The Once Animated Soul of Bernard Madoff

Who is his Ancient Double?

What are his Words of Power?

Visitors participating in my computer assisted interactive installation "The Animated Soul: Gateway to your Ka"(1991), would have found their own answers to these questions.

Your Ka is your double. Everyone has a double. The double has a designated purpose in life. It is assigned "words of power" that can expedite this purpose and yield power in the present. In ancient Egypt the "words of power" had the magical formula for carrying out wishes and needs for a safe journey into the next world.

Following rituals laid out in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, I mapped the rites for attaining everlasting life into a Hypercard computer program.

Participants' selections of western icons, depicted on the computer screen, determined their personal pathway to eternal existence. The participant, before making the transformation into a living soul, must confess a declaration of innocence (a "negative confession") before the god Osiris in a court of judges.



Bernard Madoff, a former chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market, and head of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, was recently arrested by the F.B.I. He is accused of using funds paid by new investors to pay existing investors for what they thought were reliable returns. He perpetrated a Ponzi scheme; a $50 billion global fraud, that has impacted thousands of investors and financial institutions worldwide.



What selections would Bernie Madoff have made as a participant in "The Animated Soul"? Under the guidance of the soul-bird (a human headed hawk), what choices would lead him to his ancient double?








^ Click on image for clearer view.

It would be difficult for Madoff to protest his innocence since he'd already confessed to his employees (his two sons) and to the F.B.I.

Vagrancy Among the Shadows of Love

The Trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg


The virtual world of the puppet theater recently became notorious with production of a cold war crime of espionage and execution. Puppeteer Vit Horejs of the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater staged "The very sad Story of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg…" about the couple who were convicted of passing atomic secrets to the Russians during World War II. 1



Horejs' conversion of real life drama into a puppet theater reminded me that I, too, once played the dalang (puppeteer) when I documented participants acting out the ways in which they coped with their intense experience of sexual jealousy in my interactive performance "Coping with Sexual Jealousy "(1984). I adapted their responses into the framework of an Indonesian "wayang" (shadow) play to create a computer-assisted interactive installation entitled "SEXUAL JEALOUSY: The Shadow of Love"(1993).



In a Hypercard computer program I combined imagery from Jungian mythology and Aubrey Beardsley prints with clips of incidents of sexual jealousy from TV soap operas. The presentation was accompanied by gamelan inspired music composed by Michael McNabb. Participants were able to investigate the sources of their jealousy, and their methods of coping with their feelings by answering a series of questions at the computer in the interactive program. The "shadow" in the title refers to the observation by Psychiatrist Dr. Ayala Pines, consultant for the art project, that jealousy reflects or is the shadow of the initial reason for the chemical attraction between people.



In "SEXUAL JEALOUSY: The Shadow of Love" I selected shadow puppets of Javanese Majapahit Empire heroes that related to the attraction icons of desire, respect, attention, security and faithfulness. The puppets are juxtaposed with their humorous American counterparts.



Morton Sobell's recent confession prompted me to reconceptualize Vit Horejs' puppet characters as virtual Indonesian shadow puppets reminiscent of those I used in "SEXUAL JEALOUSY: The Shadow of Love". In this piece I metaphorically use the computer screen as a scrim upon which my characters cast their shadows of ambivalent love.



I have re-appropriated the set of categories from my earlier artwork; "Desire", "Respect", "Attention", "Security", and "Faithful" and their respective shadow puppet figures in order to arrange the players, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; their sons Michael and Robert; Morton Sobell; and Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, according to their ambivalent love attributes:

DESIRE
Julius' desire was to serve Communism and the Soviet Union. His love was reversed against his wife, Ethel, and their two sons when he would not reveal any of his co-conspirator's names.

RESPECT
Morton Sobell's silence about his espionage activities showed his respect for Julius. Then, in his confession, after fifty-seven years, he reversed this love by betraying that he and Julius had indeed been spies.

ATTENTION
Michael and Robert Meeropol, sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were deprived of parental attention when neither parent would cooperate with the prosecution. They were ten and six at the time of their parents' execution. Although betrayed, the sons have consistently supported their parents by repressing their anti-love ambivalence.

SECURITY
David Greenglass, Ethel's brother who at first exonerated his sister from any involvement in the case, later reversed this love with false testimony made by his wife, Ruth, that convicted Ethel. This move secured his own wife's freedom and her love for him.

FAITHFUL
Ethel, faithful to her husband, chose the stoical path in balancing blind loyalty to him with accusations from her brother. She made no compromise that would have allowed her to live and be a mother to her two young sons.



Their last words in betrayal to their sons were: "Always remember that we were innocent and could not wrong our conscience."



1. To briefly summarize the Rosenberg's story, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were American Communists who were found guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage, in particular, to pass secrets about the Atomic Bomb to the Soviet Union. They were subsequently executed. Morton Sobell, an American engineer, was also a former spy for the Soviet Union. He was found guilty of spying for the Soviets and sentenced to 30 years in prison. Sobell was released in 1969. He had claimed to be innocent for over 50 years, but on September 11, 2008, in an interview with the New York Times, he admitted to spying for the Soviets, implicating Julius Rosenberg as well. His confession exonerated Ethel Rosenberg's role in the affair.

higgledy-piggledy: The Transgenic Bagel Redux

A BAGEL FLAVORED BEAT ROCKS



1. Art and archeological historians have uncovered definitive proof of the existence of the bagel in Middle Kingdom Egypt, pictured in a hieroglyphic frieze dating to 1837 B.C.E.



2. Scientists have recently discovered that their earlier theories concerning the gene’s ability to impart specific traits to an organism were too simple and specific to account for the many exceptions to the currently conventional gene rules.

These two seemingly disparate developments have led me to reengineer my earlier work, The Transgenic Bagel (1993 -1996).



From 1993 to 1996 I produced, in several phases, The Transgenic Bagel, a parodic interactive artwork in which I hypothesized that a person could acquire new personality traits by eating a recombinant DNA bagel.

In this work I used the bagel as a model through which to explore the recombinant gene-splicing process. I created a “bagel plasmid chimera” – a bagel that carried within it certain ingestible, and thus transferable traits.



I researched animals said to bear traits such as “obedience” or “impetuousness” or "authority" and with a hypodermic needle virtually extracted the trait gene from the animal. The gene was hypothetically processed for preparation of a genetic formula that was injected into a section of a bagel (bagel fragment DNA). The “bagel fragment DNA” was subsequently smeared with a cream cheese “mortar” and inserted (annealed) into the cleavage site of another bagel (the bagel plasmid vector), from which a same-sized section had been removed.

In the early 1990s, scientists believed that a gene trait excised from an animal host was inherent to that single trait gene. Now, fifteen years later, the identity of the gene is challenged. Other molecules clinging to the DNA strand comprising the gene can produce different characteristic traits from the same gene.



From 1994 onwards, in the computer assisted interactive versions of the Transgenic Bagel, participants were situated in a virtual “Bagel Casino” wherein they played the one-armed bandit slot machine hoping to win their preferred “Noahsomal DNA trait gene”. To win the trait gene, the players needed three identical animals in a row from among images of thirteen mythical animals that resided in Noah’s “Virtual Ark”— hypothetically the first gene pool.

Scientists now realize that gene expression operates under the “law” of higgledy-piggledy.1 Current genetic research has determined that the law of higgledy-piggledy has joined in the genetic game.

These new scientific developments have made me realize in my artwork, the idea that when an unmatched combination of animals appears in the slot machine’s windows, each animal representing its own specific trait, that their combination can be read as representing a complex that produces a single genetic trait.



In the fall of 2008, I had the chance to read some essays by undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley.2 For the assignment, each student was told to choose an animal and write a story about it. Many students chose animals similar to those I had chosen to be the animal residents for Noah’s “Virtual Ark”.

Little did the students know that they had returned to play the one-armed bandit in my Bagel Casino.

Three students chose to write about dogs, thus creating a similar “window line-up” with my own (Spaniel). Whereas I had attributed the trait “lovable” to the Spaniel, these students identified the traits “tolerant”, “obedient”, and “technically strategic” in their dogs.



In the original Transgenic Bagel the lion carried the “authority” gene trait. But when the student got the lion in the Bagel Casino, she claimed that lion instead carried the trait of the “male chauvinist pig”. Thus, this student pointed me to the recognition that an individual trait gene could code for two distinct traits in the lion.

1. New York Times, December 11, 2008. Dave Itzkoff byline.
2. In a conversation with Tom Bates, he mentioned that Sir John Herschel, the esteemed astronomer, in his desire to have a universe that was eternal and unchanging, used the term “higgledy-piggledy” to describe Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection.
3. I read samples from the diagnostic essay from a Berkeley, Fall 2008 class, “Reading & Writing about the Visual Experience” in which each student selected an animal to write about.

Goethe’s Primal Scream: The Plant and Sexual Love (imagine imogen's images)

The golden links in Goethe’s alchemical chain are still clinking since I produced the artwork Goethe’s Urpflanze in 1977. I interpreted Goethe’s Primal Plant by drawing directly on computer printout data that described the effects of pollution on the development of the bean plant. Lucifer’s ugly head had arisen, albeit in another form, in the 1700s, roughly two hundred years before this scientific experiment on the bean plant took place at the University of California, Davis. Goethe had pointed to the personified pollutant, Lucifer, whom Goethe claimed had split the Unity of the World. In his alchemical theory of Unity in Duality, Goethe’s Primal Plant, as exemplified by the double bean plant, would eventually resolve the opposing tensions in its evolutionary growth of leaves as they became liberated from the burden of matter.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a Romantic Botanist in both senses of the word “Romantic”. In one sense, he believed his scientific observations were verifiable through “passionate divination”, and in another sense he was a ladies man who used botany for his entree into flirtations with women when they were marginalized in academic pursuits.

In the artwork, Goethe’s Primal Scream, Lucifer’s ugly voice arises as a gender pollutant. Lucifer, whom Goethe claimed had split the Unity of the World, had himself split the Unity of the World by splitting the roles that the sexes would play in scientific pursuits.

To restore Unity in Duality in tribute to Imogen Cunningham, I combined portions of her nude photographs with those of her plant images. This series of collaged images is a collaborative project with printer Josh Partridge.

*[Image titles taken from "Goethe's Botany: Lessons of a Feminine Science" by Lisbet Koerner (Isis, 1993, 84: 470-495)]

Stemming from an "inner urge", Goethe's botanic insights were (he believed) verifiable only through "passionate divination".

Collage from Imogen Cunningham ‘s photographs Alta on the Beach 2 and Two Callas 2.

She herself is metamorphosed into a plant. Now she is always silent.

Collage from Imogen Cunningham ‘s photographs Pregnant Nude and Water Hyacinth 1.

He builds into the concept itself a notion that the male voice is dependent on women's silence.

Collage from Imogen Cunningham ‘s photographs Ear of Susan Cunningham and Leaves.



He overlays her (Vulpius) garden with his own interpretative grid.

Collage from Imogen Cunningham’s photographs After the Bath and Aeonium.

Goethe understood women as equipment to his thought rather than participants in his science.

Collage from Imogen Cunningham ‘s photographs Nude and Tuberose.