Excerpts from "More Than Meat Joy," by Carolee Schneeman
Meat Joy has the character of an erotic rite, excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chickens, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, rope brushes, paper scrap. Its propulsion is toward the ecstatic-shifting and turning between tenderness, wildness, precision, abandon: qualities which could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellant. (December 1963.)
Upstairs I constructed a torture tunnel into which each architect was pushed as they exited from the previous "ordeal" area. The tunnel was covered in black cloth; behind these cloths were electric fans blowing through slits in the fabric onto lines of wet sponges which slapped at intervals on the person walking through. Long feathers tapped their faces and bodies; it was utterly dark and boards at various angles obstructed their passage. As they advanced down the tunnel blue lights flashed around them; ahead were huge illuminated slides of Vietnam atrocity images. Old raw fish hung overhead.
When they started down the stairs to the gym, blinding lights were flashed into their eyes. Assistants grabbed them, carrying the women, dragging the men, into the dark sea of polyurethane foam. In the face of the implied violence and spatial disorientation, the participants became extremely sensitive to the tactile material around them and began to touch and handle one another. Others struggled for footing… (November 1965.)
I shredded a roll of white printer's paper and filled a bucket with wall paper paste and molasses. My intention was not simply to collage my body (as an object) but to enact movements so that the collage image would be active, found, not pre-determined or posed. When I had covered myself with glue I ran back and forth around a pile of papers until the momentum of the runs provoked a fall into it. Once there I rolled heavily to attach the papers to my body on random shape and proportion. (August 1967.)
(This excerpt is from the proceedings of The First Computer Faire, 1977. The Apple II computer was introduced to the public at this event, marking the beginning of the age of the PC.)
Digital Pyrotechnics: The Computer in Visual Arts by John Whitney
Harmonic forces give shape to our experience of past and future. This is the dramatic essence of musical experience. It is why the composer, more or less intuitively, has manipulated the network of harmonic relationships of all musical scales for as long as music itself has existed. Evidence is accumulating to substantiate the need for much further study of harmonic phenomena. Because there is reason to believe, as I do, that the tensional charge and discharge-the expectations evoked and then fulfilled by tonic structures in music-all this is a direct product of the mathematics of harmonic order. I further believe that the same possibilities exist in the skillful design of harmonic pattern for visual perception. Therefore I am exploring harmonics designed for eye instead of ear. It is interesting to note that the very creation of harmonic pattern had been altogether inconceivable until a very recent time when computer graphics eventually and slowly became available to the visual artist.
