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Organ Land VR documentation

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Organ Land Artist Statement

This piece is a continuation of my investigation into my own body and how I relate externally to the organs that operate inside of me internally. A core purpose of modeling my own organs was to remove the fear in not knowing what these organs looked like physically and how they operate together.

Originally, Organ Land existed in Unity and the viewer would have to key through the world in order to experience the body parts. While this was an interesting experience, there was an element of removal in the form of the computer screen between the viewer and the virtual world. I wanted to eliminate this distance and immerse the viewer into the world as much as possible. Through the virtual reality goggles, the viewer is inserted into the environment and as a result, has a more physical and bodily relationship to the organs that are present in the sterile environment.

At its core, this body of work as a whole is an examination of the various methods of how the body can be read (i.e. through scans, modeling, sound recordings, medical imaging, etc.) The immersion into an environment of 3D models of abdominal organs serves to disrupt and disjoint the typical relationship we have with our own bodies.

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This work is a continuation of my previous work investigating the body. My previous piece included creating a digital environment where the internal organs could be experienced through sight, touch, and sound in order to better understand what these organs are, how they function, and to help make an unknown known. In a sense, this type of work is a way to “read” the body through scans and modeling.

I was intrigued by this idea of reading the body and thought about ways in which the body could be read both internally and externally. For this piece, I wanted to experiment with reading the external body through sound in contrast to reading the internal body.

This video serves as documentation of a performance in which I run a contact microphone all over my body in order to pick up the sounds of my skin. Contact microphones only transduce structure-borne sound, meaning that they will only pick up and record sounds of surfaces that they come into contact with. As a result, the audio accompanying the video is documentation of what my skin sounds like.

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Video In-Progress Update

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Video Workday #1 Update

I am planning on doing a video performance continuing to use the contact mic to engage with my body investigation work. 

Elements that have come up in my 3D bodywork:

scale = making the organs bigger than life in Unity and also handheld in a 3D printed form

inside/outside dynamics = looking at something on the inside of the body but also recording sounds that travel to the outside)

I want to do a short performance using the contact mic and just running it over my skin as another way to “read” the body as I have done in other forms through the digital and physical 3D models. I am interested in different ways we can “read” and understand the body both on a literal, physical level.

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Screenshot from After Effects exercise

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Documentation of Organ World

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Sound Artist Statement

Recently, I have experienced a series of health issues in which I suffered from severe and chronic pain in my abdominal area. It was a horrible time due to the pain but even more so because of the sense of not knowing and not being able to see what was going on inside of me, that was causing this intense pain. A professor of mine even stated, “I fear that you have temporarily lost the sense of your body, a trust that is important.” We rely so often on our eyesight and visuals to cue us into what might be wrong with something or how to respond to a certain situation or problem. However, in this situation, I had to rely on my sense of sound (i.e., hearing my internal organs make really weird noises) as well as artificial “eyes” to scan my insides through ultrasounds, CT-scans, and endoscopic imaging.

I was thinking about how unsettling this unknowing sensation is in relation to the Memory Palace and how if something has a specific place or can be organized, rationalized, and understood physically, it removes some of the anxiety and fear surrounding the feeling of unknowing.

As a result, I have created models of each of my abdominal organs that were investigated as potential problem sources and inserted them into a virtual environment. In addition, I used a contact microphone to record sounds emitted by these organs and assigned them to each of the models in this virtual world. The result is a world in which the player can wander around a clinical and sterile space and examine each of these organs as well as the sounds that accompany them as a way to be able to visualize that which cannot typically be seen. This could be seen as an educational exercise but also as a therapeutic one. When a name, a shape, and a sound can all be identified as one, it allows for greater understanding of something that is usually hidden and unidentifiable by the common person, and therefore lessens the fear of that unknown.

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Kusama! Kusama! Kusama!

I had read about these infinity rooms and seen hundreds of pictures of them, but never expected to be able to participate in one so soon. The feeling of being in that space is hard to describe...I find it magical when someone is able to create the illusion of a space that is inside another space being immeasurably larger than its container. The container itself was much smaller than I had envisioned; however, the space inside was even larger than I could have imagined. The pumpkins seemed to move and shake and talk amongst themselves. I felt like I was eavesdropping in on a secret conversation and then asked to leave after the 45 seconds were up...

This reminds me of Pipilotti Rist’s “Pixel Forest” installation that I had the pleasure of seeing at the New Museum last January in New York City. I was amazed by the fact that Rist was able to create an entire environment as a container that I and all of these strangers were now existing and living our lives within. It is a feeling that I am interested in experimenting with in my own work.

A quote on the wall of the exhibition that I particularly loved was: 

“During the dark days of war when I felt I could no longer go on as a young girl, behind my house was a river upon which lay millions of white stones, the basis for a mysterious vision confirming their ‘being’ one by one under the glistening sun. Aside from this direct revelation from nature, I was also possessed by a strange world inside my psyche with images of an immaterial drive.”

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Artist presentation on Jason Salavon 

10/2/17

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Grizzly Bear + Hannibal // Podcast Response

I am an avid podcast listener, yet I had never heard of Song Exploder or 99% Invisible before. They may be two of my favorites now...

I listened to the Song Exploder episode that delved into Grisly Bear’s “Four Cypresses” off of their new album Painted Rituals. This is one of my current favorite songs; it is a very rich and complex piece with interwoven layers. It’s almost like every time you listen to it, it becomes a different song. 

I love hearing about the process behind a piece of work and this song in particular has an interesting story. The band had been playing with simple drum rolls for a while and had created one that would become the basis of “Four Cypresses,” but they didn’t know what to do with it. The beat sat stagnant for about 10 months until it was pulled out, the dust blown off, and reworked. In the interview, the band went through each individual sound in the song, speaking to its artistic and sonic merits but also what it represented and how it contributed to the song. In addition, they spoke to the lyrical development and the story behind the words. It gave me an even deeper appreciation for the song and the band as a group of collaborators who make really dang good music.

I also listened to the “All In Your Head” episode of 99% invisible where they talked with David Slade and Brian Reitzell about the sound mixing and production of “Hannibal,” the series based on the life of Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham. I found this episode particularly interesting because of their discussion about the biology of horror sounds. For instance, high screeching noises and low grumbling noises trigger a physical response in us because our old lizard brains associate those sounds with animals in pain or a bigger animal coming to get you. Having a peek into the musical workshop behind Hannibal was fascinating.

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Compiled from free sound samples: cars, foot traffic, big trucks, pigeons, people yelling, etc.

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Photo Crit Documentation II (original images)

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Photo Crit Documentation I (edited images)

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reisch || photo statement

I have always been fascinated by the history of place, memory of particular spaces and locations, and how narratives are shaped by a location by the imagery that is produced from that place (i.e., Who is pictured? — equally important, who is not pictured? How they are positioned? What does their body language communicate? Why has this picture even been taken in the first place?) Due to these interests, I have always imagined the people who came before me in a certain place, walked the same paths that I walk, have seen the same sights that I see every day.

SMU has a digital archive of articles, videos, recordings, and photos dating as far back as 1911 when the university was founded. This means that I no longer have to just imagine the people who walked on this campus over 100 years ago — I can actually see them and begin to piece together semblances of answers to the questions regarding representation, documentation, and visualization.

As I investigated this database, unsurprisingly nearly all of the photos of prominent faculty, staff, administrators, Presidents, Vice Presidents, Provosts, et cetera were only of older white men. The images I chose to manipulate feature situations that at the time that the original photographs were taken, I would have (most likely) never have been allowed to be in due to social constructs surrounding gender and class. Since I have a physical and personal relationship to these places, I began to imagine what these images would look like if I inserted myself into them to quite literally show what it might have looked like to have a woman in those situations.

The manipulated images have an element of humor to them — yet also a somber tone. Although they are edited to blend in with the original images they don’t quite fit precisely, causing the viewer to perhaps think that they are original — but no, they can’t be…she shouldn’t be there…

I can imagine that this response would be heightened even further for a woman of color.

Overall, some primary questions that I seek to investigate in my work in a broad sense, as well as particular to this project, are: who gets to occupy public space both physically and in our memory? Why have “we” given certain events, icons, and people importance over others? Who gets to write the narrative of the collective memory?