i'm all ideas and no follow through

so the surgery came and went. the drugs were great and i wasn't scared or uncomfortable at all during the procedure, and i was awake, even though the bartender put benadryl in my cocktail. i got to watch the tv monitor with the xray on it and i saw my heart all grayscale and beating with jellyfish tentacle catheters wiggling inside it. i went home that evening and the next morning i went out to breakfast first thing. so maybe modern medicine is pretty neat.
friday i dissected a rat:

i took some crappy video of it, and so i want to take some more of the rat this week.

thurs. i am getting together with joe to experiment with electric meat and pickles.

in other news i have begun again to write rhymes. i am thinking about making hip hop peformance art, and i feel REALLY silly. which makes me think i really have to do it. one idea is to make beats from the sounds that my body makes (like heart rhythms and breathing...)
another idea is to do a performance where i cover someone else's song... and peform it by writing the lyrics. have a video camera on my hand while i write, and project the image, and also mic the paper so that the sound of the writing incorporates with the beats of the music. i dunno.
also, maybe revisit the dolls by making one perform a song.
that's all i got for now. i promise to include findings of thursdays experiments.

oh well

i finally heard back from the nurse about whether i can document anything, and apparently i can't because the room has to remain sterile.
or at least has to maintain the illusion of being sterile.
damn.

oh well.

i promise to stop with the wild ideas.... eventually

so i met with eric dyer today...

he helped me brainstorm some more and i thought about this:
there's a company that makes stuff that helps you do crazy things and i may be able to use a teleo device for this idea:
i could make one of those simple contact mics like i made in tim's class last semester and tape it to my chest. then, have the sound of my heart interface with an electrical switch that would send alternating currents into pieces of raw meat... hopefully causing the muscle fibers in the meat to contract, and then, a camera would capture the motion of the muscles and that would be data to play with in a max patch.

so i am giving myself only one more week to keep coming up with all these wild ideas and maybe narrow it down.
also i will know for sure which way to go once i get the surgery out of the way.

in other news, i made a sweater for a hotdog:


it looks more like a voodoo doll now, cathy will be happy. and it's the first sweater i ever made, so i am happy with it. it also kinda looks like a cross.

oh, also as for grad review day plans: i found out that George has sattelite internet in eleuthera, it has much higher download speed than upload speed, so it should be ok for video chat for GRD but i might be a little choppy.

another thing eric and i talked about is the struggle i feel between word and image in terms of making work which is "about" something which i have already verbalized in some way. and he suggested maybe i make the work about that dialog in myself... but then i am afraid i would be settling on one side of the debate by lending the work to the idea of that debate... that approach favors the verbal idea of the debate over the material, image based process i like to maintain. i dunno.
and then eric asked what i thought the point of making my work was. hmmmm. i am really into ann lauterbach these days and here's something she said about poetry: "Poems that interest me are poems that show me how to proceed, not where to go or what to look at. They assuage the panic of the Stranger's Hand by awakening curiosity rather than fear. The poem attests to the mobility of the frame, not to the totality of the picture."
i am not trying to frame an argument or even a statement with my work... i am not trying to fool the viewer into perceiving a "total picture" i guess i am really trying to make something that holds my interest long enough for me to make it. what holds my interest? intelligence, delight, absurdity and sincerity.

hotdogs and tablesaws!

apparently hotdogs interrupt electrical signals in the same manner as human flesh: Scratched Hotdog
i had thought about doing some performances with electrified bodies, but what if i used hotdogs in place of my body?
hotdogs are so gross, and absurd.

so i am thinking some nice wool hotdog cozies and some balloons to mess around with static electricity for now, as a quick little project. if i rub a balloon on one hotdog and wool on the other hotdog, they should become oppositely charged and create a spark, if the raleigh building is dry enough.

my surgery is scheduled on feb. 21... and i am waiting for dr. sutton to call me back about whether he will let me record the surgery. so i plan to have the hotdog piece done before the surgery and after the surgery i will work on a larger piece.

depending on what kind of documentation i have of the surgery, i plan to have a final installation idea which will involve the following elements:
rats
rat/bonnie animations
urine
maybe bonnie? bonnie's voice whiles she's on midazolam and fentanyl.

also i thought of a little idea related to revisiting the dolls: in my head i call it "milk milk lemonade"
i wanna get some of those oral syringes (i have some from a time when my cat was sick) but i could stand to use a few more and connect them to tubes, and have them attach to the doll bodies in the appropriate locations and using milk and lemonade to squirt fluids through the dolls. (like the hotdogs, this would be best documented with video)

gross ideas

so i have a couple of gross ideas:
i found these weird mouths from cpr dummies
and i thought it would be cool to have people interact with the mouths to do something crazy to some videos of me pretending to be dead... maybe resuscitate them?
but i don't know if that's possible.

so i had another idea:
i ordered some preserved rats from a bio supply company... i am working with eric dyer on some animation, and i thought about doing some stop motiony type stuff with the rats and me... maybe we will be dancing. so maybe the animation will be the video manipulated by some performances on my part.

grossest idea of all:
the performative state will involve me being catherized by a nurse... and i will be wearing a costume which contains water and straws and depending on the level of the urine in the catheter bag, the video will do something cool.