New Collaborative Review is launched : now, the sheep is a very special skua

Museum of the Essential and Beyond That
The second Collaborative Review is launched!
Guest Artist: Millie Niss - USA

To see the texts below with images browser at:
http://arteonline.arq.br/newsletter/reviews2005/english_niss.htm

1- BIO AND INFORMATION:

ENGLISH:

1- BIO AND INFORMATION:

Millie Niss was born in New York City, USA, but moved to France at the age of two months, and has grown up bilingual French/English. She returned to the USA at age 2 1/2, then spent summers in France. Later, she spent a year doing her last year of French lycee, where she obtained her baccalaureat C (in math & physics) in 1990. Millie then went on to study math at Columbia University in New York City, obtaining a BA in math in 1993 with magna cum laude and admission to Phi Beta Kappa. She spent the next two years studying for a doctorate in mathematics at Brown University in Providence, RI, USA,
but had to quit due to illness. Later, she did a year of graduate school in creative writing at Emerson College in Boston, MA, USA, but also had to leave before finishing.

Millie started programming computers when her father bought a Commodore VIC-20 ( http://www.myoldcomputers.com/museum/comp/vic20.htm ) in 1983. This was a computer ( http://www.arteonline.arq.br/museu/attic/millie/vic.html ) with a whole 4K (!!) of RAM and it worked on your television, with only 20 characters on a line… Millie (then age 8) and her father learned BASIC together using the VIC, and later they both moved on to machine language (6502 Assembler). Their biggest project together was re writing the word processor for the Commodor 64 (a slightly more powerful similar computer), at first just to add French accented characters, then to add many more features.

Millie has been making web-based computer art since 2000, when she discovered Flash and HTML. Her work has been published on wordcircuits.com, bannerart.org, Rhizomes/hyperrhiz, The Museum of the Essential and Beyond That, trAce, thirdplacegallery.org, and others. A list of her publications on the web is at http://www.sporkworld.org/webpub.html. Since 2001, Millie has been maintaining her website http://www.sporkworld.org, which focuses on web art and poetry (although the poetry on it is old). Themes of work on Sporkworld include cities (especially New York), mental illness, contemporary poetry, politics, and more. Millie presented a workshop on Sound Poetry in Flash in 2004 at the trAce Online Writing Centre's Incubation3 Symposium in Nottingham, England. In 2004, a drawing from one of her animations appeared in Rachel Greene's Book -Internet Art - in Thames & Hudson publisher's "World of Art" series.

Millie also enjoys writing poetry and prose, and her poems and articles have been published widely online and some in print, including in The Buffalo News, Artvoice, The New York Times, Friends' Journal, New York City Voices (print), and futhertxt.org, unlikelystories.org, Beehive, poetz.com, Big Bridge, sidereality, poetrysz, m.a.g., and others (online). She loves to read poetry and novels, especially contemporary experimental works and some classics, and enjoys literature which is postmodern and does not make sense and/or is written in nonstandard styles. Millie is also very interested in science, medicine, mathematics, and computer science, and likes to base her work on scientific and technical ideas and algorithms.

2- WORK (s):

Spork, the Schizophrenic Skua

At the Museum of the Essential and Beyond That:

Spork's Toilet (http://www.arteonline.arq.br/museu/bathroom/toilet.html) >
It is one of the bathrooms
(http://www.arteonline.arq.br/museu/bathroom/index.htm) of the museum.


To learn more about Spork:

The Spork Web Site by Millie Niss

http://www.sporkworld.org/spork/

Spork the Schizophrenic Skua (http://www.sporkworld.org/spork/skua.html)* is a cartoon bird created by Millie Niss to critique the way (U.S.) society treats people with mental illness. The Spork cartoons are also meant to evoke the literary theme of the Absurd, and to touch on other sociopolitical themes (for example the theme of racism is addressed through Spork's status as a bird in a human-dominated society).

The character Spork is a skua (a kind of arctic bird) who has the illness of schizophrenia, a mental disease which causes people to hear voices which aren't real and to have delusions (false beliefs about reality, often of a paranoid nature). The first Spork cartoon strip (in The Spork York Times http://www.sporkworld.org/spork/sporkread.html ) illustrates Spork's illness and society's response to it. In the world of the Spork cartoons, Spork is genuinely ill and suffers from his illness. The site's critique of the mental health system is not based on the Szaszian idea (see the wrong-headed book by Thomas Szasz, "The Myth of Mental Illness") that mental illness does not exist or that it is a social construct which oppresses people by labelling them as ill. Spork actually has psychotic symptoms, caused by a brain disease. But the System's response to Spork's illness is oppressive and Absurd.

The representatives of the System do not see Spork for who he really is (on a basic level, they cannot see that he really is a bird and they think he is acting crazy when he acts like a bird), they lock him in nasty hospitals and they try to control his life by manipulating government benefits and pushing him to participate in stupid treatment programs and take harmful drugs. However, the viewpoint of the site does not disapprove of psychotropic medications in general, it merely emphasizes that they can be harmful and that doctors should pay attention to the dangers of drugs.) The System is represented in the cartoon world through the person of Miss Meddling, who reappears in many roles: social worker, nurse, case manager, etc. Any time Spork must be "treated" and controlled by a mental health worker who is not a doctor, that worker will be Miss Meddling. (The name Miss Meddling was suggested to Millie Niss by a patient in a mental health residential treatment center where Millie worked as a counselor.)Spork is much more than his illness, as all mentally ill people are, and he is portrayed as an intelligent and talented bird, whose particular interest is computer security. The System sees Spork only as disabled and fails to recognize his worth.

The heart of the Spork site is the cartoons (and secondarily, the articles) in The Spork York Times. Try clicking on various words in the headlines of The Spork York Times, the articles, and the cartoons. These tell the basic story of Spork's Adventures. The pages on Spork's Living Room, Miss Meddling, and Peter Pong the Bipolar Pelican provide background information. Spork's childhood history is told on the page "Spork's History"( http://www.sporkworld.org/spork/origins.html ) It explains where Spork came from and describes the onset of his illness, which had both biological and psychological causes.

Millie Niss has experimented with creating Spork merchandise, hence the
forthcoming Spork Store. She has made and sold notecards with the Spork
cartoon adventures printed on them, Spork T Shirts, refrigerator magnets, and more. The merchandising aspect of Spork was intended as a semi-ironic and semi-real example of transforming art into merchandise.


* Any of several Arctic and Boreal sea birds of the genus Stercorarius that harass smaller birds and snatch the food they drop.

http://www.sporkworld.org/spork/skua.html

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Regina Celia Pinto

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