kyle hood
interactive artist

Project Bateson is an installation that examines gallery practice, as well as looks the topics of animal experimentation and authorship of works of art. The project is named after Patrick Bateson, the President of the Zoological Society of London, who created "Bateson's Cube." The "Cube" is a cost-benefit analysis of animal experimentation in pharmaceuticals and consumer products that factors in animal suffering, medical benefit, and quality of research. The installation basically takes a tank full of fish, records and tracks them, and then uses the data to drive a generative painting that is projected through a frame on a mobile wall. In essence, I am exploiting these fish to create art, which is parallel to the way way animals are exploited for the benefit of medicine and product-safety. The installation is designed to reference the fish and the data as being "behind the scenes." From the front, all a viewer can see is the wall, the frame in the middle, with a "painting" growing inside the frame. By stepping around, however, the viewer is presented with the guts. This references gallery practice and giving a view to the process in the piece of art. Its similar to the popular reference of 1,000 monkeys on typewriters writing movie scripts. I further exploit these animals by giving up some of the control to them, but ultimately taking all of the credit. While I may control the way the camera works, how the data is compiled, or what the computer makes with the data, the composition is ultimately completely dependent on the fish's unknowing cooperation.