Hello, my name is Chris Hefner. Lauren and Francesco have been kind enough to invite me to participate in Binary, and I am in the process of making a new, as yet untitled, film for the occasion.

Observing the themes of collaboration & response which are central to Binary, my film will take the form of an exploration of three collections held by Lauren herself. Through close examination of her accumulations of insects, orchid plants and dress shoes, I’m interested in not only drawing relationships between these three particular groups of seemingly disparate objects, but also, in a broader sense, to acknowledge the impulse to collect and organize.

The nearly universal phenomenon of attraction to certain objects and the subsequent accumulation and organization of these things seems to relate to an extremely basic, almost primitive impulse. Reaction to one’s surroundings through keeping, arranging, touching, looking and repurposing has been a part of the human M.O. since day one. What does this say about us? What questions about our ability to understand our situation does this raise?

Does the collection of things which were once alive bring us any closer to understanding what it means to be dead? Or is it simply a natural reaction to look endlessly at something which can fundamentally never be understood by a living mind?

How, too, does this relate to the simultaneous habit of cultivating living material (plants, pets, etc)? And where do these things meet? How do we use the dead, and how is life created from them? How do the dead attract us? How do the living? How do we use our bodies to attract bodies? How does sex involve itself with use of the dead?

Where do the impulses to hunt, seduce, adorn, feed, procreate and protect meet? And when they do meet, how do we make sense of the intersection? How is it organized? How is it digested? And at what point must we stop looking?

re • com • bi • nant [ ree-kom-buh-nuhnt ]

–adjective
1. of or resulting from new combinations of genetic material: recombinant cells.

–noun
2. a cell or organism whose genetic complement results from recombination.
3. the genetic material produced when segments of DNA from different sources are joined to produce recombinant DNA.

–installation
4. an interactive video by Francesco Levato in which poetic texts and animated imagery are dynamically generated via SMS text messaging by gallery viewers.

Origin:
1940–45; re- + combine + -ant