Jennifer Kanary Nikolova studied fashion from 1994-1998 before graduating with the first roomforthoughts from the fine arts department at the Art Academy of Maastricht in 2000. She continued with a Masters education at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam graduating in 2002. She was then invited to participate in the first experimental curator course initiated by the University of Amsterdam and the Sandberg Institute, along with three other artists and four art historians. Together they created the exhibition Interscape that was presented in 2004 at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam. She has participated in a number of international solo and group exhibitions. She recently opened the Dutch transgender film festival with an undercover performance and is currently in an art project that researches the implementation of thoughts on self identity with young children. Jennifer’s installations research all aspects of the physics of thought.
“I’m a bad girl, I’m a bad girl, I’m a bad girl…” what effect does such a thought have on my behaviour? Is a thought that is re-emitted a cloned copy of a first thought? What effect does it have on my brain, my body, my actions? Movies like “What the Bleep do We Know” (www.whatthebleep.com) speculate on how if I think I am fat (even if I am thin), my brain will reconfigure it's neurons and I will actually become fat. Giving thought the power to create a different reality. Do I actually become a bad girl, by thinking it? How come this reality does not change overnight? Is it the slow repetition of a thought? Like a virus that spreads? How many cloned thoughts does it take to shift a part of my physical reality? Are there other factors involved such as time intervals between thoughts or materialised action? If I think I am bad and then I think I am good, am I then balanced? Though the opinions were very diverse on the science behind “What the Bleep”, it is not completely without truth as we all know mind over matter placebos.
A really interesting new field is Epigenetics. This is the study of heritable changes in gene function that occur without a change in the sequence of nuclear DNA. Epigenetics studies the transfer of information between cells, but also between organisms. In this way, gene functions change without the DNA being the cause of this change. “There must be an additional layer of information”, as prof. dr. M.M.S. van Lohuizen said during the Riddle of Information Lecture Series, Paradiso, Amsterdam. Prof. van Lohuizen researched how young mice transferred to a mother with different grooming behaviour would pass on new behaviour to all generations to come, making it genetic. Returning mice from these passed generations to a mother with the former grooming behaviour recreated the initial genetics and again the old behaviour was passed on. My question is: Do my thoughts infiltrate the biochemistry of my body, affecting my genes? Was my ‘good girl complex’ carried by the behaviour of generations before it became part of my programme? How to ever delete this software?
The
art project at kloone4000 with scientist Annemarie
Estor
From
the ceiling I have hung a thought (www.roomforthoughts.com),
shaped in the form of an abstracted good-girl figure bowing her head.
A three-dimensional line drawing, the line made of thin fragile black
lace that is shaped by ‘sowing’ it to the ceiling. The spiral
shape and the repetition represent the layers of time, every second a
new dimension, every second a chance to re-alter the activation of my
genes. The black lace can be seen as the symbol of lust and mourning.
The underlying addiction I covet yet want to kill. The lines holding the
thought represent the connections that sustain it. How to mutate this
thought? At first the (unborn) thought hangs from the ceiling in a line
defining the space the thoughts are to slowly grow in. Then while a viewer
can watch I have shaped this thought and attempted to clone it, by copying
my own actions. In the end I have cut the threads loose. Would this be
a step forward altering my behaviour?
Jennifer Kanary and scientist Annemarie Estor started their collaboration in the summer of 2005. Both are interested in the nature of thoughts, the fabric of the self, the material nature of spirituality, and the value of art - Kanary as an artist, and Estor as a humanities scholar. Can the value of art be measured? And if art produces knowledge, then, what kind of knowledge is that? Is it different from scientific knowledge? ‘Cloned thought’ is the first part of a continuing multidisciplinary experiment, investigating the questions above.
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