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THE MUTANT GENOME PROJECT |
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The Mutant Genome Project was a series of allegorical digital photographic works and installations dealing with definitions of normality and aberration as perceived through contemporary media and medical culture. On the upper level it is concerned with the construction of physical desire and prejudice in an age where every part of the external body can be re-figured. It is unselfconsciously ambitious; it aims to belong to the mechanism that renames liposuction to liposculpture. It is amoral; it looks forward to the day when everyone can be free of genetic disease in the same way as it looks forward the prospect of a perfect race; no matter what form it might take. It is glamorous; it promises you a better life with interesting people. It is familiar; you know in your heart what it's about because you see it everyday on the street, on TV, in the paper. It comes from a place that is compromised, it knows that there is often very little difference between right and wrong, between art and TV. It sees only love for smooth, clean surfaces that shield you from bad news days, from the threat that life will always be as it is today. Patricia Piccinini 1996 |
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LOVE ME LOVE MY LUMP |
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Love Me Love My Lump looks beneath the smooth 3D modelled world of the LUMP at the glistening viscera that lie within. This both a play on the notion of the superficiality of virtual reality and 3D animation (which literally have no 'guts') and the idea that computer generated art has no 'soul'. In Love Me Love My Lump the virtual creatures have been endowed with virtual insides, painted directly into the computer with a Wacom pressure-sensitive tablet and Photoshop. This drawing, done by hand and by virtue of the drawing skill of the artist, simultaneously endows the 3D model with real virtual guts and also returns a computer-based arts practice to its origins in 'traditional' media - however does it make the images any more 'real'? |
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YOUR TIME STARTS NOW |
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According to any of the reputable biotechnology companies, selling medicine is like selling anything else. Therefore I decided that LUMP must have a spokesperson to sell it. That person doesn't really need to have anything to do with the product or any real expertise, they just have to be famous. To this end, I contacted Sophie Lee ‚ AustralianTV personality ‚ who agreed to endorse LUMP in a series of images titled 'Your Time Starts Now'. This series presents Sophie and LUMP together, the absolute epitome nurturing care. There is a bond between mother and child that is deeper than the emulsion on the photograph. In many ways the two figures, one computer-generated the other studio-photographed, are more closely related than they at first appear. The LUMP is not real and neither is the woman; she is Sophie Lee the personality not Sophie Lee the person. Her fame ‚ her celebrity ‚ is as artificially constructed as the LUMP, and her image ‚ made up, photographed, retouched, enhanced ‚ as plastic. Within the borders of the media culture where they dwell, a strange flat familiarity replaces real intimacy and even if you don't recognise the figures you feel like you should, because they look famous. Patricia Piccinini 1996 |