KIT

AUTOSKINNING : PASSIVE
ABDUCTION
No. 2

KIT is a composite, a creature which, like one of Felix Guattari's machinic
assemblages, incorporates the organic and the inorganic, the subjective,
technical, social and psychic, to produce new subjectivities which act in
singular ways.(i) Parasitic, it feeds upon the underbellies of globalising
systems. It suspends itself from the purlins and dwangs of non-places,
exploring crevices left by the imperfect annealings of cyber-dominant
functions. It revels in thwarted ecstasies and expiring dystopias. Like the |
DNA-shifting function of the HIV virus, which moves along a strand to
disenable, almost inadvertently, its host, KIT's displaced logics force
paradigm shifts, of value if not of cognition. Exploring alternate ecologies,
the biochemist James Lovelock's logic found a Gaia whose ethical
modalities depended solely upon the balance of chemical elements in the
atmosphere. Similarly, KITs projects deconstruct (in its classic sense)
globalisation's systems, yielding progeny that unmask them by returning to
them instances of inadvertence and experience. xWe are part of a global
collective who seek to reintegrate the body into the material matrix.'(2)
Autoskinning : Passive Abduction No.l archives the way in which a car's
safety systems default to the logic that a car must become obsolescent.
KIT's black humour unpicks the ethic of the automobile safety regulatory

systems. Care, here is after the fact; the car and its systems are

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unnatural-born killers, their natural progeny newer and faster cars anpl the
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detritus of their passing. The project began with the proposition thattferms
altered by impact might offer a new methodology: Impact art'. So car
crashes are seen from the point of view of the car's internal skins, its^s
covers and its lungs, the air-bags. While they signify safety, air-p
may now switch them off, after estimating the relativgj]ra6aBnities of
being poisoned, suffocated or impaled. AirMg and seat-belt casings here
provide mouth, lung and limb function for chrysalid forms that twitch and
jerk in an enduring death-in-life. Their bodies are made from seat covers
that have incorporated their inhabitants' genetic material, to a greater or
lesser degree. These objects are beautifully crafted from the indexical
traces of events whose relation to such globalising assemblages as petrol
companies force us to recognise that somewhere there is an ill match
between system and subject. The driver it seems manifests more passivitythan control.
Recently, DRIVE, power>progress<desire, at the Govett-Brewster Art
Gallery in New Plymouth, New Zealand, took the fast lane, its catalogue
cover a detail from David Noonan's M3 (1998): headlights converging into

a girl's face at a point somewhere above her molars.(3) The image's stilled
antithesis, Charles Ray's Unpainted Sculpture (1997), which reconstituted a facsimjjg^
of a wreck in which a woman had died, was quickly framed as a
memorial/monument for the famously crashed. Again and again, images of cars and
highways offer conflicted visions of possibility and enclosure, duration and the
ever-possible final cathartic moment. As Giovanni Intra points out, instead of
catharsis, there is either death or an enduring disability.^)
KIT's approach to road kill is consistent with their wider practice, which combines
imitation and resistance, in a parodic subaltern strategy. Globalising programmes
ignore specificities, of individual life or of location. The autopo^
inevitably clash with such conceptualisations/seeing them as intersticesTrPEo^wfTiCh"
they may insinuate destabilising practices. $trbj€ctiviti£s^Qf different orders develop,
lived in those other non-places of cyber-space, the video monitor and the CD-Rom;
or that privileged space, the art gallery. Like corporate bodies, KIT operates as an
entity without individual faces, anonymous and genderless. A meta-contract,
between art-event and viewer, recuperates the anonymity of such environments, but
remains contained within the subjectivities of art.
KIT's Greylands (1999) asked web site viewers to design houses for themselves
upon LeBreton Flats, in Ottowa, Canada. This polluted expanse has been grassed

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over, a 'green7 place in urban space. KIT were represented as housing

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developers in an onsite porta-cabin. Participants were given an index of
the toxins present in the site they had chosen (this type of letting of
information almost closed the project down) and were asked to use them
productively: to become complicit with them. A klutzy robot disguised as a
ride-on lawnmower and programmed using Global Positioning Satellite
systems drew the plans onto the surveyed sites, tracing awkward
interfaces between the virtual, the ideal and the actual. For these
hearth-designing participants, asked to imagine and display their private
lives as they might be played out in a toxic waste site, \t)he very body of
the connected witness happens to be the ultimate urban territory, a folding
back over the animal body of social organization and of a conditioning
previously limited to the core of the old city. In bodily terms, it resembles
the core of the old familial hearth/(5)
KITs strange progeny love places in which deaths-by-hypertechr|ology arte
rationalised and ordered. Black Boxes provided sound-tracks for |he
CO.T.I.S. (Cult of the Inserter Seat) works, such as that in whicrP"
participants agree to be locked in a black container for ten minutes while
the last sounds of air-crew and passengers echo around them.

".... CO. 7.IS exposes the closed-circuit of mediated mourning, along with the silent satellite
witnesses of cathode addiction. The medium may well be the message, but the messengen

Autoskinning:

Passive Abduction

No.2

Canberra Contemporary Art Space,
June 9th-July 21st 2001, Canberra, Australia

moves more swiftly when there is the scent of blood and smoke in the air."(6)
In Autoskinning : Passive Abduction No 1, KITs parody of the speed-desire-death equation

All photographs from
Autoskinning:

employs a carnivalesque-subaltern logic, as it both mimics and subverts, doubling submission

Passive Abduction

No.l

at The Blue Oyster Gallery, New Zealand 2001. Mixed media

with resistance. Within the semiotic flux of art, the abject names some limitations of its own^

Bridie Lonie

Photographs:
Design:

Alan Dove
Beewoo & Chubby Digit Design

KIT URL
Contact

- http://members.tripod.com/~webkit/
- kitco@visto.com

CCAS URL

- www.ccas.com.au

notes:
1. Felix Guattari, chaosmosis, an ethico-aesthetic paradigm, Power Press, Sydney, 1995
2. Dominic Pettman CO.T.I.S. review, http://members.tripod.com/~webkit/
3. Greg Burke, Hanna Scott, Drive/power>progress>desire, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery,
New Plymouth, 2000

This project has been supported by The British Council and the North West Arts Board and
the Canberra School of Art Textiles Workshop.
CCAS is supported by the ACT Government through its Cultural Council and
the Australia Council, the Federal Government's arts funding and advisory body
CCAS is sponsored by Goanna Print Pty Ltd and CyberOne.

4. Giovanni Intra, 'Too autopoietic to drive", pp 62-71, in Burke and Hanna,
Drive, power>progress>desire

ISBN 1 875526 68 4

5. Paul Virilio "The Third Interval: A Critical Transition." In Re-thinking Technologies,
Chapter 1. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1993
6. Dominic Pettman, CO.T.I.S. - The Art of the Accident (1998) Published-byJ^AI / V2 Organisation

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