Title: the J-4000, a bio-art and video installation
Date: 2014
Medium: wood, video, interactive tech, audio, bacteria, agar, plastic
The J-4000 uses the queer sick body to challenge the limits of the phenomenological, extending life and consciousness beyond the edges of the skin.
By demonstrating that one’s sense of self is entangled within larger techno-material frameworks, the J-4000 explores the assemblages of blood, anti-bodies, and protocols to explore where our consciousness ends and our fleshy bodies begin? What happens when other people’s blood product is infused into our own? Beyond potential pathogens, beyond the anti-bodies that give bodily strength where there was only muscle weakness before, what other strengths and weaknesses come along on with the infusion?
Jarah’s work examines the permeability of the boundaries between the individual self and the ways in which the sick body becomes a collaborative space, where power and control elide and collapse into physical metrics of touch, where permission and consent take on new meanings, and perceptions of self collapse into designed systems of control.
Exhibited at:
Area 405
405 East Oliver Street
Baltimore, MD 21202
July 3-Aug 24, 2014.
The artist reception was Thursday July 17, from 7-10pm