This exhibition investigates the conflicting narratives about mortality offered by science, philosophy and religion.  It also looks at how contemporary technologies have changed the way that we think about death.  The problem of mortality is fundamentally the same today as it was for the first humans 200,000 years ago, but because of the particulars of our contemporary situation, humans now think differently about death.  Meiser created this collection of works to seek a better understanding of what it means to be a mortal human in the year 2012.

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If the soul exists, then perhaps it is a necessary by-product of consciousness. Just as fire inevitably produces smoke, surely the conscious mind must produce an ethereal residue. It is possible that a whole host of humble non-human animals also have souls.  Hominid and Simian Souls posits that even our distant ancestors, including chimpanzees and long-extinct hominids, have had immortal souls.  The collection so far consists of the australopithecus, homo erectus, gorilla, chimpanzee, homo sapien, and neanderthal.

Click here to see how this sculpture was made.

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2011, dimensions variable (each figure is 32” tall), cast plastic, expanding foam, steel, wood, and other materials.

These two sculptures consider what might have happened to Socrates the moment after he drank the poison hemlock and died.  After criticizing the Athenian government, Socrates was put on trial and eventually sentenced to death for not believing in the gods of the city and for corrupting the youth.  While Socrates was in a prison cell awaiting his execution, he had a series of discussions with his friends and students in which he argued for a permanent human soul. In his final argument, he explained that all physical entities are caused by unchanging immaterial Forms, and we will all transcend death through our participation in these eternal Forms.  Socrates saw death not as an event to be feared, but as a liberation of the soul from “the prison house of the body”.

Socrates’ propositions stand in contrast with the strictly materialistic explanations articulated by the Epicureans, who lived in Greece soon after him. The Epicureans also argued that death should not be feared, but they reasoned that “death is nothing” precisely because of our strictly physical nature—since all sensory perception and all conscious awareness ends at the moment death, there will be no pain and no feeling of loss.  Their famous epitaph was: Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo (I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care)

We will each inevitably face death at some point, and there is no shortage of competing explanations for what will happen afterward.  These two depictions of Socrates are meant to encapsulate the uncertainty and the variety of possible futures (or non-futures) that one faces at the moment of crossing the uncertain divide.

Click here to see how this sculpture was made.

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This is a collection of in-progress images of Hominid and Simian Souls. Click here to view the finished work.

Process image from the making of Become the Gorilla, created at Allegheny College in 2011 during 8-Hour Projects.

Science can tell us quite a bit about gorilla behavior, but very little about the gorilla’s firsthand subjective experience of the world.  The methods of science can’t effectively address the problem of phenomenal consciousness.  This problem serves as a point of departure for a couple of performance-based projects that compare gorilla and human consciousness.

In Become the Gorilla (a project that I recently conducted at Allegheny College) gallery visitors were invited to watch and commit to memory a video of a gorilla behaving in a human-like way.  Each participant then dressed in a gorilla costume and re-performed the scene as accurately as possible, attempting to take on the mind of the gorilla. This process was filmed and then displayed during the exhibition.

Still from Simon and Simian Sentience, 2011, video, running time: 2 minutes and 45 seconds

Simon and Simian Sentience was an earlier and more narrative video project that considered whether a gorilla might be capable of feeling existential dread.  Gorillas seem to feel emotions like embarrassment and sadness, and they are capable of thinking about the past and future, so they might also be able to contemplate their own eventual demise.  In this video, by repeatedly losing at the game of Simon, the gorilla realizes that all things eventually come to an end: games, and even life itself.

I’ve been incorporating performance and participatory aspects into my larger body of work in order to implicate the viewer.  This invites the unexpected, and allows the collective intelligence of the viewers to enhance the work’s meaning.

Click here to watch the video on Vimeo

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This is a collection of in-progress images of The Two Deaths of Socrates. Click here to view the finished work.

2012, series of seven prints created digitally with Rhino 3-D and rendered with Flamingo.

A film called Short Circuit was made in the 1980s in which a military robot named Johnny5 gained consciousness after being struck by lightning, and consequently, he also acquired a fear of being “disassembled”.  Johnny 5’s story made me think about the forms of artificial intelligence being developed by real world scientists, and caused me to wonder how similar these forms of intelligence may be to the human mind. As an example, you may have heard of IBM’s Watson, who handily defeated two human champions in a game of Jeopardy.

Is Watson’s consciousness just a lifeless sequence of ones and zeros? Or, is there some animating metaphysical presence at work in his intelligence?  Are humans qualitatively different from Watson and Johnny 5?  Or, are we simply highly advanced computational machines?

In this project I entertain the possibility that an advanced form of artificial intelligence might have the capacity to consider its own inner workings and muse about the significance of its own existence.  In my own life, I’ve found that my most profound questions have emerged during moments of quiet solitude, most often during the mundane aspects of my routine, and I figure that it would be the same for Johnny5.  I created a replica of Johnny5 on the computer and then placed him in various digitally-generated mundane situations.  This series of photographs is meant to convey a narrative about the robot’s comprehension of death and the distinction between human and machine consciousness.

Click here to see a quick video of the 3-D model.

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The vulture pictured above is a virtual model that I created with a program called Rhino 3-D.  When this sculpture is complete it will exist in real space and intermittently flap its wings, move its head and beak, and periodically let out a shrill cry.

Some of the vulture’s parts will be made with a rapid prototype printer and some with a CNC router.  I’m collaborating with a small team: Steven Shooter–a mechanical engineer, Joe Hass–an electrical engineer, and Aurimas Liutikas–a computer science grad student.  Steven is currently working on the mechatronics that will enable the bird to move about.  Once we have put all of the vulture’s physical components in place, Joe, Aurimas, and I will work to program the microcontroller Arduino “brain” so that the motors will actuate at fixed intervals.

Just as an individual person’s existence must eventually come to an end, it seems likely that human-kind too will eventually cease to be.  Looking at the fossil record isn’t terribly reassuring; there are a prodigious number of creatures that used to exist, but are no more. When one pauses to consider the array of events that could interrupt humans’ heyday, it’s a bit surprising that we’ve lasted this long.  At any moment, our planet could be struck by a gargantuan asteroid that would turn our skies black and create megatsunamis thousands of meters high–effortlessly leveling all of our human constructions. Or we could become victims of our own innovation by a gradual extinction through the effects of global warming, or a more immediate annihilation through biological warfare or a global nuclear meltdown. Or, as is supposed by some religious doctrines, we could be done in by a supernatural intervention of some sort.   This list of festive grand finales could go on an on, but this short one is probably sufficient to remind one that we are fortunate to be in existence at all today.

While a typical cuckoo clock cheerfully demarcates the forward progression of time, this vulture clock will measure a countdown to the eventual demise of humanity.  Such a sinister responsibility couldn’t possibly be assigned to the benign cuckoo, and so the vulture will serve as a stand-in, measuring the progression of time not with melodic cooing, but with shrill screeching, with the flapping of its ominous wings, and with the brandishing of its awful hooked beak.

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2010, dimensions variable, fabric, motors, translucent paper, and other materials.

“Plato claimed that reasoning about geometric objects trains the mind for the more difficult task of ascending to knowledge of what he called ‘The Good’… [He believed that] the errors of the senses must be corrected by concentrated thought, which is best learned by studying mathematics. Plato maintained that these ideal [geometric] figures not only exist in our imaginations but also exist in a world of perfect ideas, of universal eternal truths.” —from Euclid’s Geometry

This work is a visual-mechanical contemplation on the tension that exists between our concepts of the world and the world itself—between what we think we know, and what is—between the known and the unknown. Light is cast through the geometric diagrams, projecting onto the cloud in the same way that we project our concepts of the world onto our experience of it. Not only is the cloud three-dimensional, but it also remains in a constant state of flux; the cloud is a metaphor for the dynamic and puzzling chaos that Plato may have struggled with.

Click here to watch the video on Vimeo

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