Hybrid II.

Beetle and Dragonfly, digital image. (Rephotographed from an A4 print). Julie Clarke (1995)

transphylum

transphylum. Digital image. Julie Clarke (1995)

I thought I'd done something similar before and then hunting around this morning I found a digital image of mine called Transphylum, which was reproduced on the back cover of aedon journal, The University of Melbourne in 1995. I've rephotographed the image from the shinny cover. I did a whole series from scanned insects that I'd found and hybridized aspects of one insects body onto another.This image is of  a dead bird I scanned. I still have it in a small, hard plastic container. I no longer have the digital image files but have slides of the work. The beautiful flowers at the bottom of the images were collected from the grounds of the University of Melbourne and scanned. This was the way some images were made prior to the availability of digital cameras, which make image collection so much easier.

Hybrid

Cow/Whale Hybrid. Digital image. Julie Clarke 01.10.11

Pig/Whale Hybrid I. Digital image. Julie Clarke 01.10.11

Pig/Whale Hybrid II. Digital image. Julie Clarke 01.10.11

Ornamention/Buildings/the human body

I'm thinking about conversation I had yesterday, but yesterday's conversation bleeds into the conversation of the day before with Francesco Vitelli about ornamentation of Melbourne Buildings - Art Deco & Art Nouveau and Francesco's idea about the grid, a kind of imposition on the city in which a clear demarcation was made between white settlement & that of indigenous Australians. We agreed after much thought and energetic discussion that indeed buildings reflect in many ways the social, racial, political, economic state of the human body and why would it be other than that, doesn't all art in some way reflect the body? I offered that Art Nouveau, with its curvilinear shapes & illusions to Darwin's theories of evolution and fecundity, in fact represent the female body, reproduction, sexuality. But what of those buildings, more Art Deco - minimal, geometric, did they represent the masculine - order - rationality, can we anymore think in these terms? Does not the new buildings - Federation Square (bounded by Birrarung Marr - 'mirror of mists') and those buildings that exemplify sustainability, such as the new Economics and Commerce building at Melbourne University and the Melbourne City Council CH2 building which bring both nature 'the organic world' and culture/technology together in a hybrid form best resemble the human body now in it's hybridity, an erasure of gender, a merging of the 'other', a bringing of the outside inside? I noted, as we walked and talked that there appears to be an obsession when box-like buildings are constructed the outside surface is embellished with staggered, pure primary colors (red, yellow, blue) used by Mondrian, as though they cannot think to do anything else. But my mind wanders to the myriad of buildings that line St.Kilda Road, huge glass structures that reflect the world back to you as you look quietly through in the passing tram. If these building also represent the body, what do they say? Is everything moving, transmogrifing surface? I directed Francesco to my article entitled: Human By Design: GATTACA, published in Australian Screen Education/Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM), Australia, Issue 46, 2007. In the article I argue that Art Nouveau and Art Deco design elements are deployed in the bioethical film GATTACA (Andrew Niccol, 1997) to frame it within the era of the eugenics movement. These designs, which refer to the organic world or an abstraction of it, draw the viewer into thinking about human evolution and to the role that contemporary biomedicine plays in the redesign of genetic information.

Francesco Vitelli is a freelance Architect undertaking a PhD in History & Architecture at The University of Melbourne (where he currently tutors) he may be contacted at: vitellif@unimelb.edu.au