If you prick us, do we not bleed?…
The Immortal
Designer Revital Cohen is fascinated by the relationship of the natural with the artificial. A frequent collaborator with with scientists, bioethicists and animal breeders, she creates objects that are critical, provocative… and all-too-plausible.
Consider, for example, her recent work, The Immortal (pictured above)…
A web of tubes and electric cords is interwoven in closed circuits through a Heart-Lung Machine, Dialysis Machine, an Infant Incubator, a Mechanical Ventilator and an Intraoperative Cell Salvage Machine.
The organ replacement machines operate in orchestrated loops, keeping each other alive through circulation of electrical impulses, oxygen and artificial blood.
See more of The Immortal here, and more of her other pieces– the genetic heirloom, the electrocyte appendix, et al.– here.
***
As we go with the flow, we might send fiendishly ingenious birthday greetings to Rube Goldberg; he was born on this date in 1883. A cartoonist, sculptor, author, engineer, and inventor, he is best remembered as a satirist of the American obssesion with technology for his series of “Invention” cartoons which used a string of outlandish tools, people, plants, and steps to accomplish simple, everyday tasks in the most complicated possible way. (His work has inspired a number of “Rube Goldberg competitions,” the best-known of which, readers may recall, has been profilled here.)
Goldberg was a founder and the first president of the National Cartoonists Society, and he is the namesake of the Reuben Award, which the organization awards to the Cartoonist of the Year.
