BioKino
Tanja Visosevic
Guy Ben-Ary
Bruce Murphy
A kino-parlour of microscopic Bio-Freak Wonderment
(spanish)
The Living Screen is a primitive Bio-Kino toy, designed to travel the side show alleys of art. Peer thru the Bio-Projector and experience the astounding 1/2 millimetre projection, as it transforms with the living canvas. Take savage pleasure in how the screen made from blood Splatters the dead back to life.
Delight in primeval horror, as the Cellular Dentata lurches towards you for a bite. OR look awry, as the Monstrous Other, gazes back into your eye.
The Living Screen project produces a new poetics, made possible by fusing bio-technology into a living cinematic apparatus. It embodies and anticipates renewed cinematic techniques and modes of expression, while also offering an alternative approach to understanding Bio-Art, which is, “Bio-Art as a Freak Show”.
The project re-travels early cinema history and brings film theory into play to approach ones engagement with a Bio-Kino. Screens are grown or scavenged from different tissue sources and Nano-Movies are projected over these living canvases, via the Bio-Projector. (The projection is 250-350 µ (microns) in size)
The screens are alive, react, transform and eventually die. It contorts the projected Nano-Movie, confronting the spectator with issues such as virtuality, reality, life and death.
There are 4 elements to the LIVING SCREEN project:
• THE BIO-PROJECTOR - is fashioned on the Kinetoscope and the Kinetoscope’s similarities to a coffin. It is the machinery of the cinematic apparatus that includes a projector device, microscope and the optical lenses and magic.
• THE LIVING SCREEN - functions as part of the cinematic apparatus. Different types of screens [prepared and obtained from varying tissue cultures] are projected onto, each one of them symbolic and symbiotic in a different way. The properties of these screens inform the content of the projected Nano-Movies.
• THE NANO-MOVIES - are conceptually linked the living screen that they are being projected onto.
• THE SPECTATOR – You! When U peer through the Bio-Projector, and gaze at the Nano-Movie being projected onto the Living Screen, you become the final ingredient in this Living Bio-Kino apparatus.
The combination of film theory and bio-art is as yet unexplored from our particular approach. In overlaying digital pixels over biological pixels we intend to explore the tension between the inanimate and the animate and the digital versus the biological. We hope that the spectators will undergo a powerful engagement with the living screen. This projection chooses the raw, fleshy, unprocessed aesthetics over the hyperrealism of the digital.
The Living Screen has many connections to primitive cinema, early motion pictures that pre-date 1905 that fall under the category of the ‘cinema of attractions’. Tom Gunning defines the ‘cinema of attractions’ as a form of confrontation that addresses the audience directly. “Rather than being an involvement with narrative action or empathy with character psychology, the cinema of attractions solicits a highly conscious awareness of the film image engaging with the viewers’ curiosity.”1
“Confrontation rules the ‘cinema of attractions’ in both the form of its films and their mode of exhibition. The directness of this act of display allows an emphasis of the thrill itself – the immediate reaction of the viewer.”
What thrill will the spectator receive when it clearly confronts the spectator about life, death and the Other.
Fairgrounds and vaudeville houses were where early cinema found its audiences. It was also a form of safe house for the Other. With Bio-Art proliferating throughout the world, the art galleries of today are no less a freak show, as is The Living Screen.
“The Monstrous Other” exhibition is the first installation of The Living Screen. Sideshow canvases advertised the mutation between the movie and the screen as microscopic monsters, while the Bally Talkers [performed by Tanja Visosevic, Guy Ben-Ary, Bruce Murphy] drummed up the thrill and curiosity of the spectators waiting their turn in the Bio-Parlour.
It is a trilogy, 3 live performances, as well as a permanent exhibit. Each one of the performances included a different tissue screen. We worked with 3 screens & 3 Nano movies:
1. “The Curse of the Uncanny Eye” projected on a screen made from a mouse cornea, starring Barbara Creed as the Monstrous-Other.
The Curse of the Uncanny Eye deals with the cinematic gaze and spectatorship. A disembodied eye [that of Barbara Creed’s – Film Theorist] is projected onto a cornea [of a mouse]. The viewer is confronted with their act of spectatorship, the cornea and Barbara Creed’s uncanny eye.
Creed identifies the Uncanny Gaze as being central to the horror genre. “The uncanny warns that the subject’s sense of wholeness is illusionary…” Creed’s ‘uncanny staring eye…’ warns the viewer that their sense of wholeness is illusionary.
2.“ ISpit On your blood”” projected on a screen made of blood cells starring Lloyd Kaufman
In 1974 Lloyd Kaufman founded TROMA Films, the home of crass horror flicks. The main ingredients of Troma Films are buckets of blood, promiscuous sexuality and slapstick violence delivered through low-budget special effects.
The Bio-Kino of The Living Screen, through its “practices of attraction, distraction, tactility, shock and repetition… make for healing and sorcery.” I Spit On Your Blood re-animates in Troma fashion but is projected on a screen made of blood. Kaufman has stated that for him “blood is the vitality of life!” Viewers invited to dare to indulge in the Schlock and Splatter of “I spit on your blood”.
3. Invasion of the Cellular Dentate projected on a screen grown from skin cells, starring Barbara Creed eating Lloyd Kaufman in the world’s smallest living skin flick.
In her work Creed challenges the notion that women are feared in Horror Movies NOT because they are castrated, but rather, because they castrate. As the Vagina Dentata, they become the Real Monster in the Horror Film. Creed deciphers the Monster by employing Kristina’s notion of the Abject. For Kristeva the corpse is the most decisive abject object. “It signifies one of the most basic forms of pollution – the body without a soul.” Does Bio-Art have a Soul?
In Taxonomy of an Etymological Monster, Jans Hauser argues that Bio-Art “manipulates biological materials at discrete levels and creates an emotional and cognitive experience for the audience.” Welcome to the experience of Bio-Kino, where you peer into the Living Screen, peer into the Microscopic Monster, Peer into YourSelf!
Bio-Kino asks what is the role of bio-art? For us bio-art asks us to look into the beyond, because although bio-technology may extend life, it also looks into the mirror of death.
“Whosoever runs with monsters, beware lest he become one; for when you peer into the abyss, the abyss peers into you.” (Nietzsche)
Bio-Kino
Was established in 2004 by Tanja Visosevic and Guy Ben-Ary. Shortly after Bruce Murphy joined the group.
Bio-Kino invites collaborators to work with, depending on the technical and conceptual requirements of the project. ‘The Living Screen’ is the first project initiated Bio-Kino.
Tanja Visosevic [aka. tanya vision & tanya V]
Is currently completing her PhD. at Murdoch University, is a film and video lecturer at Edith Cowan University and a film critic for ABC720 radio. a moving image artist & film theorist, her work spans installation through to video phone micro-movies and television documentary. most recently her work has screened as part of Microcinema’s Touring International Screening Program, ‘Independent Exposure’. TV often cross-pollinates her work with bio-art and/or performance.
Guy Ben Ary
Working with emerging medias in particular in the area of art & biology. An artist in resident in SymbioticA - The Art & Science Collaborative Lab, since 2000. He specializes in microscopy, biological & digital imaging & artistic visualization of biological metter His Main research area is cybernetics and the interface of biological material to robotics. Member of the SymbioticA Research Group that developed “MEART - the semi living artist” project (). Collaborated with the Tissue Culture & Art Project for 4 years (1999 - 2003). Guy worked as a Research Fellow in the neuro-engineering Lab, Georgia tech, Atlanta, USA, 2006. The “living screen” is one of his newly developed projects. Guy is taking a MFA course in the school of arts, UWA and has a law degree from Tel Aviv University .
Bruce Murphy
Is an Optical Engineer working in the field of biomedical diagnostics. A Perth native with degrees in Computer Science and Electronic Engineering he is currently completing a PhD at the University of Western Australia in tissue modelling and the design of spectroscopic diagnostic tools. BioKino is his first major art collaboration and he has preexisting interests in electronic music, human performance interfaces and Artificial Intelligence.
