Jump to Content
 

The Cosmopolitan Chicken project includes the worldwide experimental project with which Koen Vanmechelen hopes to develop a super-hybrid chicken. Crossbreeds clearly plays an essential role in Vanmechelen's work, not only in chickens but also in materials and disciplines. Topical themes such as genetic manipulation, cloning, globalisation and multiculturalness are found throughout his work. An important lateral project is the search for the Red Jungle Fowl, the primal chicken which is still found in Asia. Vanmechelen likes to describe his work in Hegelian terms: thesis, antithesis and synthesis. The chicken and the egg are a metaphor for the human race and art.

 


The Accident II
       
       

 
 
 
       

 


 
 
The starting point for the second issue of my yearly magazine The Accident II is David Quammen’s fascinating book The Song of the Dodo  (1995). Main focus in this book  is the biogeography of islands. Islands being small land bodies surrounded by water, as well as continental ecosystems carved up into isolated pockets of habitat.
 

Islands

Islands are unique, each one of them. Their isolation breeds evolutionary specialization. Species evolve in relative isolation, and are often wonderful, weird and rare. For some they are a symbol of divine purity, for others a mirror of the past. Fact is that these species are also very vulnerable and unprepared for ‘the world’. The dodo was wiped out in the blink of an eye. Islands are very good at extinction, even more so in times of vast human expansion. They are more sensitive to environmental change than continents. In our  ‘Age of extinction’ even parks and preserves just aren't large enough.. The creation of separate islands of biodiversity lays these new ‘islands’ open to the extinctions and die-offs that have happened on islands surrounded by water. We are living among tomorrow's dodos. How can we protect them? Do we have to? The only way may be the ‘building of ‘bridges’.
 

Art

Quammen’s islands can serve perfectly as a metaphor for art, science and religion. If these knowledge domains remain isolated by focusing only on themselves, they become sterile and they will lose in the long run. The sterility of the lab at itself is not enough, just as the sterility of the art studio or the sacrality of places of worship.
 All the people presented in The Accident II are examples of interdisciplinarity, each of them breaking through their boundaries via their work and thinking. They are ‘breaking the cage’:
 
               Neil Shubin: American biologist and palaeontologist, He researches the evolutionary origin of anatomical features of animals. Shubin has conducted field work in Greenland, China, Canada, much of North America and Africa, and he has published multiple articles. His most recent discovery, Tiktaalik roseae, has been dubbed the ‘missing link’ between fish and land animals: Tiktaalik represents an intermediate form between fish and amphibians. Without it making the leap from water to land there never would have been life outside water.
Quote: “Tiktaalik made me focus on this deep continuity of life”.
 
 
                Alice Storey: New Zealand anthropologist at the University of Auckland. Her current project examines the use of ancient chicken mitochondrial DNA as a proxy for understanding human migration and interaction. By examining ancient mtDNA patterns and their relationships across space and through time she is hoping to understand settlement of the Pacific and how people moved chickens around to create stable food surpluses and how these were traded once established. She discovered that the chicken arrived in South-America via the Pacific, before the arrival of the Spanish. Anthropology meets Archeology meets biology meets history.
Quote: “The introduction of animals to specific places at certain times is important to understanding human behaviour in the past, and that is truly the goal of any archaeological investigation.”
 
 
 
              
 
              
               
                                Brian Josefson (fysics) Nobel prize winner  and founder of the Mind-Matter Unification project, about the marriage between facts and religion (I don’t see a conflict). Josephson, as a physicist, is open to the possibility of parapsychological fenomena.
Quote: “Things like telepathy and cold fusion are not hard to prove, but they are hard to get accepted. They require not only evidence, but then have to overcome the barrier that they are unacceptable, and therefore unpublishable.”
 
              
 
                               Ilexa Yardley: British author and co-founder of the Mind-Matter Unification Project. She reconciles science and religion through her circular theory of ‘Absolute Intelligence’.
Quote: “The circle is the basic entity, process and system that produces and explains all entities, processes and systems.”
 
 
 
                               Daniel Dennett: American philosopher who focuses on three domains: consciousness, philosophy of the mind and artificial intelligence. Direct opponent of Josephson, as a factual prophet. However also Dennett thinks that something can grow out of the crossing between art and science.
Quote: “Many people believe in a belief in God.They try very hard to be religious or defend religion although they are infidels. Because religion is a good and wonderful matter, they think.”
 
 
                               Johan Bollen: American-Flemish computer scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Through his Map of Science he can , for the first time, show which scientific disciplines are in contact with, are building bridges, with each other and also with art and culture.
             A snapshot of the collective focus of the human brain. He can predict which new scientific disciplines will arise out of these crossings.
Quote: “What is striking is that social and human science play a rather central role in the scientific arena. They are positioned as a cluster, but have a lot of interdisciplinary connections with physics.”
 
 
                               James Moore: British historical scientist and biographer, knows the ins and outs of the man who changed the face of western civilization; Charles Darwin. Religious and unreligious scientist, human rights activist, giant and human being. Central statement; according to Darwin there were no differences between races, even often between species. Everything is connected which each other.
Quote:“There is a continuum from variety over race to species; there is no essential difference (…) This perception is the unifying factor in Darwin’s work.”
 
 
 
             Further more the Accident II has contributions about and from scientists I work with: geneticist Jean-Jacques Cassiman, mouth- and jaw surgeon Luc Vrielinck and fertility specialist Willem Ombelet, and cultural scientists like the American Susan Squier (Brill Professor of Women's Studies and English at The Pennsylvania State University), the Brit Mike Phillips (OBE, FRSL, FRSA) and the Belgian Frank Jacobs (author of ‘Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities’).