Joe Davis isn't playing with an ordinary music box. The mechanism inside Sacre Coeur pumps human blood and grows flesh. Davis, a self-described genestheticist, collaborated with biologists, computer scientists, a surgeon, and a multimedia specialist, among others, from Harvard, MIT, and Boston University to create this political monument/medical experiment. "Everywhere you look - Israel, Kosovo, Guatemala, Rwanda - there's blood pouring into the soil," says the artist. "Why are we bleeding ourselves to death?" A half-pint of blood courses through Sacre Coeur (www.dis.org/sacrecoeur), flowing from the peak of a miniature Lucite house and spilling over a roof made of microscope-slide coverslips. Each glass shingle is smeared with the living cells of five ethnically diverse people that were culled from the American Type Culture Collection, a nonprofit bioresource center in Manassas, Virginia. The blood is pumped pneumatically through the same kind of impregnated Dacron tubing that's used in bypass surgery, and all the surfaces of the sculpture are treated with antithrombolytic agents to deter clotting. "We will try to give it transfusions and replenish its nutrients,"says Davis. "But it is incredibly hard to keep tissue alive outside the body, even in the most sterile environments."
ELECTRIC WORD
Convertible Goop
Patchwerk
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Mother Lode
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Monomania
