimes it just flows

1:08:22

so i think it just happens to come to me

1:08:27

so i thank you very much for a lovely conversation thanks

1:08:51

here um think the experience you had with the cadaver you said it was profoundly beautiful and it was out of

1:08:56

something that was ugly and it was a spiritual experience for you what was it about that moment that

1:09:02

made it so beautiful for you

1:09:08

i had this realization that everything that we ever thought of or built outside just pre-existed the outside by being

1:09:15

inside you know the most exquisite taffeta

1:09:20

for example the structures of the veins the fact that

1:09:26

the nerves travel through these perfect little foramen channels they’re called foramen the holes in the bone that the

1:09:32

nerves to travel through they’re perfectly kind of radiated like you know when like

1:09:38

on the eye i’m always paying attention to what is the radius of the edge that’s the arc of the edge because i don’t want

1:09:44

to have a corner there are no corners but there’s no room inside the head for

1:09:51

anything else of course that you uh completely understand why it’s a traumatic headache would lead to

1:09:56

you know a massive trauma very quickly because no room for the blood you know so it’s it’s

1:10:03

sort of perfectly organized and extremely efficient in its use of space and the use of its

1:10:09

own space

1:10:15

yeah it’s like the eyelid the eyelid is a little piece of armor it’s incredibly hard it was difficult too i mean we had

1:10:22

you couldn’t push through it with any of the tools we had to cut this from the edge and similarly to the

1:10:29

material that lines the skull it’s like taffeta but there’s no rectilinear

1:10:35

i mean it’s like toughness iridescent but there’s no linear warming left it’s

1:10:41

like crazy random everything is overlocked and it completely makes sense as to why it’s

1:10:48

so strong because there’s no order to sort of to find

1:10:54

for a sharp object to find its way through and so the head is

1:11:00

full of these moments of how could i mean there is no more perfect material to do to perform this

1:11:07

task or a perfect pathway to get the nerve from the neck to the eye you know so the

1:11:13

design is incredible you know i resist calling it design right but it

1:11:18

sort of is very architectural at the same time thank you

1:11:24

one question is the absence of aura i find it interesting that there’s an absence of aura in the box of bones

1:11:32

when you have preconceived ideas and expectations and the spirituality the contrast with

1:11:38

the spirituality with the eye and the cadaver where you experience

1:11:44

aura there what will cause this difference in human experience or just

1:11:50

its productization i guess would be my short answer to that

1:11:57

when i opened the bones i’d already been in india and already

1:12:03

seen how people let go of their body or the body to cremate the body throw

1:12:09

the remnants into the ganges in india they call it my wife expired

1:12:17

in calcutta a friend that we met along the way they call it expired

1:12:23

it’s a shedding shedding a body like a you know shedding behind a cocoon

1:12:28

and it allowed me to think of the body in other ways and much more

1:12:34

around you know in in a in a deeply spiritual society the

1:12:40

body is more vehicle but in a secular society we’re very materialist we have much more

1:12:46

invested in our meat i think than in deeply spiritual societies and so i

1:12:54

had an opportunity to encounter basically a counter-narrative and

1:13:00

but there was this issue of that i was sold

1:13:06

this thing through photos right i sold the collection of bones through photos of the bones

1:13:12

and description of the bones and yet i hadn’t opened the box so i waited until i got back from india to open the box

1:13:18

and some weeks actually after i returned from india i went into quiet reflection and i

1:13:24

opened the box and lo and behold they didn’t give me the right skill they gave me a skull with victorian

1:13:31

markings that was old and you know dijon mustard yellow and had all quadrants in

1:13:37

ink and somehow it just turned into

1:13:43

i ordered a pair of blue jeans and they’ve given me ground genes i have to call the company and i have to write the

1:13:48

situation and so it just sort of it just very quickly

1:13:54

turned into product now i had to research how much the value was i said okay we’ll give your money back well now

1:14:00

i have to ask do i want my money back or do i want the bonus and i had to research the phone industry in north america again to see if i could even

1:14:06

replace those birds ultimately we negotiated a replacement of the skull but it was a negotiation it

1:14:12

was it was commerce market and it was the commerce of the productization of the materials and the

1:14:20

the negotiation over the materials that emptied the aura

1:14:25

from so it wasn’t cultural

1:14:31

it wasn’t you were not infiltrated by the perception of

1:14:38

the exploration of the body the inspiration of the individual you were not influenced by that

1:14:44

you know having that psyche and then culturally here

1:14:49

you immersed yourself or you became influenced by how the body is perceived here it’s not

1:14:56

an exploration there is seemingly more dignity even though you

1:15:01

mentioned that bones are interpreted in different

1:15:07

arenas differently but still for all culturally

1:15:12

we still have some um lack of respect or some level of respect

1:15:19

and so you they are okay with that are you saying that there was there was

1:15:25

because of the productization there was really no room for maura

1:15:32

but the other thing is alcohol i’m a secular person i’m a spiritual person but i’m a secular person and at the

1:15:39

moment you know when bush came to shove i default to my place yes and so

1:15:45

to me they became specimens they were specimens you know not remains

1:16:00

so perhaps you could say something about those creatures with their wings that you’ve

1:16:06

added to that scenario

1:16:12

any kind of anything in particular well why why why advent why not just

1:16:17

have because you’ve added something to that installation and it’s certainly not like you know

1:16:24

it’s caught like you know this happened for example

1:16:34

so it’s not it takes it outdoors um

1:16:40

the butterflies came from like my first idea was the story of 1000 cranes

1:16:46

and the story of one of the thousand cranes uh was um

1:16:52

story and uh it was popularized uh the children’s book um

1:16:59

the story of a young a girl who was exposed was radiated

1:17:04

in hiroshima and the 1000 cranes are

1:17:12

the idea of holding 1000 cranes is to bring good luck or good health or best wishes or

1:17:17

you know good fortune on to somebody usually a married couple or a birth of a

1:17:23

baby and um and so the story in sudaku was that she folded these uh endeavored a

1:17:29

thousand cranes to heal herself from the leukemia that she got as a result of being radiated and then in the story she

1:17:36

folds some six hundred and something cranes before she dies and so that is that children’s story written by

1:17:43

an american author that popularized the 1000 cranes here and as i said there was something

1:17:48

significantly more sentimental and heartstringing that it was pursuing as the idea in addition to the piece before

1:17:54

like at the beginning of it and um and so uh so it started with 1000 cranes and i

1:18:01

started researching them and i wanted to deploy the cliche but i was sort of like reluctant to work too close

1:18:09

to that cliche and so so rather than calling them 1000 pranks i started calling them winged things

1:18:15

and letting go of the cranes and going into kinetic winged things and it brought me to the works of rebecca horn

1:18:23

and rebecca horn is an artist to make these little kinetic butterflies and the loss of the monarchs and what

1:18:29

the death of the monarchs means within our culture and how do i take this japanese story and bring it home to a

1:18:36

canadian cultural framework and then i came to the monarchs but i wanted to

1:18:41

choose a butterfly that was not a monarch butterfly and in fact it’s not i mean this is an indented butterfly um

1:18:49

it’s a riff off of it’s a monarch wing riffing with a congolese i can’t remember the name of

1:18:55

it butterfly and um but for me the butterfly occupies the space between

1:19:01

uh the space between life and death and that that they’re

1:19:06

carrying they’re carrying the spirit of the dead

1:19:11

into another realm but also very pragmatically i wanted to add a moving

1:19:17

element a time-based element to that piece to soften the room because i felt that the work was too austere and too

1:19:23

hard and so i felt that the butterflies would you know give it a gentle entry point

1:19:32

another question in fact yeah quite personally in some respects

1:19:38

because i’d like to ask you to get your response from

1:19:43

is part of the 21st century and i have this very stage

1:19:52

really lost and they tried to find a new way of expressing themselves

1:19:58

and the reason i say this is because i also made more

1:20:03

as well about art in the age of mass production and he was very much concerned about the

1:20:10

issue of the relationship between the machine and the capacity to reproduce

1:20:15

and obviously 20th credit century this was very much explored as well

1:20:21

but it seems that we reached now a place in the 21st century where some of our other day the machine is now

1:20:27

so dominant and so taken over that somehow the artist has a role

1:20:32

and that is to try to open up our minds to the recognition about that we really the machine has taken over but

1:20:39

we are now you know controlled by a machine and i think this is

1:20:46

very important because i think the artist is extraordinarily important because the artist opens up

1:20:53

other people to recognize there’s something there that they didn’t see and they when you refer to

1:20:59

is a religion and then you try to express you and promote put it into some sort of

1:21:05

form in which someone else then has the experience of transferring your

1:21:11

vision into someone else’s experience but it was in the traditional article the

1:21:17

great renaissance art of europe was part of the 19th century early impressionists

1:21:22

you could see that the communication of the artists and people was there was some sort of

1:21:29

very important kind of communication process going on and it was responding to

1:21:34

and i think i got a feeling that something has caused i have looked at when there are many exhibitions degrees of expressions

1:21:54

people um i’m educated as a photographer so i’m

1:22:00

kind of native with tools i don’t draw for example i don’t draw i do all kinds of things but i do not draw and i do not

1:22:06

paint i know it’s a fundamental insecurity of letting go from my hand

1:22:12

and i think that’s i mean i think that’s what’s lost that my work is so heavily mediated that

1:22:21

it’s not i i think about my work as being direct it’s very direct in its relationship to the viewer but it’s very

1:22:28

indirect for me because either i need tools or i need things or i need people

1:22:35

in order to exercise exclusives my ideas and um

1:22:41

and so so yeah in a way i mourn my dependency on tools

1:22:47

but that’s my that’s my craft is tools um

1:22:55

there are a lot of things about the eye and this whole kind of strange

1:23:00

fetishization that we’re doing about 3d printers right now which is raising 3d

1:23:06

printers to some level of rarification when there’s not much a 3d

1:23:12

printer can do that a hand a crafting a well talented hand can’t do and so i

1:23:19

think like i do agree with you that there’s something in education now that’s being sort of missed out on but

1:23:26

i have no doubt that it’s going to cycle back again i think

1:23:32

to comment on something that for you and and your practice and

1:23:38

something we really talk about say the influence of a sort of feminist thinking a feminist artist over the

1:23:44

course of your your your career but i think its relationship to technology is not really

1:23:50

key and i think here what’s emblematic of of work that she’s doing at certain points is to

1:23:56

actually um how is an artist and how can an artist inhabit technological structures

1:24:03

in order to open up and make them different and think differently about them because they are quite totalizing this

1:24:10

we are completely immersed in a technological society but and there is no outside of that which

1:24:16

you can sort of retreat to um and artists like piccolo have become quite fascinating because of the their ability

1:24:22

to to enter into it quite deeply and i think you know mean body is certainly an actual looking at that

1:24:29

those structures very very directly in that idea of representation of the body neural body and bringing a lot of

1:24:36

that right directly to the the image representation and the technology around that but i think it

1:24:42

permeates sort of all of your work in different ways this idea of how can

1:24:48

we inhabit the idea of and the experience of technology in a different way to open up

1:24:55

a different kind of conversation so that’s a i’m not an answer before i’m

1:25:00

offering no but that’s true because uh because one of the things that i have brought to my technological

1:25:07

technological works and especially the sculptural work is organic curves and

1:25:12

organic curves are not typically machine made and

1:25:18

certainly the organic curds and body and complexity of the shapes that i’m asking the tool

1:25:24

to produce is pushing the boundaries of the capacity of the tools um

1:25:31

but i think that also like we’re creating another aura and using the tool to invest

1:25:36

new kinds of materials with different kinds of orders

1:25:47

family

1:25:53

of generic um but not so directly after your experience with the distinction of

1:25:58

the eye and examining the interior structure as like architecture

1:26:06

and knowing that the body is neat that the body is like intentionally created

1:26:11

how did you expect to find a person put it in terms of the structure that would carry that lead when you would buy

1:26:18

bodies and like the five years from acknowledging that the body is

1:26:24

structured where did you expect to like embed a curse onto that structure again

1:26:32

that’s a really good question that’s why i say it comes from sentimentality um

1:26:38

and naivete like it just it really wasn’t

1:26:44

for me because i was so invested in the

1:27:01

and those children do have personhood

1:27:07

until i actually went to india and we saw what we saw nikita king didn’t need with me

1:27:14

and then i came back and i looked and then i opened the bones i realized that there’s a world apart between the

1:27:20

specimen and the dead child in the palestine in the rubble of palestine

1:27:26

and um and that the bones were mere material to invoke that life that was you know once

1:27:35

lived and lost and disrespected and undignified

1:27:42

and so so yeah that’s why i do not call myself out

1:27:47

and say well you know it was fantasy it was magical thinking it was pulp fiction

1:27:54

and really involved

1:28:03

i felt compelled to take your photograph and i wish that i had videotaped this or

1:28:10

i hope it is videotaped i think just having the audio is a little bit of a

1:28:16

you know diminishes from the with the intensity here

1:28:21

and i felt i was drawn to take your picture because of the transformation that

1:28:27

took place when you started to talk about your experience in sudan

1:28:33

you changed yeah

1:28:38

and it would be i don’t know if it was a good thing that ryan caught me because one of the things i’ve learned about

1:28:44

sudan is that i can talk for a day for every minute

1:28:54

maybe thank you so much

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