a fish as a novel and an electronic Zatorski + Zatorski art book
Genetically modified “glofish“
A few days ago I wrote about the announcement of a colour flexible display (electronic paper) from LG Philips and Electronic Ink and how this is, for me, the holy grail of electronic publishing. Sony has announced its version of the technology, a 0.3mm TFT (thin film transistor) that uses an organic electroluminescent display, which a story in MIT’s Technology Review describes as being not as widespread for gadgets as “as the two main display technologies now on the market — liquid crystal displays and plasma display panels.” I discovered that this technology orginated with Pioneer:
OEL—Organic Electroluminescent—displays were introduced to the world by Pioneer in 1999, and headunits have never looked the same since. OEL displays, featured in select Premier and Pioneer models, have some intensely great advantages over normal displays, namely:
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- You can read the display from wide angles and even in bright sunlight (what a concept!).
- Since it’s easier to read, it’s also easier to control, and you can keep your eyes on the road longer.
- It’s a self-emitting device, so there’s no need for backlighting and it’s really efficient to operate, power-wise.
I’ve been writing some stories on food production in Australia for The Ethicurean, and one that’s about to be published is on genetically modified food and animals. There’s an application been made to the Office of Gene Technology Regulator in Australia for the commercial release of the zebrafish that glows in several fluorescent colours, and that’s an organic electroluminescent display as a living creature. Altering animals to entertain us makes me shudder: Why stop at colours, how about having the text of Moby Dick display itself on a fish as it swims in a tank, “turning” a page to show the next block of text as it turns around for a new lap of the tank?
Sony is undecided on how it will apply this technology.
”In the future, it could get wrapped around a lamppost or a person’s wrist, even worn as clothing,” said Sony spokesman Chisato Kitsukawa. ”Perhaps it can be put up like wallpaper.”
Sony mentions how its display differs from other electronic paper concepts:
Other companies, including LG. Philips LCD Co. and Seiko Epson Corp. are also working on a different kind of ”electronic paper” technology, but Sony said its technology using the organic electroluminescent display delivers better color images and is more suited for video.
Sony President Ryoji Chubachi has said a film-like display is a major technology his company is working on to boost its status as a technological powerhouse. In a meeting with reporters more than a year ago, he boasted Sony was working on a technology for displays so thin it could be rolled up like paper, and that the world would stand up and take notice.
If anyone from Sony is reading this, and would like some ideas, I have ideas for two prototypes for this technology, based around projects by the artists, Zatorski + Zatorski.
THE KING JAMES VERSION OF THE BIBLE IN TEXT MESSAGE LANGUAGE.
Zatorski + Zatorski spent several years translating the King James Version of the Bible into text message language and plan to release this as a book. I propose to bind together many pages (20 or 40 say) of this electronic paper, and have this function as both a mobile phone display and a book.
ELECTRONIC ART BOOK WITH VIDEO PAINTINGS
Zatorski + Zatorski’s works are deeply symbolic, often drawn from the time and world of the King James Bible and with visual references to the paintings of the time. They capture life itself, slowly, meditatively, often respectfully with animals simply because animals happen to be around them, living their own lives in their own way (birds in the Durham Cathedral when they had a residency, for instance). They put music to the moving images.
Yet these aren’t movies, they demand and create stillness and reflection and careful consideration. So I propose an art book, with this paper, that allows these video images to be considered as a glorious plate in an art book, AND simultaneously as a video.
‘Cordero’ . Still from the ‘video painting’ by Zatorski + Zatorski.
‘Cordero’ makes reference to Francisco Zurbaran’s 17th century painting ‘Agnus Dei’ (Lamb of God) that symbolically represented Jesus Christ as an innocent lamb to the slaughter. ‘Agnus Dei’ was the cover image for Matthew Scully’s ‘Dominion: The Power of Men, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy’, a book that looks at how ignoble the sacrifice of animals, for our food, has become.
“Our work is concerned with themes of mortality, transience and belief,” Zatorski + Zatorski told me by e-mail. “In our video works, the camera remains static, providing a window, stage or picture plane, being more akin to painting than television or film. The lamb is dead. It came from a local farmer last spring – we asked him to keep a lamb for us if he found one dead (it was a very cold spring last year and many lambs died when out out in the fields just after birth). Cordero is virtually silent – the only time this absolute serenity is broken is when a finch flutters down to land on the lamb. Most of the time we use music in our video works, but we were particularly interested in the fact that we are using a time-based medium to depict something that doesn’t move – i.e. is dead. The pixels on the screen move, so that if you were really to look you would notice that it is a moving image, but otherwise at first glance you would not be sure whether it was a still image and therefore whether or not the lamb is alive.”
Religion has to be reformulated to be made relevant to each generation, to keep it alive, Karen Armstrong wrote in A Short History of Myth. Zatorski + Zatorski have translated the King James Bible into the language of today, mobile phone text messages. ‘Cordero’ is eerily reminiscent of an Associated Press photograph of a cow, bound by the feet to a crane, being lowered onto a vast funeral pyre of beasts during an outbreak of foot & mouth disease in the UK in 2001. Seven million animals were eventually slaughtered to bring the spread of the disease under control. The first reported case was in a pig that had been fed contaminated pigswill: the waste food from human tables, collected from: “Restaurants, school canteens, airline discards – anywhere where humans eat and waste food on a large scale“.
beautiful idea.
and thank you for posting on Zatorski + Zatorski — I was unfamiliar with their work, but will now definitely search them out.
suttonhoo
May 30, 2007 at 2:42 am