Mind zapping bits - a natural history museum of the future

Michael Rees, 'From Ear to Ear', Central Fine Arts

Exhibition review by Shirley Shor, 1997 

Technological culture has crossed all lines. Science progresses rapidly. The changes are swift, far-reaching, revolutionary, fascinating, alluring, worrisome and overwhelming, so much, that they can no longer be stopped. Historically, these times of change are replete with extensive cultural activity, where everything familiar is given a new meaning. The new technology permeates all fields of life and culture, infiltrating everywhere - even our own bodies.

The body continues to be the center of attention in a world of art, which for a long time now has been exploring the issue of identity. Yet, the questions posed by the human body and human identity and their representation alters as new technologies in the fields of telecommunication, nanotechnology, and biotechnology affects the discourse about the policy of identity.

The exhibition From Ear to Ear indicates on social and scientific tendencies that emerge in the digital era. Tendencies that render a new perception of the body and of the self. Michael Rees endeavors to reconstruct the meaning of being “human” by posing the body as a basis for a different mode of organization and thinking. Harnessed into an alternative cultural system, the body is deconstructed and reconstructed repeatedly during the artistic process. He combines a scientific anatomy with a fantastic anatomy to create internal body fragments that are rational and irrational, familiar and unfamiliar.

We can recognize some of the body parts such as ears and scalps but definitely not the way they are juxtaposed. Organ fragments are Rees’s virtual raw materials. Virtual, because they are located in his computer. There, onscreen, he can 'play' with these hybrid models. By using CAD (computer aided design) software he can mix, tear, clone, and distort the organs and determines their relationship to each other in three-dimensional space. Then, through a RP (Rapid Prototyping) manufacturing process the wire frame model is changing Accumulation State and becomes a 'real' sculpture in our 'real' space.

The process of Rapid Prototyping creates three-dimensional sculpture by laser forming; one 1/2000-inch thin layer is created in each step, on top of another until the 'lab object' is appearing. The automated production enables the creation of highly precise complex forms with fine-quality surfaces. Finely, in addition to the printed computerize model, those creatures of mind-zapping bits are placed on pedestals in the exhibition space.

The display space becomes a documentary site of hybrid artistic, scientific, medical, ethnographic and poetical images. One can walk among these hybrids and contemplate the remodeling of the human body. This documentary site functions as a natural history museum but in an opposing time direction. While the natural history museum invites us to explore 'extinct species' of the past, Rees's display space invites us to explore the new possible species of the future. You can establish the identity of natural museum artifacts by recognizing their skeleton - 'oh, this is a dinosaur!', but what can we say about Rees's bony structures? How does the whole body that the displayed fragments belong to looks like? Will it be possible for such a creature to exist? Is it possible for it to exist today? Is it right or wrong to open our bodies to the new technological invasion? Do we pollute our private property or improve it by hosting the artificial?

Today it is a fact; the body ceases from being the last frontier. Actually, it has been broken long before the transplant revolution started ever since Technology allowed the body's expansion and elaboration through prostheses which cling to the skin and respond to touch, such as the Personal Computer, the Walkman, the Cellular Phone and the Contact Lenses.

However, Rees is trying to produce a new kind of body, witch does not exist. He assumes in advance the virtual body, and from that point, he comes back to the corporeal body; from the pixels to the body cells. He is not interested in the body as a fixed exterior covering, or as static shape, nor is he interested in conserving, the taxidermy body. Instead, he prefers to put on surgeon's gloves and to turn over his studio into a research laboratory, a place where he can investigate and change the body in semi medical terms.

Rees tears the 'Cybernetic Strait Jacket' and peeps inside to find out what is in. In other words, he casts the body from the skin and deals with its content. This is exactly what is done in medical simulations. If the medical simulation main purpose is to see the interior landscape from the outside, Rees's work allows us to see the exterior from the inside. By chancing our viewpoint, he presents us his way of deconstructing the subject.