"Paranoia Bugs" by Marnia Johnnston
The Multispecies Salon Fall 2011 = New York
The Multispecies Salon Exhibit in New York City
_The CUNY Graduate Center, Room 5307, 365 Fifth Ave, New York City
Fall Events
the Reverend
of Nano Bio Info Cogno
Ash Globes and Intimate Views
by Kathy High
An art exhibit centered on the entanglements connecting humans with other creatures, The Multispecies Salon, has come to the CUNY Graduate Center in Midtown Manhattan. The exhibit will run through December 5th.
The Multispecies Salon originated in San Francisco when artists came together in 2008 to give a presence to parasites, weeds, and laboratory animals--creatures that were thriving in the shadows of human worlds--as well as endangered species that were failing to flourish in the built landscape. In November 2010 a collective of six people from the East Coast, the West Coast, and the Gulf Coast, brought together a multitude of creative agents for Multispecies Salon: SWARMin New Orleans. The swarm is a network with no center to dictate order. Swarming became the tactic, rather than a theme , of the Multispecies Salon.
More than one hundred artists --hailing from the far reaches of the United States, Europe, and Australia--have animated the Multispecies Salon shows. The Salon has now come to a repurposed office space at the CUNY Graduate Center. Rather than being a static exhibit, the show has started a new lifecycle of growth and decay. Twelve of the best artworks from previous sites have been brought to New York. At the gallery opening on April 4th, 2011, performance artist Praba Pilar (aka the Reverend of Nano Bio Info Cogno) explored messianic themes in biotechnology and deliver prophecy about the singularity.
Open to the public by appointment, please call 212-817-7094.
All events are free and open to the public.
This event is free and open to the public. The CUNY Graduate Center is located at 365 Fifth Ave, in between 34th & 35th Streets, in Midtown Manhattan. For more information: Eben Kirksey, 212-817-7094.
A
Call for Artists -- Occupy Wall Street
From Rhizome to Banyan, a place based installation
The curatorial swarm of the Multispecies Salon invites artists to help us Occupy Wall Street by illustrating an emergent political form.
Rhizomes, in a botanical sense, are stems that spread laterally in the topsoil and send down roots. Figurally, rhizomes embody a form of political resistance that ceaselessly establishes connections among organizations of power and social struggles. They are very difficult to disrupt or kill. When plants with rhizomes are mowed down, they grow back. When chopped up and left for dead, they resprout. "A rhizome can be cracked and broken at any point," write Deleuze and Guattari, "it starts off again following one or another of its lines, or even other lines."
A powerful social movement has transitioned from the form of a rhizome to a banyan in a seemingly remote corner of the world: West Papua, the half of New Guinea under Indonesian military occupation. "Banyans trace existing structures," writes Eben Kirksey in Freedom in Entangled Worlds: West Papua and the Architecture of Global Power . "They also contain the possibility of climax, by choking off institutions of domination, or establishing new networked architectures of power." Beyond West Papua the banyan might inspire a subversive politics of engagement.
Proposals illustrating the potential of transitioning From Rhizome, To Banyan, should be sumbitted via e-mail to multispecies.salon_gmail.com. The first installation of pieces speaking to this theme at Liberty Square in lower Manhattan took place on October 22nd. Modest funds are available to support future installations on Wall Street and other Occupy sites around the country.
Kathy High (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute-RPI, New York)
Rat Models and Intimate Views--projects with genetically engineered rats that were created to suffer with human diseases.
Paranoia Bugs
Marnia Johnston (California)
The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2005 prompted Marnia Johnston to start making Paranoia Bugs. "The paranoia of the U.S. was a kind of swarm," Johnston said, "where fears fed and bred upon each other, crawling and overtaking everything in their path."
Thneeds Re-Seed
Deanna Pindell (Olympic Peninsula, Washington)
This sculptural remediation strategy uses discarded sweaters to create habitat for Bryum argenteum moss in clearcut forests.
Anti-Rabbit Art
Cameron Michel, Vashti Windish, and Eben Kirksey (NYC)
This collage, made with images produced by anti-rabbits and the blood of actual rabbits, illustrates the spectacular multispecies relations fueling the dreams and schemes of biocapitalism.
Zoosphere
Allison Hunter (Houston, Texas)
Against the backdrop of a rapidly shifting ecological landscape in which species across the globe are threatened with extinction, Zoo-space reconnects humanity with the beauty and wonder of the animal kingdom and forces us to examine our relationship with and responsibility to it.
Thneeds Re-seed
by Deanna Pindell
Alzheimers Portraits
Andre Brodyk
These paintings were made with a new transgenic organism as the medium--a strain of E. coli bacteria that Brodyk himself created by mixing genes for a glowing molecule from jellyfish (green fluorescent protein) along with human genes connected to Alzheimers disease.
Landscape and Mammary/Raw Assmilk Soap.
Karin Bolender
This is part of a body of performance work (or "ontological choreography") involving a companion species: the American Spotted Ass.
Bryan Wilson (New York City)
Monument To The Future (Specimen 1): cast and carved glass within a wooden box.
Ryan Burns (Oregon, courtesy Barrister's Gallery)
Rubbings from clearcut stumps in an old growth forest from the Pacific Northwest.
Sourdough Cultures
Jake Metcalf (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Sarah O'Brian (New York City)
This multispecies assemblage crossed the Oregon Trail in a wagon in the 19th Century and then began propagating itself on the internet at the turn of the 21st Century.
Human Cheese
Miriam Simun (New York City)
Disturbing visions of the future (or the present) may be abstracted, rationalized, swept aside. By serving human cheese, Simun asks people to grapple with pressing technological and ethical issues.
Forgotten 20th Century Knowledges--the Xenopus pregnancy test
Comming Fall 2011
Eben Kirksey (New York City)
New Orleans - November 2010
In New Orleans over 70 artists addressed a series of interrelated questions about nature: Which species flourish, and which fail, when natural and cultural worlds intermingle and collide? What happens when the bodies of organisms, and even entire ecosystems, are brought into schemes of biotechnology and dreams of biocapitalism? And finally, with particular relevance to New Orleans: In the aftermath of disaster--in a blasted landscape that has been transformed by multiple catastrophes--what are the possibilities of biocultural hope?
San Francisco - November 2008
Visitors to the Multispecies Salon II, at the 2008 meetings of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco, could hear the twitter of live cockroaches mingling with recorded sounds of chimpanzees screeching for meat. A video installation juxtaposed images of whooping cranes following ultralight aircraft on annual migrations with footage of humans playing with dolphins in captivity. Experimental organisms, fruit flies, and pictures of transgenic E. coli bacteria shared the space with apparently everyday household artifacts. One installation featured milk cartons and junk mail picturing missing amphibians in the place of missing childrencreatures such as the golden toad of Monte Verde, Costa Rica, now presumed extinct. The piece asked, Have You Seen Me? Craig Schuetze, Christopher Newman, and Patricia Alvarez have written a preliminary ethnographic account of gallery happenings for the website of Cultural Anthropology .
Multispecies Salon: Curatorial SWARM
The swarm is a network with no center to dictate order. It involves a multitude of different creative agents. Collective intelligence emerges in the swarm through communication and cooperation. Swarming has been the tactic, rather than the theme, of our exhibit. In New Orleans the core of our curatorial swarm involved Myrtle Von Damitz lll (New Orleans), Marnia Johnston (Rubys Clay Studio, San Francisco), Nina Nichols (The Black Forest Fancies, New Orleans), Amy Jenkins, and Eben Kirksey (CUNY Graduate Center, New York). We also drew on the creative impulses of Karen Kern from the Arts Council of New Orleans. Christopher Newman , Patricia Alvarez , and Craig Schuetze--all who have ties to UC Santa Cruz--have been working to produce a multimedia film and digital media project about the Multispecies Salon since the 2008 exhibit in San Francisco. Nick Shapiro (University of Oxford) helped coordinate a multitude of visiting anthropologists who became para-ethnographers, art critics of sorts, who helped document the 2010 events in New Orleans.
For more information contact:
Dr. Eben Kirksey, ekirksey (at) gc.cuny.edu, 212-817-7094
_ The CUNY Graduate Center , Room 5307, 365 Fifth Ave, New York City
Fall 2011, Wednesday Talk Series
Sponsored by the Mellon Interdisciplinary Committee for Science Studies
Wine will be served at 4:15, the talk will start at 4:30, and then we will head out for an early dinner with the speaker around 5:30.
“Ailourography: On Cats Eating Chile Peppers”
Jeffrey Bussolini (Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work, College of Staten Island)
Wednesday, September 28th, 4:15-5:30
"Transdisciplinarity and Porosity"
Jackie Brookner (Art, Parsons School of Design)
Wednesday, October 5th, 4:15-5:30
"Archiving the Senses"
Orit Halpern (History, New School for Social Research)
Wednesday, October 19th, 4:15-5:30
"Genetic Portraiture"
Dehlia Hannah
November 9th, 4:15-5:30
"Entangled Empathy"
Lori Gruen (Environmental Studies, Wesleyan)
Wednesday, November 16th, 2:00-400 ** please note special time slot.
"“Playing the Game of Global Futures”"
Eben Kirksey (Science Studies, CUNY Graduate Center)
Wednesday, November 30th, 4:15-5:30
"“Odd Couples, Embodied Minds”"
Traci Warkentin (Geography, Hunter College)
Wednesday, December 7th, 4:15-5:30
All talks will take place _ The CUNY Graduate Center
Room 5307, 365 Fifth Ave (between 34th and 35th St.), New York City, 10016
Events
Previous Shows
New Orleans (2010)
San Francisco (2008)
