Kut Culture - Blood Simple by Paul D. Miller Repohistory's Recombinant art of transfusions and truisms on the Web takes aim at the core of the world market for blood in Manhattan. Check the flow. "The story of blood is one of metapmorphosis, of a liquid that became symbolically transformed as society learned how to deconstruct and manage itS." Douglas Starr tells us in his classic tome on the history of blood in the collection of essays entitled simply "Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce." As a substance that lies at the heart of all that we consider human, it's a fascinating metaphor for how much we are alienated from our hyper-abstracted technologically mediated selves in the information age of mass culture and astronomical numbers. 6 Billion souls on this third stone from the sun and we still have a long way to go to understand how much this red ichor of our selves truly reflects how we view the contemporary body. Starr's history of blood and human essence weaves a telling tale of how we have changed under the impact of technology - it's become a concrete symbol of the exchanges and transfusions that underly contemporary culture's exponential abstraction of individuality and personal identity: "it's a measure of the symbolic power of blood that the first transfusions were used to treat not blood loss or anemia but insanity," he tells us, and in our day and age, well, the rest is, as the common cliche goes in this age of large numbers, bloodless. Repohistory, (www.repogistory.org) a digital art collective of theoreticians and artists who usually work within the semiotic framework of the urban context with stuff like signs and mass mailings, decided to take on these kinds of issues with an internet based critique of the market forces at work in the flow of blood through Manhattan in a project aptly titled "Circulation" to bring back some kind of physicality to the cycle of art and artifice in the world of international finance that, for Starr, could be a flow chart of contemporary blood flows. Conceived and coordinated by a team of people as diverse as the material they create, Repohistory's core crew - Cynthia Liesenfeld (web master), Sharon Denning, (Technical Director), , David Sansone (designer and programmer) and Russet Lederman (production and design) - worked with Greg Sholette who conceived and directed the project, and Jim Costanzo who acts as jack of all trades web maestro for Repohistory in general. "Circulation" is a kind of corpus delecti that embraces everything from student tales of blood being sold for yarn and thread through to determining the price of blood in comparison with oil. On the open market in Manhattan, for example, blood retails for somewhere between $150-200 per unit, and in 1998, the combined value of whole blood products and plasma was in the range of $18.5 billion. Utilizing these "additive" story elements culled from the traffic on their website, Metrocards, and a host of other "narrative exchange" devices, the Repohistory gang weave together a series of eerie and hauntingly fetching resonances between blood and commerce, mapping a new way to look the human condition (www.thebleedingedge.org). But the historic precedents are just as intriguing. In 1776, in his groundbreaking book Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith presented the notion of money as an abstraction of blood flowing through the arterial circuits of the nations of the world. Even earlier, David Harvey described the flow of blood as a "mechanikal process," in his 1628 tome Anatomical Essay on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals. The image has remained an invisible and all pervasive abstraction inscribed on the ever-changing digital ramparts of contemporary culture. It has been said that money is time, but time is definitely not money. If the way commodities flow through contemporary culture is any indication, the routes money moves through as it pumps its way around the body electric, is almost parallel to the processes Harvey described so long ago. As an art project, "Circulation" is an open system that can absorb almost any offering, and many artists have added their voice to the chorus of masks and tasks that Repohistory has woven out of the project. In the process of creating a collaborative project with blood as a core metaphor for artistic production the Repohistory artists used Manhattan as a central nodal point in the global banking system and came up with some wild interpretations of the role this character called "Blood" plays in the arteries and conduits the make up the body we call the world stage. With Repohistory, all offerings are accepted - add your elements to the mix and join the flow. When you trace the pathways of commerce in contemporary culture, the routes the information takes you through can be just as interesting as the end destination - and if history is a playground for the well informed these days, that's the enlightening aspect of the project - like-minded artists collectives - General Idea (who sold sock certificates as art a couple of decades ago) and Etoy have been using a similar premise - control of physical space and the movement of ideas all loop and reinforce the notion of circulation in the social body of contemporary techno-culture. It's about art as an utterly malleable, infinitely additive process. Back in 1795 the earliest known illustrated stock certificate in America was issued for the Philadelphia and Lancaster Turnpike (the first toll road in the United States). It featured a shocking development for the time period that reminds me of the Repohistory viewpoint. On the certificate a vignette of a cart being pulled by horses down a road to a gate intricately was inscribed on vellum to foil counterfeiters, and this separated this piece of paper from all the other certificates at the time and opened a floodgate of what was then the bloodlines of the "new economy": roads. As with Repohistory, when you combine images and economics, the route you move through seems to be intimately linked with commerceS. And it's what makes writing about the topic so intriguing. Where to begin? Where to end? Toll roads? River passage taxes? Railroad lotteries? The urban landscape, in a Repohistory perspective, sphinx-like, looks back at us and asks an unaswerable question. At the end of the process you realize it isn't the actual conditions of the transactions that mean as much as the numbers they convey. When al-Khow=rizm‰ (circa 825 A.D.) came up with the title "al-jabr w'al muq=balah" to describe his market mathematics, he used it as a song to guide his students, so the story goes, in order that they could sing the praises of Allah at the market and make transactions all the more quickly - a great example of mnemonics done old school style. It wasn't until the term derived through Fibonacci around two hundred years later into the system we call "algebra," - and whose name is the root for "algorithm," came into effect though. For al-Khow=rizm‰, the mathematics became verse and acted as a linguistic device to describe the flow of numbers in the markets of the East. Metaphorically speaking, for Repohistory, it's the process of recombination and textual migration - website, subway fare cards, web projects - that make the resonance of using the net as a generative site for explorations in the world of blood in the circulation patterns of the "real world" counts most. The numbers are in the blood. In a world of more than six billion people, where heart transplants, cross-species organ donations as an experimental context for , and the "recombinant body" are becoming the norm of how humans deal with the migration of the physical into the abstract, a new kind of exchange is at hand. Imagine waking up one day in the middle of a scene from Jean Cocteau's 1930 film, Blood of a Poet, and seeing the amount of stories in the blood banks of Manhattan, and you might have a better picture of the Repohistory view of contemporary artistic production. In Cocteau's film, the main character sees a Venus-like statue that is simultaneously both flesh and marble. The statue speaks to the film's hero, and instructs him to make a leap through a looking glass into a strange, surreal world where the laws of probability are suspended and the visionary reigns supreme. On the other side of the looking glass, the images are made of "elements" that are fluidly transposable - De Sade, Dali, Ernst, Picasso and others - all blur together to form a river of images in the young poets mind - a metaphor for the blood coursing through his head as he moves through the reflections. On the reverse side of the looking glass a whirling cyclone series of disturbing scenes that derive their basis from the drug addled reveries of Cocteau's mind make up the main character's reverie. Actor and director, real and unreal, in the film, all certainty, all distinctions between borders - it's all a blur, a techo-hallucination of all encompassing proportions. A really heavy situation. On returning from this disturbing world, the poet attacks his muse, smashing the statue into a thousands of tiny fragments in a frenzy of despair -the transfusion of realities left him unable to cope with the world the muse offered, and the doorway to the world of dreams is closed to his entry. For us, living in a world of "Circulation" - numbers no longer are physically abstract. For Repohistory, like the poet of Cocteau's film, the ideas are in the blood - the circulation project remixes the way we think about how numbers and bodies relate to one another. There's a great phrase Martin Luther King came up with when he was asked about computers that echoes this situation. The candor of his response resonates with some of the best and worst of the "new economy:" "Mammoth productive facilities with computer mindsS" said King. "Gargantuan industry and government, woven into an intricate computer mechanism, leave the person outsideS man becomes separated and diminishedS democracy is emptiedS this process produces alienation - perhaps the most pervasive and insidious development in contemporary society." Communion without communication; transubstantiation without transit; circulation with no circuits; human beings meshed in a strange web of thoughts and actions divorced from anything remotely human - to improve the flow, perhaps we could all learn a thing from Repohistory's art made of collective enterprise. It would seem that the blood flowing through all the blood banks of Manhattan would keep us all in a world where we can say, like the old adage taken from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass - "so what if I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes." Who is who in a world where almost all aspects of human existence can be sampled and re-distributed? This is what Repohistory asks us with "Circulation." As with Cocteau's "Blood of a Poet" the information is in our minds - human essence is what holds it all together: roots and routes, stories and storage, codes and modes, in the world of numbers, it all just flows.