Anthony Aziz and Sammy Cucher

Aziz + Cucher have been collaborating on and exhibiting digital photography projects and sculpture since 1991. They live and work in Brooklyn, New York. Anthony Aziz began with an interest in documentaries and photograpy, while Sammy Cucher's work originated in theatre and video.

Their collaborative interest is in "creating visual metaphors for the increasing role that new technologies play in our lives and how they affect us politically, socially, and psychologically."[1] They explore the possibilities for human beings in a time when we can transform ourselves and nature from "known forms into unknown forms" as a result of the potential inherent in the coming together of computer science, biotechnology, genetics and nanotechnology.[3]

In a recent interview they speak of their focus on the fabricated/fictional quality as well as the documentary/real.

"If you look at an object and you look at a photograph of the object, you’re looking at a translation, and it is this area of translation or transformation that we are after. ...It is the fact that these images are an illusion that is reinforced by the conventions of photographic realism that interests us. Photography has this veracity to it; the sense of documentation of a reality yet the reality we present is utterly an illusion. "[4]

Some ideas central to their work are:

• New technologies allow human beings to create biological forms, which then introduces aesthetics as a component in biology and evolution. This aesthetization of biology then links it to art and raises questions about the implications for evolution.
• The relationship between nature and metaphor and the ways in which "Reality (Nature) and Metaphor generate each other, then supersede each other to be created anew." They are thinking about the ways in which the manipulation of nature through genetics and at the atomic level eliminates the need for representation and makes metaphor unnecessary. They propose this as a spiral of metamorphosis from known to unknown.

Interior #5, 1999

Additional works:

Work from Dystopia:

Work from Chimera:

Excerpts from a dialog about the Chimera images from a recent interview[4]:

TNG: Thyrza Nichols Goodeve

C: Sammy Cucher

A: Anthony Aziz

TNG: Does this also pertain to the chimeras? Although superficially they might look abject, these images seem to be about something coming into existence, rather than deteriorating; some kind of transformation.

C: I think you’re right. It’s not about decay, it’s about birth. Birth of a new form, of a new possibility that might be awful but we don’t yet know. We say we’re working in a post-Benjamin kind of aesthetic in the sense that we’re pondering the possibility of a new aura. Where the age of mechanical reproduction introduced the loss of the aura according to Benjamin, the age of biotechnical reproduction offers the production of a new kind of aura.

TNG: In terms of the current work’s relationship to the body, I think of Deleuze’s notion of "the body without organs" that was so influential in the late 80s and early 90sbecuase your chimeras are really organs without the body, aren’t they?

A: Yes, they are all the organs that didn’t find a body!

And another exchange...

A: Yes. Because these pieces are made within the context of the crossover between the biological and the biotechnological that is currently taking place. That’s why we chose the title, Chimera, the mythical creature made from the forepart of a lion, the hind part of a dragon, and a middle formed from a goat.

TNG: A crossover which is producing a new notion of the uncanny based in what we can call the biotechnological unconscious. And you are ambivalent about this?

C: Yes, we experience the new biotechnological reality as both something comforting and disconcerting.

References