https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000dpjh

In the hands of artists, smog, landfill and sewage become beautiful, witty and challenging statements. As the scale of pollution intensifies, Emma meets the artists who are finding original and compelling ways to make us understand and feel the crisis of filth. Zack Denfeld and Cat Kramer harvest air pollution in cities around the world, whipping up egg whites on street corners. They bake them into meringues and hand them out to the public who can’t help but react to eating the city’s pollutants. Mexican collective Tres guide Emma through their studio, piled high with collected rubbish: they’ve filled a gallery with 300,000 stinking cigarette butts, taken over the streets to preserve fossilized chewing gum and crawled for months on Australian beaches filtering through marine plastic. Nut Brother has courted controversy with his performance of dragging 10,000 bottles of polluted water from Shaanxi to Beijing while John Sabraw wades through Ohio’s filthy streams, capturing iron oxide from unsealed mines and turning sludge into glorious paints. Emma delves through rails of Kasia Molga’s costumes which glow red in response to carbon, she listens to an orchestra of Lucy Sabin’s breath and takes us down under the River Thames to meet her collaborator Lee Berwick: they're working on an installation about underwater sound pollution, experimenting with sounds in the Greenwich foot tunnel for an installation opening in March. These provocative and entertaining artists discuss the relationship between art and activism, taking us beyond the facts and figures to face head on and experience the contamination we are inflicting on the planet.

Smog Meringues: 

blew nose and colours of rainbow came out, cookery book said that eggs harvest the air and that at stiff peak stage egg foam approaches 90% of air - inspired them to make piece

location, tasting cities and part of cities, could articulate perception of location

debate whether eat or not - poeple putting bodies on line, sore throats from smog eating

can't have isolated air, all share it 

flavour and taste, an experience, makes issue understandable at the scale of our bodies , using our bodeis to enact change, no more data about air pollution to cause change

Cigarette butts:

keep waste as found, don't clean, don't try to make art out of trash because that will just produce more trash, thinking/dwelling on trash found and making it more intense 

300,000 cigarette butts collected in Mexico city, numbered them, put on wall like butterflies in science musueum, others on floors and tables

smell - how piece enetered the body, making waste visible throuhg our senses, not only the eye

smell so disgusting and terrible people had to leave exhibition but always came back, made collective process immensely personal

interested in objects that enter cracks, shoved in drains, chnage in lifestyle when become waste, used and thrown out, scars and marks of how treated, stories emerge from scars

preserve spat out chewing gum, restoring it, interaction - intimacy powerful weapon for change

using senses to show severity of issues - taste and smell make us feel problem rather than see it, put value on how piece experienced (smell, touch)

https://www.wired.com/2011/11/pl_mori/

Mori created a chart describing how our degree of identification and empathy with inanimate objects increases as their appearance approaches our own—we relate more to stuffed animals, for instance, than to industrial robots. But at a certain level of near-humanness, our affinity falls off a cliff. Mori dubbed this the uncanny valley.

Wired: Do you think it’s possible to bridge the uncanny valley?

Mori: Yes, but why try? I think it’s better to design things like Honda’s Asimo, which stops right before it gets to be uncanny.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/an-uncanny-mind-masahiro-mori-on-the-uncanny-valley

MM: I have read that there is scientific evidence that the uncanny valley does indeed exist; for example, by measuring brain waves scientists have found evidence of that. I do appreciate the fact that research is being conducted in this area, but from my point of view, I think that the brain waves act that way because we feel eerie. It still doesn't explain why we feel eerie to begin with. The uncanny valley relates to various disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, and design, and that is why I think it has generated so much interest.

NK: Your uncanny valley chart captures the concept nicely: The curve first goes up, as people's affinity toward robots increases, they become more humanlike, but only up to a point, when the curve suddenly plunges into the uncanny valley. Do you still think that robot designers should aim for the first peak instead of aiming beyond the valley?

MM: Yes, I do. I always tell them to stop there. Why do you have to take the risk and try to get closer to the other side? It's not even interesting to develop a robot that looks exactly like human, from my perspective.

NK: What do you mean by that?

MM: I have no motivation to build a robot that resides on the other side of the valley. I think the [design of] Asimo is more invigorating. I feel that robots should be different from human beings.

NK: But aren't there many projects in Japan that are aiming for the other side of the valley?

MM: I wouldn't say that there are many, but yes there are some, and that's fine. Although I do think it is difficult. Using the woodcarving of a Buddha statue as an example, that one last touch of the knife may destroy the whole thing. There is a narrow margin for error.

MM: I don't know. I do agree that some aspects of humans are like machines. But what I don't know is the mind. I think this is a problem that humans will never be able to solve. No one can explain whether an object can bear a mind. We don't know whether a mind will be formed when computers become really precise. Will a computer feel one day that it's not in a good mood or that it doesn't like this person or that? I don't know. My friend Ichiro Kato [the late Waseda University professor and pioneer in humanoid research] used to think that the mind can be created, but I don't think so. That's because we really don't know what the mind essentially is.

Nadine robot is unsettling to watch - example of uncanny valley, blinks, interacts/ responds to people, can carry out tasks - how a sculpture that adopts some of these features can cause alarm - piece that blinks?

https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/biomedical/bionics/prosthetic-hands-trigger-uncanny-valley-sense-of-creepiness

One might say that the prosthetic hand has achieved a degree of resemblance to the human form, perhaps on a par with false teeth. However, when we realize the hand, which at first sight looked real, is in fact artificial, we experience an eerie sensation. For example, we could be startled during a handshake by its limp boneless grip together with its texture and coldness. When this happens, we lose our sense of affinity, and the hand becomes uncanny.

Such observations suggest that the uncanny valley can arise through any combination of disjointed expectations—filtered through senses such as vision, hearing and touch— about whether an object is human or nonhuman. A prosthetic hand that looks real but feels cold could prove just as creepy as a robot that appears nonhuman but talks and behaves like a human.

Consider levels of human likeness, creating a sense of uneasiness by having correct balance of human and non human qualities (temperature, colour, texture - porous)

Thinking about what makes something human - how can a sculpture resemble or act like a human?

Movement, Respiration, Sensitivity, Growth, Reproduction, Excretion, Nutrition - creating a piece that grows or breathes? poos? examine how this changes our response, feel uncomfortable, brains classify things that we see quickly - does not like being tricked (thinks something is human when it isn't causes unease)

https://web.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/stelarc/a29-extended_body.html

Stelarc has been extending his body through performances since the late 1960s. His performances include attaching a "Third Hand" to his body, extending himself into virtual space with a "Virtual Hand", and over 25 "suspension" events where he hung his entire body from hooks piercing his skin. Stelarc's artistic strategy revolves around the idea of "enhancing the body" both in a physical and technical manner. It originates as a polarism between the "primal desire" to defeat the force of gravity with primitive rituals and a low- tech and the hi-tech performance with the third arm and the related cybersystem. His intention in both cases is to "express an idea with his direct experience."

Through Stelarc's work, we reach a second level of existence where the body becomes the object for physical and technical experiments in order to discover its limitations. When Stelarc speaks of the "obsolete body" he means that the body must overcome centuries of prejudices and begin to be considered as an extendible evolutionary structure enhanced with the most disparate technologies, which are more precise, accurate and powerful: "the body lacks of modular design," "Technology is what defines the meaning of being human, it's part of being human." Especially living in the information age, "the body is biologically inadequate."

For Stelarc, "Electronic space becomes a medium of action rather than information".

CTHEORY: You always work with your body. Your body is your form of representation, your medium. How do you feel being both an artist and an artwork?

Stelarc: It's interesting you've pointed that out, I've never felt that I am the artwork. In fact the reason why my performances are focused on this particular body is that it is difficult for me to convince other bodies to undergo rather awkward, difficult and sometimes painful experiences. This body is just merely the convenient access to a body for particular events and actions. So I've really never been obsessed by the fact that somehow I am the artwork because I don't critique it in that way.

For me the body is an impersonal, evolutionary, objective structure. Having spent two thousand years prodding and poking the human psyche without any real discernible changes in our historical and human outlook, we perhaps need to take a more fundamental physiological and structural approach, and consider the fact that it's only through radically redesigning the body that we will end up having significantly different thoughts and philosophies. I think our philosophies are fundamentally bounded by our physiology; our peculiar kind of aesthetic orientation in the world; our peculiar five sensory modes of processing the world; and our particular kinds of technology that enhance these perceptions. I think a truly alien intelligence will occur from an alien body or from a machine structure. I don't think human beings will come up with fundamentally new philosophies. An alien species may not have the same notions about the universe at all. The desire for unity may well be the result of our rather fragmentary sensory system where we observe the world sensually in packets of discrete and different sensory modes. So our urge to merge, our urge to unify, that religious, spiritual, coming together might very well be due to an inadequacy or an incompleteness in our physiology.

CTHEORY: If such a philosophy is devised, it would not be a human philosophy. How would it be applicable to the human race?

Stelarc: Well of course one shouldn't consider the body or the human species as possessing a kind of absolute nature. The desire to locate the self simply within a particular biological body is no longer meaningful. What it means to be human is being constantly redefined. For me, this is not a dilemma at all.

CTHEORY: So a human is not this entity sitting here with these two arms and two legs, but something more beside?

Stelarc: Yes, of course, if you are sitting there with a heart pacemaker and an artificial hip and something to augment your liver and kidney functions, would I consider you less human? To be quite honest, most of your body might be made of mechanical, silicon, or chip parts and you behave in a socially acceptable way, you respond to me in a human-like fashion, to me that would make you a kind of human subject.

CTHEORY: You keep speaking about redesigning the human body. Who decides and how should it be redesigned ?

Stelarc: (Laughs) There is often misunderstanding about these notions, partly because they are critiqued with a kind of rear-vision mirror mentality of a fascist, dictatorial, Orwellian-big-brother scenario.

I don't have a utopian perfect body I'm designing a blueprint for, rather I'm speculating on ways that individuals are not forced to, but may want to, redesign their bodies - given that the body has become profoundly obsolete in the intense information environment it has created. It's had this mad, Aristotelian urge to accumulate more and more information. An individual now cannot hope to absorb and creatively process all this information. Humans have created technologies and machines which are much more precise and powerful than the body.

How can the body function within this landscape of machines? Technology has speeded up the body. The body now attains planetary-escape velocity, has to function in zero-G and in greater time-space continuums. For me this demonstrates the biological inadequacy of the body. Given that these things have occurred, perhaps an ergonomic approach is no longer meaningful. In other words, we can't continue designing technology for the body because that technology begins to usurp and outperform the body. Perhaps it's now time to design the body to match it's machines. We somehow have to turbo-drive the body-implant and augment the brain. We have to provide ways of connecting it to the cyber-network. At the moment this is not easily done, and it's done indirectly via keyboards and other devices. There's no way of directly jacking in. Mind you, I'm not talking here in terms of sci-fi speculation. For me, these possibilities are already apparent. What do we do when confronted with the situation where we discover the body is obsolete? We have to start thinking of strategies for redesigning the body.

CTHEORY: Stelarc, your latest work centers around a sculpture you built for your stomach. What was the impetus for creating a sculpture to display inside your body?

Stelarc: I've moved beyond the skin as a barrier. Skin no longer signifies closure. I wanted to rupture the surface of the body, penetrate the skin. With the stomach sculpture, I position an artwork inside the body. The body becomes hollow with no meaningful distinction between public, private and physiological spaces. The hollow body becomes a host, not for a self or a soul, but simply for a sculpture.

https://nextnature.net/2020/02/interview-patricia-piccinini

When did your fascination with challenging definitions, such as 'natural' and 'artificial', begin?

I have been looking at these ideas since I left art school in the mid 1990s. I have always been interested in bodies and politics and disrupting our dichotomous construction of the world. Over the years I have looked at these ideas with regards to medicine and science, and now it provides an interesting way to look at issues around the environment, biodiversity and sustainability.

Your artworks appear both born and made. They evoke the tinkerings of biotechnological labs, of experimentation and synthetic biology. At the same time we see in them a sense of familiarity and naturalness that we recognize. What does this synthesis mean for you?

That is the very shading of the artificial into the natural that is at the core of my work. It is the distinction that I refuse to accept. How do we imagine nature now in a way that doesn't deny our place in it and our impact on it. We are part of nature. Ironically, that is made all the more clear by something like climate change. We are part of nature, a force of nature, like a cyclone. We need to get past this counterproductive nature/culture thing and start to think about what sort of world do we want to live in, and how might we achieve that. There cannot be a return to an imagined pristine nature of prehistory, not one that includes humans anyway, but does that mean we want to live in a world reduced to a small number of industrialised species? How can we find a way to 'go forward together with other animals', as Donna Harraway puts it.

Ideas about family, networks and relationships often frame your work. How can relational ways of thinking and being transform our experience of the world? Particularly when we live in quite an individualistic culture.

I think the individualism of contemporary western culture is one of the key problems of our age. I think the world is deeply interconnected, and whether you look at it in terms of genetics or ecology, the idea that individuals, or even humans in general, can somehow separate themselves out from everything is both ridiculous and counter-productive. It is the separating out of humans from nature that allows us to imagine the world and creatures around us as 'resources' to be 'exploited'. The idea of individualistic culture is that our own happiness is justification enough for anything we do, and that our responsibility is to ourselves rather than others. I feel very differently. I think we have a responsibility to those around us - people, creatures, trees or whatever - and we need to find a way to happiness that does not ignore those responsibilities. It suggests that compromise in relationships is not a failure but a success, and I think that is ultimately more productive.

You have said that you want people to go on a journey from aversion and disgust to empathy and closeness when they the creatures in your work. You strike this balance in wonderful and emotive ways. Are emotions and empathy our most important tools to carry into the future?

I think they are vital. Again not in a dichotomous way. It's not about abandoning the rational for the emotional, it’s more about acknowledging that there is no 'pure rationality'. There are always emotions, it's just a question of whether we acknowledge them or not. Empathy, or perhaps more accurately compassion, are vital tools that arise from when we grant value and agency to others. My creatures are intended to stand in for many sorts of 'others', and the relationship we can construct with these others, these strangers, in the safe space of the gallery can be a model for how we go on to interact with all of the others we share the world with. It's interesting to me that we have the idea of 'xenophobia' but we don't have a word for it's opposite: an emotion to describe the process whereby we warm to something that we are initially disturbed by. Maybe if we did we might find it easier to do.

https://www.art-almanac.com.au/an-exclusive-interview-with-patricia-piccinini-and-graham/

CM: This creature is not aspirational for civilisation?

PP: No, he’s not a superhero. He walks a fine line between admiration and repulsion. I wanted it to be kind of conceivable and familiar but completely mutant and for us to consider the wonder of technology and the trauma it can bring. Would we want to go to this extent to protect ourselves? Our would it perhaps be easier just to drive more slowly?

CM: Did your process begin with thinking about the functionality of this being?

PP: It’s a pretty similar process to my other work, I conceive of an idea and then I go about finding a way to discuss it. Part of that discussion centres around empathy, how we feel about the body, and the innate bias against difference.

‘Graham’ is incredibly open, his huge chest cavity has organic air bags in it so that when he’s in a crash they take the impact and exude protection. In a crash you have to protect the brain, it gets completely lacerated and severed from its connections. The spinal column also often will break leading to paralysis. You must protect the vital organs. As such it’s a functional design that I can imagine growing out of an intestinal system.

CM: What do you hope the work will communicate?

PP: I hope that is inspires people to ask why he looks like he looks, and to therefore think about the vulnerability of a normal body. Do we want to push the body in this direction to protect ourselves or are there other ways we can deal with living in a world we were not evolved for.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/standing-room-only/audio/2598086/korean-artist-seng-yul-oh

Regardless of how playful or interactive some of the works are, for Seung it’s purely about the form and the ideas. When asked whether he intentionally draws inspiration from his Korean background – "No... It kinda oozes out when I'm in Korea, [but] I have two cultural references. I feel a bit [of an] outsider… maybe I’m a bit lost. Sometimes I feel confused – where I sit – where I belong". But as far as Seung is concerned, being 'lost' and floating in-between is a good place to be.

https://www.expressions.org.nz/Exhibitions/upcoming-exhibitions/periphery/

Seung Yul Oh's interactive sculpture Periphery, brings his playfulness to the gallery. This large inflatable installation, on loan from the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, is an environment to be walked through and to be experienced… from the inside out. Light hearted and serious, Seung Yul Oh tests relationships between audiences and artworks, artworks and spaces, blurring the boundary between spectacle and participation, between passive and active engagement.

https://channel.louisiana.dk/video/marina-abramović-ulay-living-door-museum

Abramović argues that she and Ulay were “living doors,” which she finds very poetical: “if there were no artists, there would be no museums, so we are living doors.”

When people passed through, they had to choose between turning towards the male or the female: “That was of course the game that’s called ‘imponderabilia’. That in a flash of a second you have to make a decision and you make your decision before you figure out why,” Ulay comments. Abramović adds that it’s equally important that the piece is reperformed “because it says something about performance as a time-based art, says something about the emotions of the public, integration of the artists in the public …”

https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/49

KC: What do you think the role of the artist is now? How has that changed as the scope of what art is and what it looks like has also changed?

I think that the role of the artist is really, quite frankly, as much as a scientist, to define what life is and what life can be. I think that is really important. When I think about my young self, I never thought that that was art’s function. I thought art was something else, a little bit more polite. Delving further into the practice, I would go so far as to say that there is an urgency for artists to be at the table with other people who are making the important decisions about civilization as we know it, and not to take some sort of ancillary role as entertainers. Because art can actually do so much in leading the conversation. Art can actually invent tools and art can also push technology in ways that are completely unreasonable. We ask for the impossible things, the things that you’re not supposed to think. When we do that, that’s when we really start breaking new ground in terms of these other more functional, utilitarian kinds of disciplines.

KC: Could you talk about how you chose the materials you used in Shameplex?

This work was produced in 2015, when I was thinking a lot about gravitating more towards this biotech intersection and how one could biologize machines. I was thinking about nested technology, how one could incubate fertilized eggs in a human womb, but then also incubate someone else’s egg, and then how that would interface with an actual ultrasound machine. The ultrasound gel transpired out of that line of thinking. I was very attracted to the viscosity. I’m very drawn toward tactile textural elements. I also wanted to impart some sort of pain, whether it’s to do with actual biological child birth or whether it’s a kind of failure of technology.

I tend to juxtapose this almost uncomfortable symbiosis and disjointed symbiosis. That came in the form of these pins that would oxidize in the ultrasound gel, and that would look like some kind of bloodletting in this pristine, clear, cool, viscous gel. Then you have these coffin-like boxes that also look like incubation. New life is growing, but something has to die. There is a lot of unintentional anguish contained inside of this vessel; it has a very mournful quality. It’s something that should bring joy, associating childbirth or being pregnant with an ultrasound gel.

IC: Could you talk about the bright green bottom of the piece? Why that color?

That green just represents some kind of vertigo for me. Technology makes me kind of physically ill. It makes me dizzy. I wanted a nauseating feeling, where you would sort of recoil. It’s not pleasant. With the light, it’s not a comfortable feeling or a comfortable amalgamation, but I like it for its hideousness.

It’s funny because some people think that my work is not very technological. It’s definitely becoming increasingly so. Shameplex seems very lo-fi compared to some of the other works in [New Order]. It’s not necessarily performing as much as other algorithms or something, but there are a lot of scientists who claim that nature is a computer. We are all driven by biochemical algorithms.

IC: You’ve worked with fragrance in many of your works. How did you think about scent in Shameplex?

In relation to Shameplex, I liked that there was a kind of absence of smell. It gives you a sense that you’re in a world where smell doesn’t exist. I think that feels very radical for me. In relation to my practice as a whole, it’s a lifelong exploration. I am really interested in how we can do further research into artificial intelligence and smell. Are we going to lose smell with the rise of automated life? Does it become this inconvenient thing that we breed out of our machines? Already in humans we have diminished our capacity to activate our smell. Are we going to lose all of this sensorial intelligence? What happens? I feel that’s really important to try to translate onto machine life.

http://www.dunhillandobrien.co.uk/projects/holes-1/

The physical act of digging offered them a way of making new forms together where neither of them was able to impose their will or design. The resulting holes were not particularly remarkable, they were governed by the kind of soil and location and the use that the landowner hoped to make of the hole.

In this work The Holes, Turning, a number of plaster forms were mounted on steel frames with spindles and belts attached to a motor so that they slowly turned together. This offered a solution to the difficulty of presentation as the forms endlessly re-arranged themselves, placed in a configuration that was based upon the least distance possible given the irregularity of their shapes.

In Holes 2 the opportunity of working with clay and the inevitability of firing and glazing it got the better of their more practical inclinations. The kilns at EKWC are very large and this gave a parameter for the largest cast hole dug for a farmer in the local area. Where Holes 1 was in constant movement, Holes 2 had a heavy and inert quality that was belied by the sugary pink glaze.

The work that Dunhill and O’Brien exhibited in 2008 as part of the exhibition Just World Order, comprised of 3 parts, Object – a tailor made lining formed directly in the bell pit; Walk – a guidebook of a trek that set out to mark the distance the sound of the 40cm diameter medieval bell would have travelled with the gallery as the nominated location of the bell tower; and Phone – a mobile phone with a ringtone of a medieval bell of the same size, weight and shape, recorded at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, that rang intermittently throughout the exhibition.

The work questioned the territorial impact of the original hole and employed a range of methods to physically examine this. It drew upon our previous research (Sculptomatic 2005) that interrogated holes in sculpture and questions posed by R Casati and A.C. Varzi in ‘Holes and Other Superficialities’ and David and Stephanie Lewis in their essay ‘Holes’ considering the ontology, logic and epistemology of holes.

Stone Appreciation 3 presented videos of Dunhill and O’Brien in various British landscapes drawing and measuring large boulders alongside film of their attempts to model those same forms in clay from memory without viewing the clay object as it forms. The physical act of clambering on, under and over these rocks, attempting to gather information has been translated in to the smaller gestures and awkward intimacy of hand modeling.

http://www.joelkuennen.com/interviews/danh-vo.html

JK: Previously, you have said that narrative is not important in your work and yet the affect with which you imbue the objects used in your installations belies a narrativistic approach by you the artist, a very personal practice in which objects are brought into your emotional understanding of life. The viewer then is beckoned by the difficulty of creating meaning with these objects into relating emotionally to them as well. Could you speak to this relationship between subjects and objects that you seem to be relying on in your work?

DV: When I say that I avoid narrative in my work I mean that I avoid creating a coherent logic or perceivable rationale for why something is selected or presented in a certain way. I like to test things, to think about why things would be placed next to each other, and then deliberately try other ways of arranging them that might bring about something unexpected, or produce a new understanding of a given object. I think the viewer should have to work to create meaning; I want to leave space for imagination instead of prescribing how something should be read.

https://flash---art.com/2013/09/danh-vo-24-09-2013-interview/

TC: For the Venice Biennale, you have imported the skeleton of an entire 200-year-old Catholic church from Thai Binh Province, Vietnam. Do you think of this piece as a “refugee”?

DV: I don’t really like the word “refugee” because it conjures up specific images we all have of someone in a crisis, and it doesn’t allow a person to have a complicated identity. It implies a subjugated position as we have come to understand the word through the media. Likewise, I wouldn’t put such a heavy label on the church. It was demolished and the wood was up for sale. Usually the wood is purchased to create houses; it was going to be repurposed anyway so why not repurpose it in its original form for an exhibition? In addition, the church was not “fleeing” Vietnam. In a way, you could see it travelling to Italy as a kind of “homecoming” for a Catholic structure. Yet, if you look at its style, it is clearly not Italian.

TC: Everyone has their own little arrangement of objects, somewhere right up front or stacked in a niche. Why is it that we have to express ourselves through objects by creating a mise en scène?

DV: I’m not sure I can comment on why everyone does this. However, I do think that we collect things that we desire, because what we desire tells us something about who we are. I guess that’s why I like to shift and change my arrangements from one exhibition to another. These things should never be fixed or totally resolved. Desire is a complicated thing.