Medusae Resignified: Narrative Strategies in Dorothy Cross' Work

Leonida Kovač, “Medusae Resignified: Narrative Strategies in Dorothy Cross’ Work”, paper presented on the XLIIIrd AICA Congress in Dublin, in 2009. The theme of the Congress was The Relations between Art and Science: complicity, criticality, knowledge.

 

At the begging I will quote few sentences uttered by one of three narrators in the video work Medusae by Dorothy and Tom Cross released in 2003.

The problem with box jellyfish is that they have very complicated eyes, as complicated as our eyes. We wonder then how they’re processing the signals from these eyes, without having a brain. They can see clearly, but then we don’t know what processing power, how big a computer is back there to handle the image, and what they do with it. We know for example that they appear to see dark pier pilings and avoid them, they swim more or less up to a human and swim around it or swim away because it is too big to eat.

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