one.pseudocyborg

Inspired by a link Sandy sent out about Physics PhD candidates who danced their dissertations, I thought I would create an actlab project that centered around my MA thesis. I'd worked on Tetsuo: the Iron Man for years, and the thesis was supposed to be the culmination of all of my efforts. There were two other texts that I incorporated - the anime classic Akira and a novel by Kanehara Hitomi called Hebi ni piasu (Snakes and Earrings). But... you don't just present your thesis to the ActLab.

Instead you think about how to present a collection of ideas in a physical form. And then I saw an article in "make" magazine about wunderkammers (also called Cabinets of Curiosity), and I thought ... can I realize my written work, my theoretical work, my engagements with these three texts in a form others can see and touch and discover? And here is the result...

materials: paint, glue, posterboard, a jewelry box, pictureframes and in the background a computer.

I started thinking I might build a shadow box to encapsulate the "New World" of both Akira and Tetsuo. I found a jewelry box that I thought might hide the secrets of Hebi, and I found a shadow box picture frame that I thought would encase my arguments about Tetsuo alone. And as much posterboard as I thought I could handle - I didn't know what I was going to do with it, but I thought I might want it.

Of course, nothing turns out exactly the way you think it will. I wanted to create rocky new landscape of Akira/Tetsuo - a barren place inhabited only by the pieces of human bodies and the pieces of screws and bolts that hold the modern world together. I created a 'dick drill' out of playdoh and a slinky and textured paint, and found a Barbie doll who could spread her legs around it - and realized I was going to drill a hole in my jewelry box so the dick drill would be emerging out of it. Finally I made my final cyborg - the entity that Tsukamoto proposes will inhabit his new world, made out of two men and all the metal they absorbed/were born from.

assembly: an unpainted clay figure of a cyborg with two heads, a bunch of textured paint with brushes, the surface of a canvas covered with screws and gray paint, a barbie and the clay and slinky made dick drill

finishing: a doll bound in steel and rope laying among cut glass, a barbie and backdrop screencap now covered with paint-blood, and jewelry box drawers filled with wires

So my picture frame turned into the place I tried to express the bindings placed on the main character from Hebi - Lui is bound by expectations, by her sexual relationships, by her alcoholism. But she escapes, or perhaps transcends, all of those things when she injests the teeth her dead boyfriend gave her. And I added my own teeth to the sculpture, with a second doll sitting on top of the first, to express the character's intercorporation of her own issues. I filled the drawers of my jewelry box with signs of change from each character in Testuo, and added the paint spatter and background to my transformed barbie, the woman who is so sexually frightening that the salaryman in Tetsuo decides he has to kill her.

		Here you see the details of all three pieces. To the left the drawers of the Tetsuo box - the top drawer has a screencap of the 'woman in glasses' on the front, and markers of her transformation inside - broken glasses, a mirrored compact case with a screenshot of her transformed and wild body pasted init. The middle drawer has the untransformed salaryman on the front and a repeating image of the horrified face of the transformed salaryman in the inside (to imitate the stop-motion of the film as he transforms). The bottom drawer is of the 'girlfriend' who appears as a cyborg with a prehensile dildo only in a dream (this is the outside picture), and on the inside is shown in two different open-mouthed poses with a fork - she is set up as the female whose only purpose in the film is to consume the male penis (and then be killed by her interest in consumption).
In the upper left is the inside of the Akira-Tetsuo shadow box, with the images of the barren and destroyed landscape of the "new world" from both films recreated here as a meld of both human body parts and metal bits and shavings, nests of wire and mesh. Finally on the bottom is the Hebi shadowbox next to the completed Tetsuo-cyborg. Inside the box is Lui holding a jar with human teeth (she will consume these to be liberated), while she is literally shadowed but set apart from a combined image of a dragon and kirin (representing both her tattoo and the two men who help her transform but lock her into a sexual economy.

Finally, of course, came the classroom presentation where I threw OUT my printed version of my written thesis and invited everyone to see my thesis wunderkammer in action. I was awed and gratified that so many people touched, discovered the noise cards I had embeded, pulled the drawers out and examined all of the ways I tried to express both the theoretical and the emotional engagements I had with these three texts.