(in)AUTHENTIC

(in)AUTHENTIC (2008)

Sonya Rapoport, Content

Robert Edgar, Memory Theatre

Director/Lingo

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NOTE: The latest Macintosh Shockwave plug-in broke the online Director audio files for (in)authentic. 

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Notes by Sonya Rapoport on (in)AUTHENTIC:

“It was probably in 1999 that I was introduced to French feminist Luce Irigaray’s critical writings. They inspired me to consider the female as a displaced person. My previous art projects had come from the perspective of masculine emulation of feminine attributes.

“For my new adventure I copied excerpts of Irigaray’s criticism of the Freudian castration dogma, a psychoanalytic theory that presumes the female to be an aborted male. I then contrived a dialogic exchange between Irigaray and Freud by transferring the Freudian quotations that Irigaray had used in her chapters and gave Freud back his own voice, free from Irigaray’s sentences .The text had been extracted from Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman. During the same time period I was reading Jean-Paul Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew. I roguishly threw him into the contentious pool as the third author to participate in the discussion. Other than both books having French origin, they are very different.

“About eight years later, I returned to the work to incorporate the material into a more complex net artwork. On the worktable before me lay a collage of printed text that was comprised of ten sets of a terse interchange among the three authors.

“I had tried to keep the original sentences intact with minimal editing while at the same time I was selecting passages for their logical associations between woman and Jew. I had intuitively extracted a common denominator of displacement/outsider. A year or so later, after I had accrued an array of images that related to the concept of (in)AUTHENTIC, electronic artist Robert Edgar and I collaborated to create an interactive website that builds itself while you watch it… We selected and categorized images, texts and vocalizations, and loaded them into the engine of the memory theatre. The text is read in English by German and French natives.”