Kut Culture - Blood Simple
by Paul D. Miller
Repohistory's Recombinant art of transfusions and truisms on the Web
takes aim at the core of the world market for blood in Manhattan. Check
the flow.
"The story of blood is one of metapmorphosis, of
a liquid that became symbolically transformed as society learned how to
deconstruct and manage itS." Douglas Starr tells us in his classic tome
on the history of blood in the collection of essays entitled simply "Blood:
An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce." As a substance that lies at
the heart of all that we consider human, it's a fascinating metaphor for
how much we are alienated from our hyper-abstracted technologically mediated
selves in the information age of mass culture and astronomical numbers.
6 Billion souls on this third stone from the sun and we still have a long
way to go to understand how much this red ichor of our selves truly reflects
how we view the contemporary body. Starr's history of blood and human
essence weaves a telling tale of how we have changed under the impact
of technology - it's become a concrete symbol of the exchanges and transfusions
that underly contemporary culture's exponential abstraction of individuality
and personal identity: "it's a measure of the symbolic power of blood
that the first transfusions were used to treat not blood loss or anemia
but insanity," he tells us, and in our day and age, well, the rest is,
as the common cliche goes in this age of large numbers, bloodless.
Repohistory,
(www.repohistory.org) a digital art collective of theoreticians and artists
who usually work within the semiotic framework of the urban context with
stuff like signs and mass mailings, decided to take on these kinds of
issues with an internet based critique of the market forces at work in
the flow of blood through Manhattan in a project aptly titled "Circulation"
to bring back some kind of physicality to the cycle of art and artifice
in the world of international finance that, for Starr, could be a flow
chart of contemporary blood flows. Conceived and coordinated by a team
of people as diverse as the material they create, Repohistory's core crew
- Cynthia Liesenfeld (web master), Sharon Denning, (Technical Director),
, David Sansone (designer and programmer) and Russet Lederman (production
and design) - worked with Greg Sholette who conceived and directed the
project, and Jim Costanzo who acts as jack of all trades web maestro for
Repohistory in general. "Circulation" is a kind of corpus delecti that
embraces everything from student tales of blood being sold for yarn and
thread through to determining the price of blood in comparison with oil.
On the open market in Manhattan, for example, blood retails for somewhere
between $150-200 per unit, and in 1998, the combined value of whole blood
products and plasma was in the range of $18.5 billion. Utilizing these
"additive" story elements culled from the traffic on their website, Metrocards,
and a host of other "narrative exchange" devices, the Repohistory gang
weave together a series of eerie and hauntingly fetching resonances between
blood and commerce, mapping a new way to look the human condition (www.thebleedingedge.org).
But the historic precedents are just as intriguing. In 1776, in his groundbreaking
book Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith presented the notion of money as an
abstraction of blood flowing through the arterial circuits of the nations
of the world. Even earlier, David Harvey described the flow of blood as
a "mechanikal process," in his 1628 tome Anatomical Essay on the Motion
of the Heart and Blood in Animals. The image has remained an invisible
and all pervasive abstraction inscribed on the ever-changing digital ramparts
of contemporary culture. It has been said that money is time, but time
is definitely not money. If the way commodities flow through contemporary
culture is any indication, the routes money moves through as it pumps
its way around the body electric, is almost parallel to the processes
Harvey described so long ago. As an art project, "Circulation" is an open
system that can absorb almost any offering, and many artists have added
their voice to the chorus of masks and tasks that Repohistory has woven
out of the project. In the process of creating a collaborative project
with blood as a core metaphor for artistic production the Repohistory
artists used Manhattan as a central nodal point in the global banking
system and came up with some wild interpretations of the role this character
called "Blood" plays in the arteries and conduits the make up the body
we call the world stage. With Repohistory, all offerings are accepted
- add your elements to the mix and join the flow. When you trace the pathways
of commerce in contemporary culture, the routes the information takes
you through can be just as interesting as the end destination - and if
history is a playground for the well informed these days, that's the enlightening
aspect of the project - like-minded artists collectives - General Idea
(who sold sock certificates as art a couple of decades ago) and Etoy have
been using a similar premise - control of physical space and the movement
of ideas all loop and reinforce the notion of circulation in the social
body of contemporary techno-culture.
It's about art as an utterly malleable,
infinitely additive process. Back in 1795 the earliest known illustrated
stock certificate in America was issued for the Philadelphia and Lancaster
Turnpike (the first toll road in the United States). It featured a shocking
development for the time period that reminds me of the Repohistory viewpoint.
On the certificate a vignette of a cart being pulled by horses down a
road to a gate intricately was inscribed on vellum to foil counterfeiters,
and this separated this piece of paper from all the other certificates
at the time and opened a floodgate of what was then the bloodlines of
the "new economy": roads. As with Repohistory, when you combine images
and economics, the route you move through seems to be intimately linked
with commerceS. And it's what makes writing about the topic so intriguing.
Where to begin? Where to end? Toll roads? River passage taxes? Railroad
lotteries? The urban landscape, in a Repohistory perspective, sphinx-like,
looks back at us and asks an unaswerable question. At the end of the process
you realize it isn't the actual conditions of the transactions that mean
as much as the numbers they convey. When al-Khow=rizm‰ (circa 825 A.D.)
came up with the title "al-jabr w'al muq=balah" to describe his market
mathematics, he used it as a song to guide his students, so the story
goes, in order that they could sing the praises of Allah at the market
and make transactions all the more quickly - a great example of mnemonics
done old school style. It wasn't until the term derived through Fibonacci
around two hundred years later into the system we call "algebra," - and
whose name is the root for "algorithm," came into effect though. For al-Khow=rizm‰,
the mathematics became verse and acted as a linguistic device to describe
the flow of numbers in the markets of the East. Metaphorically speaking,
for Repohistory, it's the process of recombination and textual migration
- website, subway fare cards, web projects - that make the resonance of
using the net as a generative site for explorations in the world of blood
in the circulation patterns of the "real world" counts most. The numbers
are in the blood. In a world of more than six billion people, where heart
transplants, cross-species organ donations as an experimental context
for , and the "recombinant body" are becoming the norm of how humans deal
with the migration of the physical into the abstract, a new kind of exchange
is at hand. Imagine waking up one day in the middle of a scene from Jean
Cocteau's 1930 film, Blood of a Poet, and seeing the amount of stories
in the blood banks of Manhattan, and you might have a better picture of
the Repohistory view of contemporary artistic production. In Cocteau's
film, the main character sees a Venus-like statue that is simultaneously
both flesh and marble. The statue speaks to the film's hero, and instructs
him to make a leap through a looking glass into a strange, surreal world
where the laws of probability are suspended and the visionary reigns supreme.
On the other side of the looking glass, the images are made of "elements"
that are fluidly transposable - De Sade, Dali, Ernst, Picasso and others
- all blur together to form a river of images in the young poets mind
- a metaphor for the blood coursing through his head as he moves through
the reflections. On the reverse side of the looking glass a whirling cyclone
series of disturbing scenes that derive their basis from the drug addled
reveries of Cocteau's mind make up the main character's reverie. Actor
and director, real and unreal, in the film, all certainty, all distinctions
between borders - it's all a blur, a techo-hallucination of all encompassing
proportions. A really heavy situation. On returning from this disturbing
world, the poet attacks his muse, smashing the statue into a thousands
of tiny fragments in a frenzy of despair -the transfusion of realities
left him unable to cope with the world the muse offered, and the doorway
to the world of dreams is closed to his entry. For us, living in a world
of "Circulation" - numbers no longer are physically abstract.
For Repohistory,
like the poet of Cocteau's film, the ideas are in the blood - the circulation
project remixes the way we think about how numbers and bodies relate to
one another. There's a great phrase Martin Luther King came up with when
he was asked about computers that echoes this situation. The candor of
his response resonates with some of the best and worst of the "new economy:"
"Mammoth productive facilities with computer minds" said King. "Gargantuan
industry and government, woven into an intricate computer mechanism, leave
the person outside man becomes separated and diminished democracy is
emptied this process produces alienation - perhaps the most pervasive
and insidious development in contemporary society."
Communion without
communication; transubstantiation without transit; circulation with no
circuits; human beings meshed in a strange web of thoughts and actions
divorced from anything remotely human - to improve the flow, perhaps we
could all learn a thing from Repohistory's art made of collective enterprise.
It would seem that the blood flowing through all the blood banks of Manhattan
would keep us all in a world where we can say, like the old adage taken
from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass - "so what if I contradict myself,
I am large, I contain multitudes." Who is who in a world where almost
all aspects of human existence can be sampled and re-distributed? This
is what Repohistory asks us with "Circulation." As with Cocteau's "Blood
of a Poet" the information is in our minds - human essence is what holds
it all together: roots and routes, stories and storage, codes and modes,
in the world of numbers, it all just flows.
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