MARK JEFFERY COLLABORATION

Memento Mori (2012 onward)

Memento Mori: Anatomical Theaters of Mixed Reality will blend the crudeness of early surgery with the prevailing 21st century vision of a body enhanced by data, traceable by forensics, and augmented by computation and bio-technology.

atom-r (anatomical theaters of mixed reality) is a provisional collective exploring forensics, anatomy, and 21st century embodiment through performance, language and emerging technologies. Participants include Mark Jeffery (choreography), Judd Morrissey (systems), Justin Deschamps, Sam Hertz, Christopher Knowlton, Blake Russell, & Kevin Stanton (collaborators/performers).

For the process of research and experimentation, we have isolated four points of historical research that are striking in their conflation of scientific inquiry and image-making. Two of the sources also have strong roots within Chicago. The sources are as follows:

Exhibition A: Battle Wounds, the 19thcentury surgical paintings of physician Charles Bell.

Exhibition B: Nutshell Studies: dollhouse miniatures of crime scenes created in the 1930's by one-time Chicago-based heiress Francis Lee Glessner. The miniatures were designed with obsessive intricacy to be used as by law enforcement as early forensic models.

Exhibition C: the history of anatomical theater

Exhibition D: The Stud File: card catalog, apartment wall murals and ephemera of once Chicago-based writer and sexual queer pioneer Samuel Steward, who painstakingly recorded and filed away carefully structured data and forensic evidence (such as the pubic hair of dancer Vaslav Nijinsky) pertaining to a multitude of homosexual encounters involving many of the great writers and artists of the 20thcentury.

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