A RAT'S TALE
Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria, 2007

 

 

A Rat’s Tale is an installation comprising a panel and a back projected video (above). The panel is constructed out of 204 laboratory weighing trays, in which are framed sheets of rat’s tail collagen film embedded with rat hair, clear vinyl gloves and scalpel blades. The weighing trays are arranged in the shape of the first maze used in rat research at the turn of last century. The trays with inserts trace the path through the maze to the centre where the video projection depicts the process of extracting the collagen from the rat tails. The maze at once references the history of scientific research using rats and the network of practices through which rats have become abstracted from their animal being and reconstituted as a research tool.The process of extracting the collagen and making the collagen film operates as an exploration of this abstraction and fragmentation of living processes and materials that routinely occurs in laboratory practice. The tails used in making this work were scavenged from other researchers once they had finished with their rats and in this sense, A Rat’s Tale can also be seen as an investigation of waste and use-value, both with relation to living bodies and to the production of art. The fragile beauty of the panel functions to highlight the ephemeral nature of life in the face of constant, and often brutal, transformation.


The panel at Ars Electronica

The process of making this work was one of amplification through repetition. Cutting, ripping, dissolving, stirring, filtering, pouring, drying. In thinking about how to communicate this process, I recursively applied some of these same actions to materials used in the original extraction. I have cut and recombined the gloves and the weighing trays, inserted the scalpel blades into the cuts, shredded the protocols, the research, the diagrams and the images. Thus, the panel itself functions as a deconstruction and reconstitution of the process of deconstructing and reconstituting rat tail tendons into sheets of plastic film.