Paul Vanouse:
Paradise Reconfigured

Joseph Jernigan died a state-imposed death by lethal injection. The National Institute of Health sponsored a project to cut his body, using state-of-the-art technology, into 2,000 cross-sections. Each extremely thin slice was photographed and digitized, and in 1995 the dataset was unveiled as "The Visible Human Project." Soon after, an anonymous woman donated her body for the same purposes. Initially, the man was called "Adam" by project scientists, but the name had already been trademarked by another corporation. Thus the drier title, "Visible Man," was adopted instead. However, both male and female datasets are still often referred to as "Adam" and "Eve." The juncture between big science, religion and government is especially ironic here if one considers the following: government takes life; big science quantifies and objectifies life; and religion, by the invocation of the Creation Myth, naturalizes the entire questionable machine.

You the viewer are invited to re-live a canonical tale of our day by touching any of the three areas on the window glass. Join Adam, Eve and the Objective Scientist in this story as they struggle through creation, expulsion, loneliness and redemption.

Paul Vanouse is an electronic media artist and a recurring. His work has been shown throughout North and South America and Europe, most recently at Les Abbatoires museum in Toulouse, France and Brussels 2000 in Belgium. His interactive artwork--exploring everything from the OJ Simpson media spectacle, to the Visible Human Project, to the Human Genome Project--reflect his long standing interest in the intersections of "big-science" and "pop-culture." He is an Assistant Professor of Art at the University at Buffalo.