Miriam Simun

Talking about the value and design of Creative Disruptions, including the Human Cheese Project. At LUCID NYC June 2011.

The Human Cheese Project at Michael Mut Gallery
97 Avenue C | New York City

Hours: Thursday April 28, 7pm-10pm OPENING TASTING EVENT
Friday, April 29, 5pm-9pm
Saturday April 30, 1pm-5pm
Sunday May 1, 2pm-6pm 4PM-6PM CLOSING TASTING EVENT

“From one perspective, a cyborg world is…about the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of war. From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point. Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters.” – Donna Haraway

On Thursday April 28 the exterior of Michael Mut Gallery will be transformed into The Lady Cheese Shop. We invite you inside to sample Human Cheese (cheese made from human milk). We welcome you to taste it, or choose to not – we only ask that you please follow your gut. Contained within the space is an exploration of the process of making food from human body product. Three delicious human cheeses will be available (made from the milk of three different women), accented with delectable food pairings inspired by the cultural and microbial terroir of each cheese, created in collaboration with Chef Sarah Hymanson. Over cheese, pairing, and wine, you are invited to consider and discuss the implications of this immodest proposal.

Tasting at Postmasters Gallery 2010

Human Cheese Lifecycle Analysis

STATEMENT:  Work in Progress

We are designing life to an extent never before possible.   Science speeds ahead while people attempt to catch up to understand the implications, and legislate how we want our world to be.  This is especially true with biotechnology (consider the GM food debate).  Advances in biotechnology enable us to redesign our food, our weather, our fellow animal species, and even ourselves.  We continue to find ever new ways to use each others’ bodies as factories (consider the sale of hair and semen, the donation of blood and kidneys, the retention of wet nurses, and the growing reproductive tourism industry).

Simultaneously, we realize that our lifestyles are unsustainable, unhealthy, and unethical.  Industrialized food systems are a prime example:  we abuse animals, exploit people, pollute the earth, and destroy our bodies as we eat.  Food is a site of contention and revolution.  Food is also one of our strongest links to the natural world, and the oldest site of social gathering – thus a wonderful vehicle for discussion.

To explore these issues and engage others in discourse I am developing a system for sourcing, creating, and distributing human cheese.

Human cheese offers a unique entry into these issues.  Humans are the only animals to harvest and consume other species’ milk.  This milk is neither created for human digestion, nor particularly healthy for human consumption, nor always kind to the animals we harvest and milk. Cheese is one of the oldest bio-technologies. It was also, in 1990, the first genetically modified food product to be approved for sale by the US Food and Drug Administration.

Disturbing visions of the future (or the present) may be abstracted, rationalized, swept aside.  By serving human cheese, I ask people to make a decision:  to eat, or not to eat.  Facing the decision to ingest materializes the technological and ethical issues at hand, going beyond our rational senses to appeal to our visceral and instinctual humanness.

In doing so, I hope to engage discourse about what we eat, who we are (evolving to be), and what kind of future we want.  In serving human cheese, I pose a number of questions:

As we navigate the complex landscape of technologically modified food production, how do we understand what is natural, healthy, ethical?  If we reject all technologically modified food in favor of what is ‘natural,’ how far back to do we go?  If we are to welcome new technologies into our lives, how will we continue to redefine what is natural, normal and healthy?  How will this change our relationship to each other, the natural world and ourselves? If we are determined to continue to enjoy our cheese, perhaps it is most natural, ethical and healthy to eat human cheese?  And if not, what other biotechnological processes does this force us to reconsider?

THE CONVERSATION HAS BEGUN!
See the PRESS Human Cheese has garnered – and check the thoughtful and contentious discussions that ensue (especially on Grist).

3 CHEESES CURRENTLY ON OFFER

Wisconsin Bang

This deliciously creamy cheese sure packs a bang for your buck.  The spicy intense flavor gets your taste buds dancing while the heavy and creamy texture warms your mouth.  This spreadable deliciousness is a human-goat blend, made from two wonderful milks.  A playful Vermont mountain goat herd milk tangos with the milk of a sweet lawyer’s assistant who hails from Wisconsin and is excited to become part of what she considers a “more acceptable and personal” cheese.  Her mostly organic diet full of meat is rich in flavor and spices – and boy does it come through in this darling little cheese!   The result is somewhat explosive, the first contact of paprika awakening your senses and the creamy, pungent cheese riding out the hints of sun dried tomato.

Sweet Airy Equity

Airily aged in a room high above the east village while the cheese is still very young, this tough little cheese is a human-cow blend.  Made from the milk of a kind young mother of Chinese descent hailing from midtown Manhattan, and a cow born and raised in the Catskills.  Between working in private equity and eating lots of sweets, this mother has retained hints of her pregnant plumpness, producing a sweet, creamy milk, a delightful balance to the grassy cow milk it intermingles with.  Sweet airy equity is a mild hard cheese that crumbles in your mouth, with a smooth lingering finish that leaves only the slightest hint of walnut on your tongue.

ITP Winter Show 2010

City Funk

This cheese stinks.  It really does.  But pay no heed to it’s gamey scent; just savor the flavor! The human-goat blend – light on the goat, heavy on the human – is soft and spreadable, imparting a complex funk somewhere in between butter, yellow taxi cabs and wafting wavers of street cart smells.  The sweet and heavy diet of the Manhattan mother (who’s a little reserved, but curious for you to try her cheese) just peaks through, providing a deliciously dizzying sweet finish to this pudgy little wonder.  Reminiscent of Gorgonzola, but with a New York City flavor all its own.

Photography:  Shimpei Takeda
Art Direction: Melissa Clarke & Benji Canning-Pera
Adviser to Cheesemaking: Boris Zilberman

Interaction is all the rage these days.


photo credit: Jeff Howard

VISCERAL SWITCH (#1, LIGHT)

“Automatism amounts to a closing-off, to a sort of functional self-sufficiency which exiles man to the irresponsibility of a mere spectator”
- Jean Baudrillard, System of Objects

To design an interface is to materialize a metaphor. I look around at my life with machines, and wonder, where has all the poetry gone?

1. We come to know the world through interacting with it. Physical senses play a crucial part in our formation of knowledge. Sometimes our bodies know things that our minds do not.

2. Our technologies are growing increasingly complex, sophisticated, “smart”. Our interactions with technology are becoming ever more dependent upon abstract, intellectual metaphor.

Visceral Switch #1 explores interaction within one of the most ubiquitous technological interactions: the light switch. Pull harder for brighter light. Pull longer for longer lasting light. Slow down a bit, throw your body into it, the rope can take it.

+ How can we make use of our body to better understand the functioning of the technologies we use?

+ How might embodied interactions enable alternative forms of narrative?

+ Might visceral, physical interactions better communicate the systemic impact of our actions?

Essay published in ITPBOOK2

More on the Visceral Light Switch workshop with 3rd graders.

MIND YOUR MEDIUM!!!

“What our bodies are like and how they function in the world…structure the very concepts we can use to think.”
- Lakoff and Johnson

A little software runs in the background of your computer. It captures you, alone with your machine, at work and at play.

“I think, therefore I am” Descartes said all those years ago, and we still trudge along this path. Our technology may have evolved light-years ahead but somehow our way of thinking stutters. One might think that the impending ecological catastrophes that our way of being in the world has brought about would challenge our way of thought, but explorations such as Mind-Uploading (a hypothetical process by which you upload your scanned brain to the computer and it functions exactly the same, now sans body) suggests that we continue a train of thought that allows for an existence outside of our bodies, our mortality, our nature.

Our knowledge is inextricably linked to our body, to our sensory perceptions of the world. Our fingers remember numbers and keys even when our minds do not. “You can never forget how to ride a bike.” Contemporary work patterns often discount the embodied nature of knowledge, treating the human body as a vessel to be accommodated while the mind does all the work.

Part software-based online interaction, part participative research project, part digital sensory archive, the project aims to understand the embodied nature of digital work, and the role of the body, new media, and the body’s physical surroundings in mediating knowledge work.

Inspired by the work of Joseph Dumit and Sarah McCullough: ‘sitzfleish,’ (in German, “sitting flesh”). Their project explores the embodied nature of knowledge work, considering issues of body placement, physical environment, and endurance in the construction of written knowledge.

+ How does the use of new media alter our relationships to our bodies? As we work, communicate, and play through and with the computer, how do these often assumed “disembodied” experiences affect our relationships and intimacies to people, spaces, object, and ourselves?

+ What role do our bodies play in machine-aided production? Beyond the eyes and the typing fingers, how do our appendages and movements affect our experiences and the knowledge, culture, and communication we produce?

+ How can we evoke a different sort of relationship between bodies and computers that positions us more intimately in our physical space and physical body?

with Natalie Jeremijenko and Betsy Medvedovsky

A response to Columbia’s Journal for Literature and Art call: “How do you create a warning system to prevent an accidental unearthing of 200 million pounds of radioactive nuclear waste?”

Thousands of pounds of nuclear waste piling up besides reactors around the world remind us that despite the human tendency to aim forever forward, we exist in a cycle, and energy is never acquired but only transferred. The harnessing of nuclear power has left the awesome challenge of waste in its wake. Too dangerous for human proximity, we plan to bury it deep below the desert Yucca mountains. The seemingly empty, arid, land is home to an abundance of highly adapted, specialized and resourceful wildlife. Rams, tortoises, bats, rabbits, mice, rats, foxes, coyotes, lizards and snakes abound.
In this place, to bury unknown waste, and build a sign to last 10,000 years. Permanence is construction in waiting: of diffusion, dispersion, erosion. To last is to change the game: to remain fluid, flexible, adaptable. Any sign with a chance of viability must reproduce, replicate, and renew over time and space. For the hazard is not limited to the waste burial place, but spreads its effect as it comes to exist in the life forms that will absorb it, transform it, and evolve with it as they survive – or don’t.

A proposal: along with the nuclear waste, we introduce three distinct life forms, already habituated to life in the unique Yucca conditions, and now specially marked.

Setting the stage: the waste introduced below the ground will be symbolized above the ground with a sign that reaches down into the underworld, striving to make visible the waste buried deep below. A collection of Larrea tridentata, commonly known as the creosote bush, thought to be one of the oldest living plant forms on earth, is planted in the global symbol of nuclear warning. As the Creosote grows older, old branches die as new ones, clones of the previous branches, grow out of their demise, creating a formation of many separate crowns all from the same seed. In this way, the Creosote bush outlives most other life forms on earth – one plant, near Lucerne Valley, has been carbon dated to 11,700 years old.

Enter our contestants. A genetically marked canyon mouse (Peromyscus crinitus) and desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii), both known to live among the creosote bush, both able to survive for long periods of time without water. Genetically marked to be visibly differentiable from those that may have come from other desert parts, our competitors are otherwise in every way the same as their fellow species, and yet starkly different from each other.    Both species are highly adapted to thrive in the dry and difficult habitat of Yucca Mountain, and we presume they will continue their successful adaptation strategies as the nuclear waste is sits below their ground.

The canyon mouse is the hot-blooded member of our race. This intelligent and resourceful homeotherm builds and navigates complex underground tunnels to hide from the extreme hot and cold. A seven year life-span, female canyon mice birth up to eight precocial offspring a year, and males and females negotiate complex social relations throughout their fully active years.

The challenger comes in form of desert tortoise, a solitary species with a lifespan of up to 100 years. It is a slow life, over 95% spent in a desert burrow, usually alone, unless during breeding season. A female tortoise births lays eggs that typically produce 2-3 offspring a year. Strong site fidelity means that adult tortoises never migrate more than 2 miles away from the place they hatched. This poikilotherm spends only 1/10 the energy of its warm-blooded rival.

And thus, the sign: 100 generations of desert tortoise. 1,000 nests of the desert mouse. 10,000 creosote bushes. A race for survival. And to keep this race alive in human memory, we channel Aesop, the 26,000 year old Ethiopian slave and his tales of nature – human, and otherwise.

Photography by Jonathan Ystad
Graphic Design by Betsy Medvedovsky

A re::design of our cemetery ritual.

Attend to memory (of those passed).
Attend to nature (of the cemetery life).
Attend to health (of yourself and the environment).

Cemeteries are biodiversity hotspots in urban areas.  In New York City, one can look to cemeteries, especially the older cemeteries were established without the widespread use of pesticides and herbicides, as habitats to a wide range of wildlife, often not in the least associated with city living.

As a fundamental storehouse of natural capital on earth, cemeteries deserve increased attention, understanding and preservation (Barrett and Barrett 2000). This preservation is increasingly likely to occur if cemeteries come to be understood as spaces which serve functions beyond a burial ground – as ecological habitat, as valuable resource for both urban people and wildlife. This investigation is an attempt to understand how we can re-imagine cemeteries, our ritual for mourning, and our relationship to the wildlife that lives even in our urban midst.

“an object to improve your journey that fits on your body”

‘ Design an object that improves your journey.’

Cities can feel huge, manic, and overwhelming …sometimes it can be oppressing. have a pleasant interaction with a stranger – a funny exchange of glances, a random conversation, a shared joke – and sometimes, it all seems worth it. you never know who you might meet.

But more and more, people are not so ‘there.’ whether in their private iPod sound worlds, or partly half way around the world with whomever it is their talking to on their mobile phone, sometimes I can’t even find someone available to ask for directions…

London Transport tried to remedy this situation with their ‘Together for London’ campaign – encouraging passengers to be more contentious of the people around them.  But why not use objects rather than signs?  What if the objects and structures in our transport system asked us to cooperate with each other?

+ How can the journey be made an adventure in itself, rather than a non-space we’re desperate to escape?

+ Rather than privatizing public spaces with private acts, why not make the private acts public? even, cooperative?

+ How can objects be deployed – rather than signs – to alter social relations on public transport?

+ How might we play with the complicated social dance that is body placement on the often crowded London underground?

Youth, Creativity, and Copyright in the Digital Age
John Palfrey, Urs Gasser, Miriam Simun, Rosalie Fay Barnes
International Journal of Learning and Media, Spring 2009, Vol. 1, No. 2, Pages 79-97
(doi: 10.1162/ijlm.2009.0022)

ABSTRACT

New digital networked technologies enable users to participate in the consumption, distribution, and creation of content in ways that are revolutionary for both culture and industry. As a result, “Digital Natives”—young people growing up in the digital world with access to the technologies and the skills to use them in sophisticated ways—are now confronting copyright law on a regular basis. This article presents qualitative research conducted with students age 12-22 that explores youth understanding, attitudes, and discourse on the topic of digital creativity and copyright law. Our findings suggest that young people operate in the digital realm overwhelmingly ignorant of the rights, and to a lesser degree the restrictions, established in copyright law. They often engage in unlawful behavior, such as illegal peer-to-peer music downloading, yet they nevertheless demonstrate an interest in the rights and livelihoods of creators. Building upon our findings of the disconnect between technical, legal, and social norms as pertaining to copyright law, we present the initial stages of the development of an educational intervention that posits students as creators: the Creative Rights copyright curriculum. Educating youth about copyright law is important for empowering young people as actors in society, both in terms of their ability to contribute to cultural knowledge with creative practices and to engage with the laws that govern society.

Full paper available here