It’s all there in the title, basically. “Experiments in Galvanism” is an art installation that consists of tank of mineral oil containing a dead frog … which has been rigged up with a miniature webserver, so that you can control the twitching of its limbs from anywhere in the world. [BoingBoing]
This somewhat disgusts me. Part of my mind keeps conjuring up a “koerperwelten” variant on this theme; a convicted chinese woman, bluewhite, sunk in a 2500 gallon tank filled with mineral oil, her skull and pine meticulously opened up, electrodes lining her pharmeutically pigmented neural tissue, teenagers pressing a series of 48 buttons, making her limbs spasmodicly twitch in real time in concert with the keystrokes in some decadent rich westerner home somewhere, “cannibal corpse” playing in the background.
Isn’t there a scene in AniMatrix where artificial intelligences do the same with defeated humanity?
This is not Galvanism. You can clearly see 2 small remote control servos doing all the work. Galvanism is using an electical charge to cause living muscles to contract.
Dagon, you’ve got one hell of a dark imagination there, my friend!
theMage, I think the use of the word Galvanism is more to do with the reference to history that the piece is making, rather than an accurate scientific description of the process. Then again, it’s modern art, so who can tell? 🙂
The Loopy Dance