Michael Oatman
Zoologic, Zoorotic, Zooptic
Zoologic, Zoorotic, Zooptic
| "Always
to link unknown things to known things." --Joseph Joubert, French philosopher/writer, 1791 A woman stands in a garden, speaking to a snake. Having a conversation with an animal. Talking about God. The snake is telling her that she can know all if she partakes of the fruit. She will have the same knowledge as God. The misinterpreted payoff of the digital revolution has neither been the so-called "access to information", nor the highly touted "information" itself. We have always found ways to disseminate information, and the problems that necessitate the critique of power structures are omnipresent. The fantasy of a democratization of the media will continue until we recognize that knowledge always creates a deficit, a "not-knowing", and that imbalance is where all injustice resides. The real payoff is a paradigm shift away from the human into what many are calling the post-human. Not merely the inevitable intersection of biology with technology, (Vaucanson's Duck of 1739 morphing into the "Six-Million Dollar Man"), but a series of potential evolutionary leaps forward in which the human genome will merge with a kind of free-range genetic web, aided by a digital infrastructure. The aim of this merging can only be to go "post-species". As a freshman in college, I stumbled across the paintings of a man named Todd ______, a fellow student. In his highly refined scenarios of animals in startling landscapes there was a particular visual element, very discreet, that nonetheless stuck out at me like a sore thumb. In each "wild and unnatural" context of, say, a zebra in the jungle or a dolphin in the desert, the animal in question wore a headset. A barely noticeable telephone operators' headset - similar to those depicted in contemporary media. Although I never met this painter, his work left a lingering imprint on my brain, a desire for interspecies communication. In the coming decades, I foresee artists and scientists working closely to cross the species divide, to wildly transcend even the most sophisticated and successful attempts by primate scientists to "talk" with apes. We will first need to change how we view communication - to acknowledge that for millions of years there have been many ways in which animal and plant life on our planet have been talking through electrochemical and other means. By importing our genetic material into the world, we invite infiltration, mutation and the kind of experimentation that will lead to unimaginable discoveries. The fantastic concept of the "Midiclorians" - sentient single-cell life as proposed by George Lucas in the latest Star Wars cycle - is based on real cellular phenomena. ATP, or adenosine triphosphate, is the basic carrier of energy in the human body. To imagine a molecular "force" is not as outrageous as it seems when one considers the reality of petroleum ingesting bacteria, the inevitability of stem-cell farming and human cloning, and the recent interest in systems that evolve from the ground up. Stephen Johnson describes these "group intelligences" in his book, "Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software". We have all been conversely delighted and offended by the image of the performing circus bear, the dumb animal re-made in our own image as an entertainment, a demonstration of our mastery over the animal kingdom and a wish for communication (on some level) with non-humans. The proximity of cities to animal populations has accelerated some virus' resistance to vaccines (producing super-viruses), has taught animals how to behave around humans in order to get food, and created relationships that often seem to transcend traditional barriers between species. This "taming" of wild animals, coupled with the endless "Disney-fication" of flora and fauna alike has further instilled in us collectively a sense that animals serve some sort of aesthetic role in our lives. From ancient attempts to see animals in star groupings to dog breeding to the fetishistic role-playing of "plushies" (humans costumed as animals for erotic gratification), animals continue to be our direct link to an earlier self. A wild self. I see a co-mingling of genetic material, intelligences and habitats as an inevitable part of our own evolution. There are those (call them artists) who will seek to create organic "works" that are deeply performative, that is to say, are demonstrations of interspecies agreements about form. Call them performances, offspring, symbiotic relationships, parasite/host pairings; these co-operative conditions will, as I mentioned earlier, redefine communication. Because of the unprecedented nature of these organic/interspecies artworks, we will be forced to come to terms with "design" as a function of nature, and not of the human mind. I have had rare moments of real communion with nature. They've all been dream-like to the point of locating myself within another self, a self that longs for recognition by other (non-human) beings. Our own fascination with extraterrestrial, intelligent life may be, in fact, a wish for contact with the animal "other", these aliens that co-exist with us in our own time and under the same environmental and communication constraints that limit the rest of us. A woman on her way to work is wearing a headset. She is driving a car. She appears to be talking to herself. Michael Oatman Troy, USA |
