A Sacrifice for Hygia, 2005/06
Interactive Installation and Web Piece
A live Quicktime video feed began here at GMT 22:00/10:00 PM,
22nd of April 2006 and ran for approximately 44 hours.
The piece began when I was disposing of a mouse carcass from a trap I had set. The experience was potentially upsetting but I stopped myself from letting it be so. I did this on the grounds that this was the truth of what I was doing to maintain my environment the way I wanted it. It reminded me of when I first began cooking for myself and found preparing meat unsettling, I promised myself that I would either come to terms with being able to prepare meat myself or I would become a vegetarian.
I am not a vegetarian.
So the idea for this piece came about, as most people use standard traps placed out of sight to sacrifice the lives of these small creatures to help maintain their sanitised lifestyles. The piece consists of a set where a mouse trap appears as a sacrificial alter, loaded and waiting for its sacrifice. A live video feed sends this stream to a projection in public space and also to the web. Before the event there is a tension, heightened by the event being live, afterwards the image remains as a nagging reminder of this small truth. For the lucky(?) few who get to see the event occur it is truly confronting. The piece also touches on other issues such as the sadism of media in entertainment, the foreign policy of imperial politics and our own sense of mortality.
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