matthewsloly.com/morph_pump.html Home | CV | Links | Contact Morpholigocal Pump 1995, Video-loop, 2 second cycle, dimensions variable, collection of the NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA (Click image to view QuickTime movie) Morph Pump is an ambiguity engine. Produced from video stills taken from a book of my drawings, an ambiguous genital form, having the potential to be read as either phallic or vulvic, is morphed from an up-pointing position to a down-pointing position, giving the impression of a transformation, but this transformation is not fundamental, only positional, and thus relevant to, and contingent upon, the viewer's point of view and state of mind (ie. whether it is first read as a phallus or vulva, and/or convex or concave). By so doing, this pump keeps the viewer's recognition circulating, without allowing it to come to rest, so as to obviate the role of the one who recognizes the work (or rather the elusion of the work) of transformation, which the morphological pump is performing. The supposedly passive/receptive viewer becomes the pump's active operator, even as the operation is upon the viewer, and thus is opened the possibility of the viewer (human) and pump (machine) being seen to be continues with each other. This piece can be interpreted as a dynamic hermaphrodite symbol, but rather, experientially, genders, or rather, more abstractly, engenderings are signified, in that through the suggestion of the mechanics sexual intercourse, there is a gestalt figuration and contradictory signification of gender, without an explicit or definitive figure of either one or other (phallic or vulvic, male or female), engendering a third (or other) more complex form of identification that remains conspicuously undisclosed throughout the apparent transformations that constitute the pump. Thus, by implication all exchange can be seen as an exchange of self - a transmutation or mutation of identity, explicitly as something fluid, continuous, and interdependent, rather than fixed, discrete, and independent, the foundation of all communication being ecstasy, not a pursuit of some particular end point, but rather, of a trans-categorical continuity, where meaning is seen to break and to be broken through, facilitating all codifications, it's essential ambiguity forming the very engine of its cognition.