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Searching for the Soul of Elmo
What kind of artist would skin a Tickle Me Elmo? Someone who thinks
items of popular culture could challenge an audience into rethinking
what constitutes a living being. Someone fascinated by mechanical
intelligence and how technology can fit into art. Someone with
a wicked sense of humor.
That's Kelly Heaton, a Raleigh native who gained a lot of attention
in the New York art scene and is back in North Carolina as an artist-in-residence
at Duke, through the computer science department and the Information
Science Information Studies (ISIS) program. The conjunction between
art and technology is a comfortable place for Heaton, who spent
several years doing art at MIT's renowned Media Lab. In her East
Campus art studio, she continues to work on projects such as "Immaterial
Studio," which explores how computer-generated pixels can
recreate the painterly experience.
Her other project involves Tickle Me Elmo, the doll that has become
a part of popular culture. A microchip inside allows the toy to
respond to a child's squeeze on select tickle spots with a giggle
of "Don't tickle me!" In October, sixty-four Elmos, all
purchased over online auction service eBay, were skinned and Heaton
turned their pelts into a fur coat. Woven into the coat was some
of Elmo's electronics, so when the pelts are touched, the coat
will giggle and quiver.
The coat will be the center of a sculpture installation, tentatively
set for exhibit next year at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York.
Plans include a video documentary of the skinning, display of the
Elmo "guts" in plastic bags, a yearbook of information
about the young children who originally owned the Elmos, and portraits
of young girls from around the country whom Heaton paid to be photographed
at Sears in Elmo costumes. In a statement about the work, Heaton
describes its aesthetics as "multi-layered: The exterior is
fashionable, humorous and perverse; the interior is cybernetic,
biological, and terroristic."
"
Elmo was just not an inert stuffed toy," she explains. "He
responded to his senses. The computer chip gave him that ability
to process data. It has machine intelligence, and I think of him
as a living being; I don't treat him as a doll. I want to push
that boundary of what we think is a living being as much as I can.
"
I'm interested in where is the soul of Elmo? Is it in the electronics?
The pelt? The eyes?"
Heaton is the first artist-in-residence ever appointed by computer
science, and her work at Duke continues efforts made by computer
science, ISIS, and other programs to build bridges on campus between
the arts and technology communities. These include last year's "Free
Space" dance concert involving a dance company and the Fitzpatrick
Photonics Center, and an ISIS-sponsored symposium on music, new
technology, and theft.
"
ISIS's mission is to integrate information sciences and information
studies more fully into all aspects of research and the curriculum
at the university," says program director Edward Shanken. "[Heaton's]
space in the art studio is out of the art department. She's shooting
a video in the warehouse that involves David Brady and people from
the Fitzpatrick Center. She's working with art students and she's
working with electrical engineering students along with engineering
professor Gary Ybarra. These are the kind of collaborations that
ISIS was hoping to make possible."
The Elmo coat, called "Live Pelt," is part of a larger
work she calls Bibiota. Two of the main Bibiota pieces do for the
toy Furby what "Live Pelt" does for Elmo. Heaton skinned
400 Furbys, turning the skins into a red-and-white, Santa Claus
fur outfit she calls "Dead Pelt." She then took the eyes,
mouths, and electronics from the 400 Furbys, reprogrammed the electronics,
and mounted the eyes and mouths on a wall she called "Reflection
Loop." As people walked by the wall, the Furbys detected the
motion and their eyes and mouths would start to open and shut.
http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~kelly
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