Another Lucky Day (Happy Thanksgiving!)

Dear All,

I've decided not to make you post to the blog for this week. Instead, just do the readings and work on Project #3. Happy almost Thanksgiving, y'all!

To Animate=To Bring Something To Life

Both animators and bio-artists bring the inanimate to life, albeit in very different ways. My question here pertains to The Tissue Culture and Art Project (TCA), a high profile bio-art group based in Australia. For the 2004 piece Victimless Leather--A Prototype of Stitch-less Jacket Grown in a Technoscientific "Body," the TCA grew living cells on a foundational structure in the shape of a small coat. According to their website,

This artistic grown garment will confront people with the moral implications of wearing parts of dead animals for protective and aesthetic reasons and will further confront notions of relationships with living systems manipulated or otherwise....Our intention is not to provide yet another consumer product but rather to raise questions about our exploitation of other living beings.

Engaging with at least 1 quote from Oron Catts's "The Art of the Semi-Living," answer the following questions: What does Catts mean by "semi-living"? Do you think that the TCA's piece Victimless Leather (check out the picture above) encourages discussion regarding the "exploitation of other living beings" or is itself an example of the exploitation of a living being? If you need more information on Victimless Leather, take a look at http://www.tca.uwa.edu.au/vl/vl.html .

The Revenge of the Mummy Complex

Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) is an art project collaboratively created by the cyberpunk author William Gibson, the artist Dennis Ashbaugh, and the publisher Kevin Begos, Jr. To answer this week's question, begin by reading the following web page: http://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu
Be sure to click on "more" so you can read the whole description.

Click on the "simulation" link and play the representation of Ashbaugh's idea for fading ink (an idea that proved too difficult to implement). Then, read Gibson's poem, available here: http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/source/agrippa.asp

OK. This is question #1:
What meaning can you make out of Ashbaugh's original idea for disappearing images (keeping in mind Gibson's poem)? Use at least 1 quote from the poem in order to make your argument.

Here's question #2:
Read Bazin's "The Ontology of the Photographic Image" (1945), included in the course reader. What is the "mummy complex"? Although Bazin wrote this article decades before the Internet was invented, do you think he would say that the Internet satisfies the mummy complex? Why or why not?