Rats!!!!!!!! An evening curated by Amy Herzog, Morbid Anatomy Museum Programer in Residence.

Date: Tuesday, December 2nd
Time: 8pm
Admission: $8 ( Tickets Here )
Location: The Morbid Anatomy Museum; 424A Third Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11215

Please join us for an evening devoted to a deeper understanding of the most maligned of all rodents: as highly intelligent social animals, as exploited lab specimens, as adaptive urban dwellers, and as the screens upon which humans project their own anxieties.

Artist Kathy High will discuss her latest work, “Rat Laughter,” a concert of ultrasonic rat vocalizations for rat enjoyment. Rats communicate (like many other animals) in an audio registry that is beyond the range of human hearing. When tickled, rats make a “giggle” chirp at around 55kHz. The rat concert project will record this sound to be played to laboratory rats across the world — allowing contagious laughter to occur spontaneously.

Ethnographer and provocateur Eben Kirksey will discuss the role rats have played in his curatorial project Life in the “Age of Biotechnology,” a para-site where artists pit the logic of spectacle against itself, exposing and interrupting scientific regimes for managing and producing life. And Amy Herzog will divulge her encounters with a rat colony in gentrified North Brooklyn, as documented on reality TV. Our panelists will be joined by several very special guests.

Kathy High is an interdisciplinary artist working in the areas of technology, science, speculative fiction and art (http://kathyhigh.com/). She produces videos and installations posing queer and feminist inquiries into areas of medicine/bio-science, and animal/interspecies collaborations. She hosts bio/ecology+art workshops and is creating an urban nature center in North Troy (NATURE Lab) with media organization The Sanctuary for Independent Media. High is Professor of Video and New Media in the Department of Arts, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. She teaches documentary and experimental digital video production, history and theory, as well as biological arts.

Eben Kirksey catalyzed dialog at the Multispecies Salon as a curator, an artist, an ethnographer, and editor. He is the editor of The Multispecies Salon (Duke U, 2014), which draws together anthropologists, artists, and biological scientists to illuminate how diverse organisms are entangled in political, economic, and cultural systems. Freedom in Entangled Worlds, his first book, blends ethnographic research with indigenous parables to explore how indigenous activists from West Papua negotiate complex interdependencies (Duke U Press, 2012). Currently he holds an Australian Research Council fellowship in the Environmental Humanities program at UNSW.

Amy Herzog is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Queens College and Coordinator of the Film Studies Program at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she is a faculty member in Theatre, Music, Film, and Women’s Studies. She is the author of Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and co-editor, with Carol Vernallis and John Richardson, of The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media (Oxford, 2013). She has published essays on film and popular music, philosophy, pornography, gentrification, parasites, and dioramas. Her most recent research project explores the history of peep show arcades in Times Square, New York.