Hallucigenia
Genetologic Research 07/11/2009 01:44
Martin Walde
AHIS, 2009
Thin walled glas bodies, filled with several different gases, are made to shine through high frequency technology. They are made to look like ancient small animals millions of years old which have been found in Kanada in 1977. S.C. Morris discovered these animals and called them Hallucigenia.
Black Cat / White Cat
Genetologic Research 07/11/2009 01:20
South Korean scientists have cloned cats that look reddish under ultraviolet light by modifying a protein gene to change their skin color.
The team at Gyeongsang National University produced three Turkish Angora cats possessing altered fluorescence protein (RFP) genes.
The Ministry of Science and Technology said, It marked the first time in the world that cats with RFP genes have been cloned. The ability to produce cloned cats with the manipulated genes is significant as it could be used for developing treatments for genetic diseases and for reproducing model (cloned) animals suffering from the same diseases as humans.
Chaotic Warfare
Genetologic Research 04/11/2009 16:24
Pascal Bernier
Hunting Accident - Deer, 1996
Hunting Accident - Tiger, 2000
Pascal Bernier
Butterfly, 1996-1998
‘According to theories on chaotic systems, the fluttering of a butterfly’s wing can eventually produce a hurricane. Waging war against butterflies could perhaps become the ultimate weapon in the chaos strategy’.
Animal Anomalies
Genetologic Research 03/11/2009 23:28
Thomas Grünfeld
Misfit (Pig/Bird), 2001
Misfit (St.Bernard/Sheep), 1994
Thomas Grünfeld’s anomalous creations are some of the strangest and most surreal of contemporary taxidermy. The creatures from his appropriately titled Misfit series are composed of bits and pieces of animals, all flawlessly sewn together to create entirely new species. The Misfits are reminiscent of early natural histories in which strange and unfamiliar animals were described according to the bits and pieces of well known creatures. For example, the camelopard, now known as the giraffe, was described having the height and neck of a camel, the head of a stag although somewhat smaller, the teeth and feet of an ox, and a leopard’s spots. The armadillo was a pig with a turtle’s shell, and the sloth, part bear, part ape. The platypus displayed complete anatomical confusion, seeming to “possess a three fold nature, that of a fish, a bird, and a quadraped” as Thomas Bewick wrote in 1824. On inspecting the skin of a platypus for the first time in 1802, George Shaw, director of the British Museum, observed that it appeared to have “the beak of a Duck engrafted on the head of a quadruped.” Such a hybrid animal seemed too strange to be true, and Shaw claimed that “it is impossible not to entertain some doubts as to the genuine nature of the animal, and to surmise that there might have been some arts of deception in its structure.” In fact the specimen Shaw examined still bears the marks from his efforts to prise the beak off. As Shaw highlights, it is only a small step from describing animals as if they were composite to actually making a new species.
\ Geology of Genetology \ GG \ 1
Genetologic Research 03/09/2009 20:47
Maarten Vanden Eynde
Second quire of a larger publication about Genetology, September 2009
Size: 100 x 70 cm (poster) 50 x 70 cm (folded)
Published by Galerie De Meerse
Text: Dieter Roelstraete
Design: Raf Vancampenhoudt
Editor: Willem Vanden Eynde
Times Trial
Genetologic Research 02/09/2009 23:27
Dieter Roelstraete
Times Trial
On the Geological Imaginary in Contemporary Art
Sometime in the early nineties, the lights went out in modern and contemporary art museums around the world some would say, paraphrasing Sir Edward Grey, the 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon, not to be switched back on in our lifetime. This darkening of the countless white cubes of museums and galleries alike was meant to accommodate the entry of film into the hallowed space of art; although there had of course been film and video art before (think of Andy Warhols Empire or Sleep and Martha Roslers Semiotics of the Kitchen respectively), it was really artists like Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Matthew Barney, Stan Douglas, Douglas Gordon, Bill Viola and Gillian Wearing who ushered in the canonization of Hollywood-inflected film art (mostly conceived as spatial installations), and oversaw its subsequent transformation into what was probably the dominant, defining art form of the first half of the decade. Fifteen years on, it is worth remembering that quite a few of these artworks were in essence based on the simple tactic of slowing down, of deceleration; certainly some of the periods most emblematic pieces (Douglas Gordons 24 Hour Psycho immediately comes to mind, but so do Violas films) revolved around the aesthetics of slow motion and the freeze (here we could cite Jeff Walls cinematic photographs as a programmatic example). There are many reasons why so many artists active at the very forefront of arts habitual appropriation of cutting-edge technology (digital in this case) chose to slow down rather than perhaps the more logical instinct, given that it had become technologically possible speed up, but the advent of globalization as an everyday economic reality obviously played a major part in this, for the new world order of the electronic global village came with a new scopic regime in which the ceaseless acceleration, accumulation and proliferation of (digital) imagery gave new depth of meaning to the old situationist catchphrase of the society of the spectacle. Deceleration (and occasional paralysis) in moving-image-based art came to signal a critical stance not unlike that of the Luddites in early nineteenth-century, Industrial Revolution-era England, and pushing the pause button on the video camera (or in an early version of Final Cut Pro) could easily be constructed as symptomatic of a broader social or cultural demand for what the Dutch so poetically (hence untranslatably) call onthaasting: the conscious decision to lead a slower life of well-being.
In more recent times, arts anxiety-ridden, traumatic relationship with the onslaught of time always going forward, never going back; always going faster, never slowing down has taken on a very different form, that of a historiographic turn in art: an obsession with the (recent) past and retrospective glance, excessive modulations of melancholy and nostalgia (the preferred tone of much serious art produced in the last eight years or so), a compulsive desire for all that is anachronistic, archival and obsolete all conspiring to produce that which Friedrich Nietzsche damningly called the malady of history. I have written elsewhere (and extensively so) about this chronomaniacal complex, focusing on one modality of the historiographic turn in contemporary art in particular that of the archeological: artists collecting, digging, dusting off; revealing, uncovering, unveiling; excavating and lovingly inventorying the dumbstruck traces, shards and fragments of a distant, uncharted history (1). An important factor in motivating this widespread artistic interest in archeology, as one particular form of historiography, concerns the paradigmatic character of the archeological enterprise as an episteme, i.e. as a truth procedure and site of the production of knowledge: archeology is (by its very definition, namely that of the scientific study of historys material sources) bound to a materialist view of culture, history and society, and it is always also a science of origins archè being the ancient Greek word for beginning or first principle. Dig and ye shall find and seeing as the earth, and the many mute materials that it hesitatingly hands over to the industrious digger, cannot lie, the process of excavation ultimately functions as a promise of revelation, of the unveiling of a hidden truth. And ahistorical truth, of course, is the stable rock of comfort and assurance were after in these hectic, disorienting times of the ceaseless acceleration and proliferation of data (connective, visual and otherwise), the silent, stone-faced permanence of the ruin or the excavation site offering refuge from the teeming culture of speed that permeates our daily lives to such dizzying, and ultimately petrifying effect.
The rock, the ruin and all that is solid and made of stone: here we seamlessly slip into the adjacent realm of geology, where time is measured on a scale that makes even the archeological seem jittery with continuous shifts and changes where the building, completion and subsequent erosion of the pyramids is not very different, as a historical process, from subatomic motion: geology, as the scientific study of the earths crust and physical properties, has revealed that our miniscule heavenly body is not that much younger, relatively speaking, than the universe as a whole (4,5 billion years as opposed to the cosmos estimated 13,5 billion years). Geology as the realm of stasis then, of what seems, to the untrained human eye, absolute motionlessness the imperious eternal Same: no wonder that geology has been an (admittedly strange) source of philosophical comfort in its own right, and has made occasional allegorical inroads into the world of art, especially since the so-called chronophobic Sixties, when artists first started to tap into the rich reservoir of the geological (as well as astronomical, biological, botanical, ecological) imagination (2). Any consideration of the meeting of art and geology must of course pass by (or rather, depart from) Robert Smithsons pioneering work in the Land or Earth Art movement, as well as his prolific activity as a critic and renegade art theorist. A lengthy quote from his widely-read essay A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects (1968) reminds us of Smithsons keen awareness of arts folding into an experience or philosophy of time that is aligned with the geological rather than the merely historical (or archeological): The earths surface and the figments of the mind have a way of disintegrating into discrete regions of art. Various agents, both fictional and real, somehow trade places with each other one cannot avoid muddy thinking when it comes to earth projects, or what I will call abstract geology. Ones mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations break apart into deposits of gritty reason. Vast moving faculties occur in this geological miasma, and they move in the most physical way. This movement seems motionless, yet it crushes the landscape of logic under glacial reveries. This slow flowage makes one conscious of the turbidity of thinking. Slump, debris slides, avalanches all take place within the cracking limits of the brain. The entire body is pulled into the cerebral sediment, where particles and fragments make themselves known as solid consciousness. A bleached and fractured world surrounds the artist. To organize this mess of corrosion into patterns, grids, and subdivisions is an aesthetic process that has hardly been touched (3). Smithson is best known today, of course, for his giant, megalomaniacal interventions in the American natural landscape, most notably his Spiral Jetty (which, despite its monumental size, appears to be notoriously hard to find). Amid todays incessantly expanding body of Smithson literature, the exegesis of Spiral Jetty in particu
The River Is Always Greener On The Other Side
Genetologic Research 29/08/2009 21:22
Olafur Eliasson
Green River, Stockholm, Sweden, 2000
Green River, Moss, Norway, 1998
‘One Friday at half past one there I was on the bridge with Emile and a bag full of red powder and people starting to stare at us. I hesitated for a moment then emptied the bag out over the parapet and the wind whipped up this enormous red cloud. I could literally feel people in cars slowing down, the cars went all quiet. And there was this cloud, floating over the river like a layer of gas. When it came in contact with the water, all of a sudden the river turned green, it was like a shock wave. There was a crowded bus ten metres a way and everybody was staring at the water. I told Emile we should maybe move on, as if everything was perfectly normal, then I carefully put the bag in a trashcan, as if colouring the centre of Stockholm was the kind of thing I did every day. I went down to IASPIS and when I came out again my heart started jumping up and down like mad: the whole length of the river was completely green and all these people had stopped to look at it. Next day it was all over the front page of the papers: “The river turned green”. The colorant was absolutely harmless and there was no pollution whatsoever’.
Abstract of a conversation between Hans Ulrich Obrist and Olafur Eliasson, 2002
Inland Islands
Genetologic Research 29/08/2009 15:47
Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Surrounded Islands, Biscayne Bay, Greater Miami, Florida, 1980-83
On May 7, 1983 the installation of Surrounded Islands was completed. In Biscayne Bay, between the city of Miami, North Miami, the Village of Miami Shores and Miami Beach, 11 of the islands situated in the area of Bakers Haulover Cut, Broad Causeway, 79th Street Causeway, Julia Tuttle Causeway, and Venetian Causeway were surrounded with 585,000 square meters (6.5 million square feet) of pink woven polypropylene fabric covering the surface of the water, floating and extending out 61 meters (200 feet) from each island into the Bay. The fabric was sewn into 79 patterns to follow the contours of the 11 islands.
For 2 weeks Surrounded Islands spreading over 11.3 kilometers (7 miles) was seen, approached and enjoyed by the public, from the causeways, the land, the water and the air. The luminous pink color of the shiny fabric was in harmony with the tropical vegetation of the uninhabited verdant island, the light of the Miami sky and the colors of the shallow waters of Biscayne Bay.
Photo: Wolfgang Volz ©1983 Christo
The World is a man-made archipelago of 300 islands constructed in the rough shape of a map of the landmasses of the Earth, located 4 kilometres off the coast of Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
The Walk of Fame
Genetologic Research 29/08/2009 14:59
Richard Long
Circle in the Andes, 1972
‘Nature has always been a subject of art, from the first cave paintings to twentieth-century landscape photography. I wanted to use the landscape as an artist in new ways. First I started making work outside using natural materials like grass and water, and this led to the idea of making a sculpture by walking. This was a straight line in a grass field, which was also my own path, going nowhere. I like the idea of making something from nothing. In the mid-sixties I began to think that the language and ambition of art was too formal and orthodox. I felt it had barely engaged with the natural landscapes which cover our planet, or used the experiences those places could offer. Starting from my home territory and gradually spreading further afield, my work has tried to explore this potential. I see it as abstract art laid down in the real spaces of the world. It is not romantic; I use the world as I find it’. - Richard Long -
Dusty Boots Line Sahara, 1988
Michael Heizer
Double Negative, 1969-70
Double Negative is Michael Heizer’s first prominent earthwork. Double Negative consists of two trenches cut into the eastern edge of the Mormon Mesa, northwest of Overton, Nevada in 1969-70. The trenches line up across a large gap formed by the natural shape of the mesa edge. Including this open area across the gap, the trenches together measure 1,500 feet long, 50 feet deep, and 30 feet wide (457 meters long, 15.2 meters deep, 9.1 meters wide). 240,000 tons (218,000 tonnes) of rock, mostly rhyolite and sandstone, was displaced in the construction of the trenches.
Industrial Gardening
Genetologic Research 28/08/2009 19:41
Panamarenko
Hofkes, 1967
Three thick sheets of cardboard of about 1m2 are filled with a variety of inorganic trash and debris. From a prophetic kind of future vision Panamarenko nostalgically tries to restore and reconstruct the long lost city-gardens. These city-gardens functioned as urban alternative for life on the countryside and provided additional food for the unfortunate. By the steady increase of city residents (in 2008 a remarkable event took place: the majority of the world population lives now in a city) the necessity to have physical contact with the earth and live from the land is gone. People are used to this new, self-created landscape and recognize the urban environment as their natural habitat.
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