duality – lesley's headspace

Text-heavy update

As promised, I’m spending December ironing out my content and approach for FYP, and I’ve narrowed my deliverables down to these three things: a book containing a narrative, the gallery space as an installation relating to the book’s narrative and a process book (thanks for the advice, Beverley!).

At the moment I’ve been focusing on the narrative the most because it’s the centerpiece of what I’m doing. I’m doing a kind of homage to Greek mythology, to House Of Leaves and to all the good literature that has influenced me over the years, while bringing in my illustrations/skills in layout design to complement the content. I haven’t figured out the visual style precisely yet but my aesthetic has been heavily influenced by The Sick Rose and Crucial Interventions. It’s very likely that the book will be hardcover, but I’m not clear on dimensions yet. Here’s the narrative, from one of my brainstorming sessions with B:

This is the story, which I’m working on now. My ideas are best explained over text to B, because I’ve spent most of the FYP period talking to him about my project. This narrative lets me bring in aspects of the Castor and Pollux myth as well as the larger canon of Greek mythology, and gives me an avenue for illustration (I can draw all the hybrids) and grotesque/freakshow ideas that I researched on earlier in the semester.

Here are my initial thoughts for the setup:

The idea is that while the reader is following the stories of Paul and Pollux, they’re standing in front of a mirror, which (as mentioned in the screenshot) will reinforce the ideas of duality and madness. I may also want to incorporate mirrored text into the book pages itself so that the environment can add directly to the experience of reading the book. I haven’t decided where to place the process book, but the walls of this space are likely to be covered in my own drawings (perhaps simulated pages from Paul’s drawings of medical hybrids, and drawings of Castor and Pollux/page extracts from the book) so that people who don’t get a chance to read the entire story get to glimpse the whole project just from the space alone.

Please let me know what you think if you’ve got time to drop me a comment, see y’all next semester and I’ll be back soon with more updates! For now, I will be writing and sketching to work out what I’m going to do with the book, space and process book.

Breyer P-Orridge: What am I reading…

“In the ’90s, the artist embarked on a startlingly extreme project to erase gender boundaries and reach a state of ‘pandrogeny’ with h/er (to use the preferred pronoun) wife Jacqueline Breyer, known as Lady Jaye. Together they became Breyer P-Orridge, a single unit that dressed alike, acted alike and, thanks to a series of cosmetic procedures including twin sets of breast implants and nose jobs, eventually looked alike, as documented in Marie Losier’s 2011 film The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye.”

http://www.factmag.com/2013/09/26/genesis-breyer-p-orridge-on-life-art-and-the-quest-for-pandrogyny/

I was looking up bio-artists after today’s class too, and I discovered Breyer P-Orridge, who is actually incredibly relevant to a lot of my themes. Breyer P-Orridge, as a single unit of being manifested in two people (I’m actually not sure which pronouns I should be using to refer to them), reminds me a lot of a physical manifestation of Castor and Pollux, except with way more of a relation to pop culture.

The interesting thing is that Lady Jaye, one half of Breyer P-Orridge, passed away in 2007, but Genesis Breyer P-Orridge continues to live the pandrogeny project they birthed together. In summary, they underwent surgery to look more and more like each other and began adopting the same kind of clothing and styling to transcend the limits of separate bodies.

I quote from the article,

“P-Orridge’s absolute dedication to erasing the boundaries between life and art, and between man and woman, is palpable in the freestanding soliloquys that seem to tumble out of h/er mouth at will, reaffirming the self-directed narrative; a legacy of many years of public speaking, shouting and acting up.”

This is terribly fascinating also because it could help me form some answers to the question I was exploring in my dictionary project – what happens to Pollux after Castor is killed by Lynceus, and how does he deal with that grief? I’m not entirely sure that that’s the core focus of my FYP any more, but it’s still a fact of the myth itself and it might still be productive to keep this as a consideration.

I wouldn’t delve into Bio-Art myself but I’m looking it up right now as a source of visual and conceptual inspiration.

Second Life

http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/24/4698382/second-lifes-strange-second-life

I was never very interested in Second Life or the Sims franchise even though I had one or two Sims in my childhood and I was a fan of SimCity for a bit. Simulated reality is a wonderful way of capturing the imagination (I take Pokémon way too seriously) and creating an immersive, total experience. I wouldn’t be the only one to tell you that a Pokémon battle can get emotional, even if you look as if you’re casually button-mashing and interacting with pixels that don’t have any bearing on real life.

Creating an alternative lifestyle for oneself on a virtual platform would posess even more of a hypnotic draw, and my job isn’t quite to explain it but to note down whatever is relevant for my research.

People are very self-interested, for one. If you create an avatar resembling an idealised version of yourself (not your physical self – a version of yourself that you feel is authentic to your personality, which has no bearing on what you actually look like) you’re bound to invest time and effort into it, regardless of whether it’s tangible or not (and this makes me wonder if we should place more value on tangible goods as opposed to intangible goods, and why intangible goods are often regarded with contempt especially with regard to gaming). It isn’t unheard of for people to spend real money on their virtual possessions in Second Life and consequently to form very lasting attachments to these possessions.

The mutability of Second Life also offers a freedom that real life does not accord to you. Any aspect of the appearance is easily altered, and the environment bends to a coder’s will through several clicks and keystrokes. The phenomenon of virtual control versus real-life passivity (the thought of repainting my room, for example, makes me shudder with horror because so much effort is involved) is quite seductive.

Second Life is also subject to its own share of crime – virtual property can be duplicated and stolen, the system can be glitched and slowed down simply out of a vindictive pleasure in disrupting the order of things and the mutable age and appearance of Second Life avatars has already resulted in simulated child pornography becoming a very real phenomenon. There are communities that indulge in ageplay, which I don’t exactly want to go into more depth with than I absolutely have to. I find it unpleasant, and it’s tangential to the key issue that a virtual reality comes with its own set of conundrums and codes that don’t necessarily correlate with real-life society’s.

Another issue I was interested in more was death and virtual reality – firstly the death of an avatar (dying in Second Life returns you to your home location), the murder of an avatar (there are specific combat-centric locations in SL where you can bear arms and fight to kill – otherwise killing is a no-go) and what happens to the avatar if a real-life user dies. (And equally, what happens when a real-life user considers SL more real than his/her ‘real’ life.)

I still haven’t answered most of my own questions about existence (in terms of the virtual sphere) but this is my starter kit of thoughts for the fact-fiction issue I’m exploring.

Janus

In ancient Roman religion and myth, Janus (/ˈdʒeɪnəs/; Latin: Ianus, pronounced [ˈjaː.nus]) is the god of beginnings and transitions,[1] and thereby of gates, doors, doorways, passages and endings. He is usually depicted as having two faces, since he looks to the future and to the past. It is conventionally thought that the month of January is named for Janus (Ianuarius),[2] but according to ancient Roman farmers’ almanacs Juno was the tutelary deity of the month.[3]

Janus presided over the beginning and ending of conflict, and hence war and peace. The doors of his temple were open in time of war, and closed to mark the peace. As a god of transitions, he had functions pertaining to birth and to journeys and exchange, and in his association with Portunus, a similar harbor and gateway god, he was concerned with travelling, trading and shipping.
— Wikipedia

So I’ve decided to take duality as a starting point in my final year project and I’ve taken a leap into other mythological figures besides Castor and Pollux as a way of exploring that. I decided not to lock myself into Gemini on the basis of research, because I’m interested in duality and dichotomies as a whole and whether dichotomies are necessary or just helpful tools for understanding a kind of worldview.

There’s a logical fallacy known as the false dichotomy that presupposes only two alternatives to a situation when in fact there could be more than two. This is rather common to many kinds of discussions and arguments that I’ve seen, where the two most obvious positions from which to argue are taken to be the only two positions from which to argue.

I’m examining Janus because of the imagery (I still want to work towards doing something vaguely anatomical) and the potential for coming up with really good illustrations related to duality or the idea of having two faces.

This Janus Cat was illustrated by Craig Horky for a t-shirt design I found online. There’s actually a real-life Janus cat that’s the product of a disorder known as diprosopus, where parts of the face, or the whole face, are duplicated in other areas on the head. Cats with this condition really are referred to as Janus cats which is pretty interesting. Distortion of the body has been a recurring theme with me in my personal work so I might come up with some Janus creatures myself as well.