Author: DC (Page 323 of 1067)

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L.A. Raeven Annelies, Looking for Completion, 2018
‘She seizes up at my contact and the crying comes louder now, mimicking the effect of real human vulnerability. It’s only when she lifts her head I realize she’s a robot—and even then, it takes more than a few seconds to fully register: a slow realization that sends me through an emotional cyclone of empathy, sadness and fear.’

 

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Arcangelo Sassolino FIGURANTE, 2010
‘In Figurante, a steel mouth slowly crushes a cow femur over a period of three hours. The machine materializes stress for viewers to watch. Is this about pleasure through pain? I wanted to see what type of pressure was necessary to crush a bone to the point of being liquefied. It reminds me of our collective Paleolithic past. I want viewers to understand the visceral ramifications of hearing bones break.’

 

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Shyu Ruey-Shiann One Kind of Behavior, 2014
‘Viewers are greeted by dozens of metal buckets, each undulating to its own unique rhythm. Shyu works with different material and media to explore themes related to our environment. The installation One Kind of Behavior is inspired by the quasi-mechanical movements of creatures like hermit crabs. The artist sees within the landscape of nature, languid movements of opening and closing of the hermit crab’s shells, a stark contrast to contemporary society where things move at high speed.’

 

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Stelarc Spinning/Screaming: Event for Amplified Head, 2011
‘The performance used a Kinect sensor, to map the artist’s arm gestures to the Prosthetic Head animation and voice. The artist wore a head up display enabling him to view the head’s behaviour on the screen beside and behind him. The artist’s large shadow accentuated the interaction with the gesture recognition system, establishing a relationship between the artist’s arms and the visual and acoustical animations it generates. The performance is improvised, observing and responding to the artificial head’s behaviour, generating animations and vocalisations. What is interesting is the glitches that occur between the artist’s gestures and what the Kinect system can detect. And opportunistically incorporating them in the performance. The animation of the artificial head sometimes freezes, the vocalisation sometimes stutters. The accidental is welcomed.’

 

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Michel de Broin Castles Made of Sand, 2015-2016
‘The installation can be described as a production line that casts sand castles, dispatches them for a journey on a conveyer belt, and eventually sends them to crumble. The sand is then recuperated and recycled and a new castle created.’

 

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Lien-Cheng Wang Reading Plan, 2017
‘Reading Plan is an interactive artwork with 23 automatic page-turning machines. When audiences enter the exhibition room, the machines start to turn the pages automatically and read their contents in the voice of elementary school students. The machines are a metaphor for a Taiwanese classroom.

In 2016 in Taiwan there was an average of 23 students per primary school class. “When people go to school in Taiwan, they don’t have much power to decide what they want to read and study. It is like being controlled by a huge invisible gear. The authorities’ education policy prioritizes industry value and competitiveness. The government wants to promote a money-making machine rather than self-exploration and humanistic thinking. This is a complete realization of dogmatic rules and state apparatus.” (Lien-Cheng Wang)

‘The machines read an extract from The Analects of Confucius—a book that has influenced Asian countries for thousands of years in ethics, philosophy, and morality. The content reads: “The Master said, ‘Is it not pleasant to learn with a constant perseverance and application?’ ‘Is it not delightful to have friends coming from distant quarters?’ ‘Is he not a man of complete virtue, who feels no discomposure though men may take no note of him?’” The essence of the book is a metaphor of ancient China, which wanted to control surrounding countries for thousands of years.’

 

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Takashi Murakami Sans titre, 2016
‘Murakami’s life size representation of himself as one of the enlightened figures of the Arhat Buddhist tradition is immobile, but three sets of moving eyes capture the viewer as the android recites the Sūtra du Coeur.’

 

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Michael A. Salter Giant Styrobots, 2008
polystyrene packing materials, 22 feet tall

 

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Patrick Tresset Human Study #1, Distanced, 2022
‘Patrick Tresset is a Brussels-based artist who, in his work, explores human traits and the aspects of human experience. His work reflects recurrent ideas such as embodiment, passing time/time passing, childhood, conformism, obsessiveness, nervousness, the need for storytelling, and mark-making. He is best known for his performative installations using robotic agents as stylized actors that make marks and for his exploration of the drawing practice using computational systems and robots.’

 

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So Kanno & Takahiro Yamaguchi Asemic Languages, 2016
‘Characters are a means of visual communication and recording a language. Civilizations through- out the world have created various characters that convey their culture and history. This project focuses purely on the form of the characters rather than their meaning. The characters have been learned by artificial intelligence (AI) not for their meaning but for their shape and patterns. The AI has created and drawn lines that look like characters but do not have any meaning.’

 

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Orlan ORLAN ET ORLANOÏDE, Strip-tease électronique et verbal, 2017
‘The ORLANOÏDE is a sculpture that was created especially for the Artistes & Robots exhibition at the Grand Palais. The artificial hybrid has collected social intelligence that in turn generates texts and movements. The ORLANOÏDE that resembles ORLAN questions AI and new technologies which search to rebuild, reconstruct and reinvent the human body. In this installation the robot speaks, dances and sings with ORLAN’S voice and multiplies using mirrors to create a real visual spectacle and a theatre of deep learning. The ORLANOÏDE is in dialogue with ORLAN through the use of two HD screens and three cameras and a presence sensor.’

 

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Bill Vorn Mega Hysterical Machine, 2013
‘The Mega Hysterical Machine has a spherical body and eight arms made of aluminum tubing. It has a sensing system, a motor system and a control system that functions as an autonomous nervous system (entirely reactive). It is suspended from the ceiling and its arms are actuated by pneumatic valves and cylinders. Ultrasound sensors allow the robot to detect the presence of viewers in the nearby environment. It reacts to the viewers according to the amount of stimuli it receives.’

 

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Louis-Philippe Demers and Bill Vorn Inferno, 2016
‘INFERNO is a participatory robotic performance, an absolutely unique experience, in which electronic music plays an essential role. In this involuntary choreography of 60 minutes for 2 x 24 participants from the public, the volunteers’ movements are controlled in synchronization with this techno-industrial music by tele-operated upper body exoskeletons.’

 

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Annie Wan Where’s the Chicken?, 2008-2009
‘These chickens are amazing – they are larger than life, do special performances based on their location in one of the 18 different districts of Hong Kong, make quarky noises, facial expressions, and you could sign up to take them for a walk! The chickens were then tracked using SMS texting, and the data was used to create a “Chicken Map” of Hong Kong.’

 

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‘Ai-Da is a humanoid robot credited with being the world’s first ultra-realistic robot artist. Completed in 2019, Ai-Da is an artificial intelligence robot that makes drawings, painting, and sculptures. She is named after Ada Lovelace. The robot gained international attention when it was able to draw people from sight with a pencil using her bionic hand and cameras in her eyes.’

 

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Keith Lam Stand Up, Light Up, Shape Up, 2015
‘When you own an a country, you can own light. You can own prosperity, culture and civilisation. Yet light becomes luxury when you cannot afford bulbs. They struggle for lights, a basic right. And they struggle to read. Change their lives with light. Stand up and come close to the people, light them up and shape their future up. This is interactive installation, it doesn’t have the fixed shape. The final shape of the candle is the end of the show day, and depending on whether we stand up and come closer to the candle.’

 

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Cod.Act Nyloïd, 2014
‘Nyloïd is a huge tripod consisting of three six-meter-long nylon limbs animated by sophisticated mechanical and sound devices. Sensual, animal and threatening, this mobile draws its dramatic power from the reac- tivity of its plastic and sound material to diverse mechanical constraints. Similar to a living object, its tension, effort and suffering, which result from its contortions and its vocal manifestation, can be sensed.’

 

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‘Aypera is Turkey’s first robot actor. “The only difference between Aypera and a human being is that it is designed by humans,” he said. “Aypera was designed with government support, and our main goal is its export.” Sharing that Aypera will play in TV series, commercials and also perform at a concert, Guven said they want to make Turkey’s first robot actor a “world-famous actress.” “She has graduated from all conservatories … has read all the theater plays in the world and can read them in a few minutes. She can learn everything on Google. She knows and watches actors across the world closely,” he added. Aypera has been developed by designer and instructor Bager Akbay, science fiction writer and science communicator Tevfik Uyar, and computer engineer and creative technologist Zeynep Nal Sezer.’

 

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Geumhyung Jeong Homemade RC Toy, 2019
‘The South Korean artist and choreographer Geumhyung Jeong’s new installation centers on five human-scale, remote-control sculptures that she cobbled together from metal brackets, batteries, wires, dental study props, and disassembled mannequins. Surrounding them are stepped plinths whose bright colors echo the robot sculptures’ wiring. The plinths display fetishistic agglomerations of spare parts: wheels, cables, gutted medical practice torsos, home repair parts. In their default state, the sculptures are frozen, comatose, even if all that wiring and machinery certainly suggests movement. The installation is the setting for a series of live interactions between the artist and her uncanny others.

‘In the performances, the artist’s body melds with that of her creations as she crawls at their level, lying at the start partly atop an eviscerated medical torso outfitted with crudely taped joystick controllers. She caresses it with such excruciating slow and sensual allure, it feels almost too intimate a scene to watch. Fondling the attached controllers, she occasionally uses enough force to elicit movement from a nearby robot, accompanied by a hum and glowing battery-powered lights. The artist’s choreographed interactions, like her exhibition as a whole, question the boundaries between animate and inanimate, controller and controlled, flesh and machine.’

 

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Ken Rinaldo The Augmented Fish, 2004
‘The Augmented Fish is comprised of 5 rolling robotic fish-bowls, designed to explore interspecies and trans-species communication. In these interactive robotic sculptures, Siamese fighting fish use intelligent hardware and software to move their fishbowls anywhere that they desire. By moving about they choose to interact with their environment and other Siamese fighting fish which can also see clearly beyond their glass bowls as well as control their fish cars.’

 

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Driessens & Verstappen Tickle Salon 2.0, 2002
‘The robot installation Tickle Salon provides a space arranged for stroking sessions. The suspended robot uses a “feeler” to probe the body on the bed. It carries out sensitive movements over the surface of the skin, endeavouring to offer variety, unpredictability and flexibility.’

 

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‘Japanese performance artist Momoyo Torimitsu takes her robot for a crawl in downtown Sydney, Australia. Crowds watch the bizarre sight of the life-like Japanese businessman in suit and tie slowly crawling on all fours along the pavement. The robot is a symbol of the Japan’s rigid Salaryman culture.’

 

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Piet.sO and Peter Keene R.-O.-B.-O.-T., 2013
mixted technics. L:75 cm x l:60 cm x h:205 cm

 

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Alex May and Anna Dumitriu My Robot Companion, 2011
‘Working with the University of Hertfordshire, the artists created a new robot called HARR1 (Humanoid Artistic Research Robot 1) based on a high quality mannequin with its arms and neck replaced by servo motors. The robot is designed to be installed in art galleries for long periods of time and be a modifiable platform for experimenting with robot ethics.

‘HARR1 was exhibited at Watermans gallery in London during September and October 2013. For the installation Alex implemented robot boredom where HARR1 would be looking around somewhat absent mindedly – much as humans do – until it sees people moving, which it will then look towards and follow across the room. If the people stop moving, HARR1 will get bored and look away.’

 

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So Kanno & Takahiro Yamaguchi Senseless Drawing Bot, 2018
‘This is a drawing machine that draws abstract lines using spray paint and movements that have the chaotic nature of a double pendulum. As a result of the electric skateboard moving left and right, the amplitude of the pendulum increases and once the momentum exceeds a certain threshold, the machine instantly draws on the wall. By eliminating the human body and claims involved in tagging in “graffiti,” and presenting only the dynamism, extemporaneity, and symbolic nature of the drawing process, this machine explores the true nature of these actions.’

 

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Wade Marynowsky Black Casino, 2013
‘Black Casino involves five flying V guitars mounted atop a rotating spin wheel as used in popular game shows such as ‘The Wheel of Fortune’. The guitars form a five-pointed star – a pentagram, which conjures certain magical associations and is used today as a symbol of faith by many Wiccans and Neo-pagans. This pentagram, however, depicts Diabolus in musica: the ‘tri-tone’ musical interval that has been used since the sixtenth century as the signature of the Devil – an association exploited by many heavy metal bands.’

 

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Julian Knowles & Wade Marynowsky Robot Opera, 2015
‘The robots operate on a wireless network according to algorithmic principles and choreographed behaviours, incorporating the ability to be responsive to audience interventions. The choreographed behaviours are mapped out via overhead cameras that track and control the robot’s position in in x and y coordinates. Audience members are able to move into the stage and engage with the robots in close proximity.

‘On a musical level, the work is structured so that the robots form an 8 member ensemble, with each robot capable of producing its own independent sound, local to itself – in effect playing a ‘part’ in the traditional sense within a musical ensemble. The resulting experience is of the robots as moving sound source/performers, performing the score from distributed locations. The musical parts can either be directed from the composer’s computer or can take the form of algorithms with audience input allowed via input from the robot’s onboard sensors.

‘On a technical level, the project has been based on the MAX and Arduino environments with additional programming from Imran Khan and Adam Hinshaw. Equipped with Kinect v2 cameras, the robots respond to humans by translating their proximity and facial expression into responsively programmed music, sound and light. The robots also contain sensors to detect objects and barriers. These data are then sent across a wireless network to the central control computers operated by Wade Marynowsky and myself.’

 

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EleksMaker EleksEgg Egg Drawing Robot, 2017
‘EleksEgg is a machine designed and to draw on uneven surfaces where it would normally be impossible to do so, such as golf balls, ping pong balls, large marbles, ball bearings, light bulbs, pumpkins, stone balls, and eggs. This can also be used on wine glasses and Christmas ornaments. It can even print on ellipsoidal and spherical shapes, just as long as it is sturdy, smooth and fits on the machine. The drawing is done with a simple ink marker pen.’

 

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Survival Research Labs Spine Robot Tentacle Arm, 2012
‘Spine Robot is a working prototype of a decidedly tentacle-like robotic arm. The arm’s nimble movements are made possible by four rope tendons that are actuated by hydraulics. The 12 foot long arm is being developed by San Francisco Bay Area art group Survival Research Labs for their robotic performances. The large building in the video is the Federal Building, which houses the FBI, etc. The machine was running off of a large generator on the truck. First time out and it almost beaned Greg Leyh with a 10 lb crescent wrench that it threw, (though truth be told, he was operating the claw release himself at the time).’

 

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Max Dean, Raffaello D’Andrea, Matt Donovan Robotic Chair, 2003-2006
‘The Robotic Chair may look like a generic wooden chair. Unlike most chairs, however, this one falls apart and puts itself back together. The Robotic Chair is guided by an overhead vision system and controlled over a wireless network by an external computer. Various algorithms govern the chair’s behavior, while the software is structured in such a way that the system can learn from its environment.

‘The Robotic Chair keeps its controls and technology hidden under a simple wooden veneer, making it high-tech in the most unassuming way. As the chair falls apart, gathers itself together and picks itself back up again and again, it reminds us not only of our fallibility, but also of our innate capacity for re-creating ourselves.’

 

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Wanda Tuerlinckx Robot Portraits, 2015 ->
‘Since 2015, Tuerlinckx has been traveling the world with her Victorian-era camera to meet humanoids, robots, and androids of all kinds, shooting them for a series she calls “Robot Portraits.” “Robot Portraits” is a project that Tuerlinckx plans to be engaged with for the next two decades or so, a time during which, she predicts, “robots [will] become more and more integrated into our lives.” So far, she has taken around 100 portraits, which range from images of purely functional machinery (mechanical arms and prosthesis) to surprisingly true-to-life androids that talk and behave like humans.’

 

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‘Dr. Masaaki Kumagai, director of the Robot Development Engineering Laboratory at Tohoku Gakuin University, in Tagajo City, Japan, has built wheeled robots, crawling robots, quadruped robots, biped robots, and biped robots on roller skates. Then one day a student suggested they build a robot that would balance on a ball. The robot they built rides on a rubber-coated bowling ball, which is driven by three omnidirectional wheels. The robot can not only stand still but also move in any direction and pivot around its vertical axis. It can work as a mobile tray to transport cocktails objects and it can also serve as an omnidirectional supporting platform to help people carry heavy objects. Such a ball-balancing design is like an inverted pendulum, and thus naturally unstable, but it offers advantages: it has a small footprint and can move in any direction without changing its orientation.’

 

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Pekka and Teija Isorättyä Invalid Robots, 2010
‘Pekka and Teija Isorättyä first captured the popular imagination a few years ago with their Zimmer frame-pushing Invalid Robots. Their fusions of art and technology are a far cry from modernist machine aesthetics. Best defined as ‘electromechanical bio-art’, their sculptures are fashioned out of organic materials such as tanned hide, stripped bone and fish skin, to which they add a retrofitted second-hand motor. To the contemporary eye, human-machine hybrids seem stiff, passive and soulless. But the roots of their posthumanist art trace back to the automata commissioned by the church and the court during the late Renaissance. These human simulacra were ‘living machines’ that seemed to act unpredictably, playfully, interactively, as if they had a mind of their own. Pekka and Teija Isorättyä thus justifiably pose the question: “For how long will mechanics and electronics look forward to the future – or do they already hark back to the past?”’

 

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Tim Lewis Pony, 2008
Electric motors, aluminium, feathers

 

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Marco Barotti The Woodpeckers, 2019
‘The Woodpeckers transform in real time the invisible radiations used for mobile communication and wireless technology into audible and visible acoustic drumming patterns. The sonic result is a generative acoustic composition which undergoes constant transformation. A live soundscape which resonates as invading drum ensemble into urban and natural environments.’

 

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Goshka Macuga To the Son of Man Who Ate the Scroll, 2016
‘Macuga’s spectacular famous learned man and contemporary prophet, installed in the Podium, is a “manmade man”: a bearded android commissioned from the Japanese A-Lab, who speaks in a captivating voice while turning his handsome head, blinking his eyes, and moving his hands like a perfectly “natural” creature. It utters a blend of words of wisdom by thinkers, philosophers, writers and artists from the past. “The robot is the rhetoric, a collector of speech. Like ancient orators, his speeches are constructed of many speeches”, says Macuga. Among them is a witty quote from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: “How dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to be greater than his nature will allow.”’

 

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Gilberto Esparza NOMADIC PLANTS, 2008 – 2014
‘In 2008, Esparza began the process of developing Nomadic Plants (Plantas Nómadas), his first project addressing urban and industrial water pollution. A collaboration between technology (a robotic system), plants, and bacteria, it took six years of research and experimentation to create the final product. The robot extracts polluted river water, stores it in a group of microbial fuel cells (think biological batteries) where the bacteria in the water itself break down the toxic substances to create clean water that, in turn, feeds the living plants. At the same time, the bacteria generate energy to recharge the batteries. Esparza’s research indicated that the more polluted the water, the more energy it produced. Over the course of the project development, as he does with all of his projects, he worked with a team of engineers and biologists to create the robotic system.’

 

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Petra Gemeinboeck On Track, 2008–9
‘On Track is a performative assemblage involving a mechanical mop, a troupe of robotic brushes and spilling viscous fluids. The work develops an ironic lens through which to look at human endeavour, its overly complicated mechanisms and procedures, and their vulnerability to a slipperiness already built in.’

 

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‘Justin Bieber unveils the TOSY mRobo at CES 2012. As the music plays the robot will grow a head, arms, and legs and start dancing. “Not only do they have a great new way to listen to their favorite songs but they also have a new partner to dance to their favorite music with,” Ho Vinh Hoang, founder and CEO of TOSY Robotic, said in a statement.’

 

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Engineered Arts RoboThespian, 2010
‘RoboThespian is the product of over 15 years of iteration and innovation in the hands of our expert robotics team. Powered by our unique Tritium operating system, RoboThespian is yours to command remotely from anywhere. With a range of expressive movements, speech and songs that can be animated in advance or on the go, RoboThespian will create waves of excitement wherever you place them: at your theatre or trade show, on a live panel or TV show, in a room full of executives or a science park filled with visitors.’

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Yes, I read that about Tony Dow. Very sad news. Hope even against hope if need be for the miraculous. Everyone, Should you be in the LA area, and should you want/need ‘a humungous reel-to-reel TEAC tape recorder Number A3300SX-2T’, Mr. Ehrenstein has one on offer for the songlike price of $200 if you can pick it up at his place. Contact him @ [email protected]. ** Misanthrope, I think Panchito’s finally closed down, which, even having been anticipated for decades now, is very sad to think about. Mm, I prefer colds to flus just because, at least in this cold’s case, I can still at least kind of do things like the p.s. But, yes, no fun, and, yes, I think it’s gradually being put to bed. Hm, interesting about fermented foods. My diet is majority vegan/health food store stuffs, and I feel fairly safe in thinkingly guts are my friend. But, hey, that sounds like a winner of a plan to me, and I say go for it. ‘Prayers’ re: David’s interview. I have a weekend that’s a little busier than my current health makes seem sensible,  but I think I’ll manage to soldier through it, thanks. May yours salute your rockin’ of it. ** _Black_Acrylic, It’s big fun, you won’t be sorry. Gotcha on taking the opportunity to cull your accrued past in item form, but I guess keep in mind that sentiment is one of human beings’ rare potential sources of joy. Or something. ** Bill, That Paul McCarthy video is kind of totally god. Thanks, Bill. I … think I’m upswinging? It’ll be easier to tell a little later on. I hope your weekend is as healthy as a horse. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Oh, I don’t have a headache. It’s a head cold — clogged, fuzzy thinking, etc. I almost never get headaches in general for some reason. So, no, on the migraines, thank god. I will, of course, immediately go find out what I need to find out about the The Prismatic Ground film festival and join in if possible. Thanks a lot! I just thought ‘Lux Aeterna’ was Gaspar on automatic pilot enacting the tropes he’s done many times before with much, much less imagination and commitment. But you may totally disagree. Strangely, I bumped into Gaspar yesterday afternoon at Paris’s great DVD store/film distributor Potemkine. He seems well. I saw no sign that the Mexican restaurants here marked Cinco de Mayo, but it’s certainly possible that some of them did. It seems like it would be anti-good business practices not to. ** Right. This weekend I am festooning you with the robotic. See you on Monday.

 

‘“Perhaps there is no hope left for the whole of humankind,” wrote Cookie Mueller, “not because of the nature of the epidemic, but the nature of those it strikes.” Cookie learned about AIDS in July 1981, from a New York Times item she’d read aloud to friends on Fire Island; by early 1989, having lost who knows how many friends, she saw her husband, the artist Vittorio Scarpati, hospitalized with two collapsed lungs. “I hope he comes home soon,” she wrote in her art column for Details magazine; he died in September. Nan Goldin, a close friend, photographed Cookie at his funeral and, several weeks later, in her casket.

‘“I used to think I couldn’t lose anyone if I photographed them enough,” Goldin wrote, in the text accompanying her portfolio of photographs of Cookie from 1976 to 1989. Of course, she lost Cookie, the Cookie she knew and we never will. But Cookie Mueller isn’t lost: she’s there in Goldin’s photographs, the films of John Waters, and in the stories she wrote about her own life, a life I can’t imagine regretting even as it ended too soon.

‘Cookie Mueller was born in March 1949. At 15, she teased her hair until it scraped the ceiling and clomped down the halls of her Baltimore high school in spike heels and cone bras. She dated a boy, she wrote, who was in and out of jail and a girl “born of a lightbulb it seemed,” whose “scalp shone through all the teasing as if her head was a mango.” She arrived in Haight-Ashbury just in time for the Summer of Love, where she encountered Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Anton LaVey, and munched acid until her roommates had her institutionalized. She was transferred to a hospital in Maryland, where she met John Waters at the premiere for his Mondo Trasho. She’d appear in five of his movies, dancing topless to “Jail House Rock” in Multiple Maniacs; brandishing a flogger in Desperate Living; getting screwed with a chicken in Pink Flamingos.

‘From the freak wharfs of Baltimore (where she lived, she wrote, in a crowded three-room basement with a cockroach-eating pet monkey) and Provincetown (where she reportedly wore a monkey-fur coat to pick up the welfare cheque), she travelled around with her young son, Max, landing in Lower Manhattan where she became “sort of the queen of the whole downtown social scene,” in Goldin’s words. She wrote a medical advice column for the East Village Eye—a “‘health in the face of drug use’ column,” as she called it—and the art review for Details; she go-go danced and, according to a commenter on Motherboards NYC, sold MDA, which customers would refer to as “a Master’s Degree in Art.” John Waters remembers her snorting instant coffee “because she ‘didn’t have time’ to make it the normal way”; every morning, she claimed, no matter the hangover, she hoisted her ass out of bed to get Max ready for school.

‘Cookie Mueller had her own normal and her own values—good values, adapted for a life that careened like a unicycle down a fire escape. She was the kind of person who seems to live adjacent to the rest of us, subject to different rules and different laws of cause and effect. Adventures just accrued to her, like money for some and lovers for others (“I’m not wild,” she wrote, “I happen to stumble onto wildness. It gets in my path”). And she was lucky, in her way: in Sicily, she rented a car, totalled the roof, then returned it to an inspector too short to notice the damage; in Elkton, Maryland she was kidnapped by gun-wielding hillbillies and escaped by hiding in the woods under the lining of her black velvet jacket. She lived a short life as a born survivor; you picture her losing an arm, then tossing it into the ice box as she fishes out a beer.

‘Mueller recorded her life, in her columns and in short, mostly autobiographical stories collected in the wonderfully titled Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, which is still in print, and the more extensive Ask Dr. Mueller, which is worth the price on AbeBooks. Cookie was a good writer; she had excellent stories to tell, but had she been boring she could have made a career on chops alone. She pictured John Waters as a “tiny baby, fully developed and compact like a pound cake, almost bursting his bunting wrapper with the desire to communicate to anybody who’d listen,” which is a good description for her tales; the New York summer heat is “served as thick as lava gravy” and “closing in like the lid of a waffle iron.” Her characterizations are precise and brimming; her reality was singular, but her heart was everyone’s. She lived in a different world with the same mud puddles.

‘It’s tempting to think of Cookie Mueller as a doer first and a writer second, because it’s comforting, when you write and you’re dull, to think of dullness as the writer’s lot. The wild are not supposed to have insight, which is reserved for those of us too mired in our own heads to participate. The funny are not supposed to be beautiful, the beautiful are not supposed to be smart—either/or’s as bulkheads for our frail senses of self. This is stupid. Some people make beautiful work and some people live rich lives, and some people live rich lives and record them through beautiful work. The same genius that makes a story can make a life, if you apply it that way.

‘From where I sit (and it’s a dull seat, kind of a worn-out rocking chair with a whining squeak), it’s better to record than to be recorded. Moments pass and when you’re gone so is everything you ever lived through; your world ends, even if you are remembered, and what good is it to live forever, estranged? It seems better to leave a semblance of your world than to live as just a character in someone else’s; even better to be a character who can speak for yourself. Cookie Mueller died at 40, in tragic circumstances in a time of cataclysmic tragedy. But she lived an extraordinary life very quickly—she had a skill for living extraordinarily, and an equal skill for self-expression. Cookie was a character, for John Waters, for Nan Goldin, but a character with the genius to leave her world behind. That’s another way she was lucky.’ — Alexandra Molotkow

 

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Further

The Cookie Mueller Fan Club
Cookie Mueller @ Wikipedia
Courage, Bread and Roses: A Tribute to Cookie Mueller
How it Feels to be on Fire Reading Cookie Mueller Today
Cookie Mueller writes British Columbia—1972
Cookie MUELLER By Emily Gould
Doctor Strange Love
The Simplest Thing by Cookie Mueller
My Bio: Notes on an American Childhood, 1949–1959 by Cookie Mueller
The Mystery of Tap Water by Cookie Mueller
Baltimore 1969 by Cookie Mueller
Theatre by Cookie Mueller
A True Story About Two People: Easter 1964 by Cookie Mueller
Narcotics By Cookie Mueller
Jo Applin on Cookie Mueller & Vittorio Scarpati
Cookie Mueller @ MUBI
Tales of a late, great It Girl
invoking your idols: cookie mueller
A Stirring Exploration of Death by John Waters’ Early Muse
THE CURE FOR A BAD PARTY
A counterculture scene queen revisited
Buy ‘Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black’

 

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Extras

Cookie Mueller I GOT A KNIFE

Cookie Mueller Tribute Interview

cookie mueller “secrets of the skinny”

Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller

Justin Vivian Bond Reads Cookie Mueller at Low Life @ HOWL 2013

 

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Interview
from Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller

 

Cookie Mueller: “They were just three sluts looking for sex on the highway,” the two abductors and rapists said later when asked to describe us. This wasn’t the way we saw it.

Mink Stole: Yes, it must have been 1969. You know the story. Well, my version’s probably different. In Cookie’s story, she had me wearing a ball gown, which is completely not true. I was wearing brown bell-bottom jeans and a brown leather jacket.

Susan Lowe: I had black nail polish, miniskirt up to here, black lipstick. We were the punks.

Mueller: And I, the blond, was dressed conservatively, in a see-through micro-minidress and black velvet jacket.

It was a sunny day in early June, and Mink, Susan, and I were on our way to Cape Cod from Baltimore to visit John Waters, who had just finished directing us in his film Multiple Maniacs. When we told him we were going to thumb it, he said, incredulously, “You three? You’re crazy! Don’t do it.”

Stole: Then a couple guys picked us up—we were still in Maryland. They promised to take us to New York, and we believed them.

Lowe: We got in this car with these hillbillies because they had beer in the backseat. They looked like… oh, you know, greased-back hair or a flattop, maybe—farmerish.

Mueller: Burgundy Mach IV Mustang with two sickos, gigantic honkies, hopped-up, and horny on a local joyride.

Stole: The three of us got into the back, and the stupid thing is that we put our luggage in the trunk. That was our mistake. And Cookie carried everything in her bag: an iron… I mean she was loaded down.

Mueller: For the twelve-hour trip, we didn’t forget our two quarts of Jack Daniels and a handful of Dexedrine Spansules (they were new on the pharmaceutical market) and twenty black beauties. Aside from these necessities we had a couple of duffel bags of Salvation Army and St. Vincent de Paul formals and uniwear.

Stole: We started getting a bad feeling about these guys. I don’t know how long we were in the car before we realized that they were never going to take us to New York, that they had no intention of taking us to New York and never had. What they intended to do, I don’t know.

Mueller: There comes a time when even the most optimistic people, like myself, realize that life among certain humans cannot be easy, that sometimes it is unmanageable and low-down, that all people are quixotic, and haunted, and burdened, and there’s just no way to lift their load for them. With this in mind I wanted to say something to Mink and Susan about not antagonizing these sad slobs, but right then the driver turned to me. “You ain’t going north, honey. You ain’t going nowhere but where we’re taking you.” These were those certain humans.

Stole: I don’t know if they thought they could just ride us around. I don’t know if they intended to rape us or kill us or what. I really don’t know. Anyway, it was still daylight, and we were in this town called Elkton.

Mueller: Smack in the middle of a famous love zone, Elkton, Maryland, the quickie honeymoon and divorce capital of the eastern seaboard.

Stole: At one point we went through a car wash. We sat in the car through the whole thing. We could have hopped out while the guys got out, but they were fucking with us already, and we started to get scared and they knew we were scared and they were somehow getting off on that.

Lowe: Well, this is how I remember it: I remember seeing the same toll taker, and I’m going, What the fuck? And then we realized the guys were trying to make us lost, and then one time we tried to pass a note to the tollbooth—it was me because the tollbooth was on the driver’s side, and I was behind the driver—and they caught us trying to slip a note. We were laughing because we didn’t realize the danger at the time. We were high on black beauties.

Mueller: “We have knives,” the guy riding shotgun said, and he grinned at us with teeth that had brown moss growing near the gums.

“Big fuckin’ deal,” said Susan. “So do I,” and she whipped out a buck knife that was the size of my miniskirt.

The driver casually leaned over and produced a shotgun, and Susan threw the knife out the window.

Stole: Eventually they drove to some small rural house somewhere in the area of Elkton. There was a woman with a small child doing the laundry.

Lowe: A hillbilly house that I have never seen before, except in pictures of Appalachia, maybe. It was in the woods. Mink and I were on the edges, so we jumped out, but Cookie was in the middle, and they drove off before she could get out.

Mueller: Mink and Susan got out, but Mossy Teeth, El, grabbed my thigh and held me fast. Merle spun the car around and we took off, making corn-dirt dust in all the faces of everyone who was standing there in front of the house…

I began to feel the mood change. As they were talking to each other I noticed that they sounded scared; El even wanted to get out and go home.

After a lot of fighting, Merle finally did let El go… I have always been an astute observer of sexy women and unsexy women, and in all my years I’ve never seen a crazy woman get chased by a man. Look at bag ladies on the street. They rarely get raped, I surmised. And look at burned-out LSD girls. No men bothered with them much. So I decided that I would simply act crazy. I would turn the tables. I would scare him.

I started making the sounds of tape-recorded words running backward at high speed. This shocked him a bit, but he kept driving farther into the woods, as the sun was setting and the trees were closing in.

“What the fuck are you supposed to be doing?” he asked me nervously. “You a maniac or something?”

“I just escaped from a mental hospital,” I told him and continued with the backward-tape sounds, now sounding like alien UFO chatter. I think he was believing me. Anyway, he pulled off into the bushes and unzipped his pants and pulled out his pitifully limp wiener. He tried to get it hard. For a second I saw him debating about whether or not he should force me to give him a blow job.

“Ya devil woman, ya’d bite my dick off, wouldn’t ya?”

He tried to force his semi-hard pee-wee rod into me as he ripped my tights at the crotch. I just continued with the sounds of the backward tape as he fumbled with his loafing meat. This infuriated him. “I’m going to ask Jesus to help me on this one. Come on, sweet Jesus, help me get a hard-on. Come on.” He was very serious.

Stole: Susan and I got the woman to call the sheriff. He came and got us and took us to the station. Susan was drunk and passed out; she had tattoos on her belly, and her shirt would ride up, and, well, they just thought we were trash. We were beatniks, we were hitchhiking, and we deserved whatever we got. There was absolutely no sympathy.

So Susan and I stayed in the sheriff’s office for a while, and during this time there was a jailbreak. I remember there was this one really fat guy walking around in his Bermuda shorts. He had a two-gun holster and was yelling, “Leg irons! Next time we put ’em in leg irons!”

Mueller: Not waiting to see whose side the Lord was on, I pushed his wiener quickly aside and threw open the door and dove out into the darkness. I ran faster than I’d ever run, and I wasn’t a bad runner. As my eyes grew accustomed to the half-moon light, I saw that I was running into very deep woods. Aggressive brambles grabbed at my thighs, poison ivy licked at my ankles, and yearling trees slapped me in the face.

After a long time I decided to stop running, so I got under a bush next to a pile of rocks. I felt a bunch of furry things scuttle away. Rats or possums or raccoons, I guessed.

I lay there for a while trying to see things in the darkness. And then I heard his voice. He was far in the distance yelling, “Girl! Girl! Where the hell are ya?”

Did he think I was really going to answer?

As he got a little closer I saw that he had a flashlight, and I got scared again. If his light found me there would be no hope. My white skin was very bright in the bluish flood of the half-moon. I had a black velvet jacket on with a black lining, so I ripped out the lining in two pieces and wrapped one around my head and the other on my almost bare legs. Those brambles had shredded my stockings. No light would bounce off me now. I was awake for a long time, and then I just fell asleep, sure that he had given up the search.

At sunrise, or thereabout, I woke up. I didn’t even have a hangover. I felt very proud that I had melted so well into the underbrush, just like Bambi. Without too much trouble I found this little dirt road, and I started walking to the right.

All roads lead to Rome, I told myself.

 

___
Book

Cookie Mueller Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black
Semiotext(e)

‘The first collected edition of legendary writer, actress, and adventurer Cookie Mueller’s stories, featuring the entire contents of her 1990 book Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, alongside more than two dozen others, some previously unpublished.

‘Legendary as an underground actress, female adventurer, and East Village raconteur, Cookie Mueller’s first calling was to the written word: “I started writing when I was six and have never stopped completely,” she once confessed. Mueller’s 1990 Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, the first volume of the Semiotext(e) Native Agents series, was the largest collection of stories she compiled during her life. But it presented only a slice of Mueller’s prolific work as a writer. This new, landmark volume collects all of Mueller’s stories: from the original contents of Clear Water, to additional stories discovered by Amy Scholder for the posthumous anthology Ask Dr. Mueller, to selections from Mueller’s art and advice columns for Details and the East Village Eye, to still “new” stories collected and published here for the first time. Olivia Laing’s new introduction situates Mueller’s writing within the context of her life—and our times.

‘Thanks to recent documentaries like Mallory Curley’s A Cookie Mueller Encyclopedia and Chloé Griffin’s oral biography Edgewise, Mueller’s life and work have been discovered by a new generation of readers. Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black: Collected Stories returns essential source material to these readers, the archive of Mueller’s writing itself. Mueller’s many mise en scènes—the Baltimore of John Waters, post-Stonewall Provincetown, avant-garde Italy, 1980s New York, an America enduring Reagan and AIDS—patches together a singular personal history and a primer for others. As Laing writes in her introduction, Collected Stories amounts to “a how-to manual for a life ricocheting joyously off the rails… a live corrective to conformity, conservatism, and cruelty.”‘— Semiotext(e)

Excerpt
from Interview

I have lived in New York City for about nine years now. Since one year here is equivalent to seven anywhere else, that makes 63 years for me. With this kind of time passing, one begins to wax cool. It takes a lot to impress a New Yorker. The word cool was invented here, the etymological roots lie somewhere south of 14th Street or north of 116th. When I first moved here I used to bitch about everything. “There are easier places to live,” I used to tell myself in the mornings as I brought the toothbrush to my teeth and there was a cockroach hugging the brush, licking the toothpaste. Now I find myself admiring these roaches for their bold New York attitude. They’re so smart they’ve been around for 300 million years, seven times that in New York of course. There’s even a modern hybrid, a totally new breed, the albinos. Through evolution they’ve adapted themselves to white porcelain bathroom living. That’s admirable. “God love ’em,” I say and smile. They seem like pets to me now, or like wild elk drinking at the edge of a watering hole. I hated it when the pigeons used to wake me up, screaming and flapping on the window sills amid all their caked-up guano droppings. Now I have discovered that 80 percent of all city pigeons are gay. Male pair bonding seems to make more sense for them here. I read it in some very reputable science journal. Now I respect them for this instinctive genius for population control. I used to hate all the flies here, but I’ve learned that fat people benefit because they get exercise chasing them off their hamburgers. Because of flies too, illiterates find something to do with newspapers and magazines. I used to hate the fact that there weren’t any fish in the fountains and lakes in Central Park, but then I found that they’ve all been fried up and eaten by hungry people and that’s good because it’s really proletarian. I’ve been hungry and I have a fishing rod, so I get this. Squirrels are good eating too, except they’re so cute alive and look like rats when they’re skinned. I used to hate people with money here, but they’re the ones who buy art from poor creative people and anyway on an average day there’s always two or three people jumping out of Park Avenue windows or wielding the Wilkinson Sword blades on their blue-blooded wrists. So I certainly can’t dislike them now. Toward the other extreme I used to look with impatience on the uneducated poor here. But then after I had to go on welfare and after waiting in lines for five days to get 15 dollars’ worth of food stamps that were supposed to last a week for a family of two, I decided that the welfare system was the thing to be impatient with. I know now that ghettos are full of people with rich lives. I know for a fact that the wild people on the street corners who are talking to themselves aren’t crazy and lost, they just don’t get enough carbohydrates to sustain the weight of profound ideas rushing into their cerebral cortices.

Even time is physically different here. It’s faster. All clocks are aggressive and they warn you that every hour is zero hour. I have found that all this is quaint and romantic, it is the stuff of which poignant movies about Manhattan are made. “It’s real life here in New York,” the film directors visiting from L.A. say. “Well … if you can live in New York you can live anywhere,” I answer. There is no other response. They wouldn’t be so glib about New York City if they only knew that just

getting out of bed here is like one of those hurdles on the way to wisdom that all the Buddhists talk about.

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK

Lately, a couple of my girlfriends have committed suicide. One jumped off a building and the other one took pills. As I remember, in conversations with them not long before they decided to do this, they told me they were depressed because:

they were reaching 40

their careers were at a standstill and

they were lonely.

All valid reasons.

There have been times when I’ve been so depressed about these same things that I couldn’t be emotionally positive enough to get up from bed at 5 in the afternoon to take a piss even when my bladder was bursting.

So I understood.

I have tried to commit suicide but the famous Dorothy Parker quatrain rattles in my head.

Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live.

You might as well. You’re going to die soon enough anyway and I guarantee when it happens you won’t be ready. In retrospect, I know what I should have said to them. I should have told them about my personal cure for deepest depression, which never fails. “Girls,” I would tell them, “Girls, don’t be such pussies! Get the hell out of here! Take a break from the city! New York is only a small part of the world. Being 40 ain’t so bad in the rest of the world. Nobody on the Adriatic in Yugoslavia will see your hairline crows’-feet wrinkles. In Lesbos, Greece or Fez, Morocco, nobody cares about careers and if heterosexual loneliness is the problem, get your butt on an airplane. There are millions of hetero men walking around in all parts of the world that would fall to their knees in front of you and lick your toe jam. And they’re great looking, some of them have money, even. Not all men in the world are assholes or married or attached or anal or too career-oriented or gay or balding like they are in New York.” It wasn’t as if these girls couldn’t get together the plane fare to somewhere. And it wasn’t as if these girls had inextinguishable burning desires for power and New York city fame that they would be throwing away if they left. But it was true that each of them was sad because they didn’t have a partner. “Look,” I should have told them, “if you’re going to kill yourself anyway, why not go to some country where you can hook up with some fisherman on some coast in Turkey or Italy or Spain or Brazil and be anonymous? Why not start a new career as a fishwife? Fishermen always need wives. Or why not go into some European urban area and hook up with a restaurant owner? You could be the lover and bartender. Or go into the rural areas in southern hemispheres and meet a sandal maker. Think of the fine footwear you’d have.” I mean, hon, if you’re going to kill yourself anyway what difference does it make if you don’t get a mention in New York magazine and what difference does it make if a Women’s Wear Daily photographer finds you sheep-herding in Sardinia wearing a peasant blouse? The next time you find yourself climbing out on a ledge, give me a call. I can recommend a travel agent.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Unfortunately, no, I’m still clogged and messed up in my head but hoping today us the turning point. Thank you asking. Well, Robert Pollard releases music virtually non-stop as GbV or himself or under various guises, and I used to keep up when I was in the States and near record stores, but it’s too hard over here, so I have to stick to trying to find mp3s of everything, which doesn’t have the pleasure of having the physical objects at all, so alas. But that’s what I get for revering someone who makes the word prolific seem like its antonym. You and I really need to find that genie in a bottle on the seashore, or, in our cases, on the banks of our respective rivers. Ha ha, I’ve often wished I could pull off a Lou Reed in the 70s deal in interviews, but I’m too nice, damn me. But, if it helps, your Reed-like love’s fans, while fewer in number, would be really hardcore. Love explaining why current day teenagers don’t get pimples as often and as badly as teenagers did when I was one, G. ** David Ehrenstein, Morgan Fisher is still making wonderful things. I’m not sure about Louis Hock. It’s been a while since I’ve seen anything by him. ** Jack Skelley, Hey, J. Thanks, hopefully I’ll be much righter by tomorrow’s confab. I hope the Dodgers to reward your pleasure in their current success stint. Optioned, whoa! Tell more tomorrow. That’s super ace! The movie plans go well, the financing aspect is the worrying part, but we’ll get there. Ride the wolf if your haven’t. Love, me. ** _Black_Acrylic, Me too! Well, except for the student days part in relationship to the McCarthy. I think that video is still my favorite thing he’s ever made. Concentrate on your mojo, man. It’s your best friend, I swear. ** Tosh Berman, It was obviously my blog’s great honor, sir. Even though it was too racy (?) to be embedded in tact. Strange. ** Misanthrope, I cant think of a single example where the word fusion doesn’t portend meh, except in science of course. I like Chipotle. And it’s a godsend here. It’s no Poquito Mas. It’s not even Baja Fresh. But I’ll wolf it down at a finger snap. Thanks, this cold is being obnoxiously clingy. ** Robert, Hi. Those are two really great Bernhard choices to me. For a long time my favorite was an odd one,’Wittgenstein’s Nephew’, which is kind of a slighter novel, but lately I think my favorite is ‘Concrete’. Sebald is amazing, I think, and highly recommended. Bachmann is really strong too, especially ‘Malina’. I like the early Handke, pretty much everything up through ‘Repetition’, but after that his stuff lost me. I too have a hard time with Jelinek. I remember liking ‘Lust’ when I read it ages ago, but I’m not sure if I still would. Musil’s ‘Man Without Qualities’ is a helluva thing. If you want to slip one country over, I’m a huge fan of Max Frisch’s ‘Man in the Holocene’. Do you like French writers? I’m gigantic on the French avant-garde/experimental writers. They’re my and my work’s meat and potatoes. Happy Friday! ** Okay. Since Cookie Mueller’s wondrous book was recently reprinted and expanded by the mighty Semiotext(e), I thought the time might be right to spotlight it, and … hence … See you tomorrow.