On the last Wednesday of every month, we here at Kinetech Arts like to co-host “Y-Exchange” alongside ODC Dance. Y-Exchange is a series of presentations about performing arts, technology and science and how they intersect and inform each other. Every month, selected artists and scientists are invited to talk about their life and work. The event takes place on the last Wednesday of every month. Since 2014, we have featured hundreds of artists and scientists from all over the world!
Our first artist speaker on July 29, 2020, was Kathy High, whose background in filmmaking and photography has helped her create many fascinating pieces along the way.
She first spoke about her experience pretending to be Ximena Cuevas’s girlfriend for a Mexican tabloid -- a stint that went on for several years.
"Oh yes! A lesbian!” - Kathy High’s reinterpretation of a Mexican tabloid’s response to the idea of featuring Ximena Cuevas's story.
Then, she talked about how she coped with her superstition that she was going to die in 2000 and how she tackled it head-on by performing her own death in animal telepathy-related video art pieces in “everyday problems of the living.”
She then found herself looking into rat laughter -- working with scientists who had discovered that rats might be making ultrasonic vocalizations when tickled -- much like human laughter, but just in a range beyond what you or I could hear. “Rat Laughter” records ultrasonic rat vocalization in a laboratory setting, capturing contented rat utterances. Then a concert of the “rat laughter” sounds will be created to be played back to the lab rats. This project is based on the human phenomenon of the contagious nature of laughter – hoping that the rats will exhibit a positive response to the other “rat laughter” sounds played for them.
And her scientific forays continued on to lead her to create an art project called Blood Wars, which was a tournament for people’s white blood cells. In a nutshell, blood would be drawn from different people, with their different white blood cells separated out. Then, in an “ironic simulated tournament,” different individuals’ white blood cells would vie for dominance in the petri dish -- sometimes leading The white blood cells would be stained and photographed via time lapses for about 8 hours, sometimes leading to interesting and unexpected results -- like stalemates or friendships!
Last but not least, the last project Kathy talked to us about was OkPoopid, a platform for which you could see how good of a fecal match transplant you are with someone else. Gut biomes are much more influential than you might imagine and have very prominent effects on overall health. A fecal transplant is where fecal bacteria and other microbes from a healthy individual is placed into the guts of into another individual, and an effective treatment for Clostridioides difficile infection.
You can see her promo video for OKPoopid, where participants can line up speed dates with potential fecal donors for DIY at home FMTs (fecal microbial transplantations) – making feces as a therapy available to a general public is part of the gift economy here:
Kathy’s talk ended on some concepts and questions:
- The taboo and unspeakability around poop
- Cultural taboos around bodily fluids (that are entirely natural!) -- like blood!
Some other notable artist quotes:
“I look to philosophy quite a bit for inspiration in my work. I have found that - and this sounds crazy -- but I get really turned on reading theory and philosophy...”
“As a culture, we do not talk about death and illness as much as we need to -- not to normalize it but to build the empathy we need to.”
"I haven't had a fecal transplant because David Bowie died, and I don't know who else to go to."
More about Kathy’s work can be seen here at www.kathyhigh.com, on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook.
Viddhu Agrawal
Vidhu began her presentation on mute, a classic Quarantine(TM) mishap but quickly took the Y-Exchange attendees a poetic meander through her thoughts about migratory avatars and cloud poetics.
“My work is predatory,” she said, “I have an encyclopedic longing.”
She led us through some of her inspiration for her poetry -- the Hindu god Krishna and how the deity comes in different forms and different avatars for various situations. That led us into the idea of an avatar -- an embodiment of some entity that leads, whether that’s from Avatar the science fiction James Cameron movie or in the casual use of the word in a New York Times editorial.
This leads to many cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural interpretations of the same words, whether that was the avatar or cloud poetics or anything else. Avatar means “descent in Sanskrit” and it's also the Western word for digital identity or alternative uploaded person, Vidhu explained, and her works attempt to "collide these meanings" -- ancient and contemporary both.
Vidhu then explained her self-coined term “humpadori” or “race monster” -- featured in her poetry book The Trouble with Humpadori.
The rest of this ended with a video-poetry collaboration between Kathy High and Vidhu Aggrawal -- an excerpt from Avatar of the Virus that truly took us into another space!
More about Vidhu’s work can be seen here at http://vidhu-aggarwal.squarespace.com/, on Instagram, or Twitter.
Y-Exchange is Co-Presented by Kinetech Arts, ODC Theater and The Djerassi Resident Artists Program.