Iris Chang 1968-2004
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Friday 19 November 2004 Iris Chang - Korperwelten - Fantastic Voyage - Border Patrol Los Angeles, San Jose, The Infinite Iris Chang, 1968-2004 Last week was a busy, in many ways amazing week. But everything pales next to the surprising, sad news that Iris Chang has died at 36. Apparently she'd been struggling-with / hospitalized-for depression, and she appears to have committed suicide. She leaves a husband and a two-year-old son. On Tuesday I'd been off to that wacky Body Worlds exhibit and Thursday morning I was getting ready to head off for Humanoids 2004 when Tim's email came in. My cave-wreck-tech diving buddy Tim Bakken was, like Iris, one of the portrait subjects in my Californium series. He remembered Iris and the intensity of her work well, so when an internet news reader sent him the sad news, he forwarded it to me.  I followed Tim's weblink and read the story. Before I could be in shock, I had to be in disbelief. I'm loathe to bring in pop culture references, but I remember so clearly the death of Princess Diana. Wendy and I were at TGI Fridays eating that "nine-layer dip." When the present-to-the-point-of-invisibility TV monitors at Fridays all switched to some newsperson saying "Diana, the Princess of Wales has died," I remember my immediate response was, "no she didn't." I also recall that when a reporter asked - the now late - Richard Harris what he thought of the death of Richard Burton, Harris replied, "it's true if you want to believe it." I met Iris on Sunday 11 July 1999 in San Diego. Her second book, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, had been published two years earlier and she'd recently begun work on her third: The Chinese in America: A Narrative History. I sat in on a video interview some Florida based production company was shooting, then I made some still photographs of her for the Californium series, and then Iris and I had dinner at that great Mexican place in Old Town. I remember being impressed with the clarity and power of her thought. I certainly felt a little fuzzy-squishy sitting next to her. I also remember asking her, "do you laugh a lot?" Which was my somewhat clumsy way of asking her how she dealt with being immersed in so many devastating, painful stories. After I explained my question a little better, her response to that question was in fact - I hope I'm not rear-projecting - a little squishy. When something this... intense... happens, it seems, maybe, impossible not to rear-project. I find myself thinking about so many things about Iris... and then my mind seems to draw connections, to connect dots. Perhaps it's a grandiose thought, but I also can't help but wonder if a better interviewer / person wouldn't have gleaned some sense of emotional distress. 
An awful lot of things don't seem so important at just this moment.I've always thought of Iris and educator Erin Gruwell as sharing a sort of singular passion and energy. When Caltech neurobiologist Christof Koch met Erin at my studio he later commented, "she's quite vivacious." Maybe it was more Erin's intensity that I also found in Iris and not actually Erin's effervescence. Maybe I should call Erin and see if she's okay. Suddenly I feel like maybe I should call everybody and see if they're okay. And then I feel a little silly for actually thinking I could ever help save anyone. I just never would have guessed. The truth is, I didn't really know her, so perhaps it's presumptuous to think I could have anticipated, "something." Still...
(Iris always had somebody snap a photo Anyway, I met up with Iris at UCLA on Saturday 24 April this year and interviewed her for Strange Angels. Her third book, The Chinese in America had been published in paperback just a few weeks earlier. She spoke compellingly of many big picture ideas of life on earth, of freedom and democracy. My favorite quotation in the book is the one she begins chapter 20 "An Uncertain Future" with: it's a 28 Jan 2003 quotation from Governor Gary Locke of Washington State, the first Chinese American governor in the United States: My grandfather came to this country from China nearly a century ago and worked as a servant. Now I serve as governor just one mile from where my grandfather worked. It took our family one hundred years to travel that mile. It was a voyage we could only make in America. 
Strange Angels interview with IrisKorperwelten Among the things that don't seem so important just now is everything else I've done lately. But, of course, the thing that media hates most is silence, so I'll press on. Back on March 27th I interviewed Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt of Matmos. In addition to their own music and teaching art, they've toured the world with Bjork. In their circle of the globe they took day trips to Portuguese castles, had all-night odysseys at Russian gay bars, and swam with the Greenlandic Choir in the Blue Lagoon in Iceland. But when I asked them about their adventures, the first thing that came out of their mouths was the night - at midnight after a concert - when they, bottles of champagne in hand, went to a converted slaughterhouse in Brussels and saw Gunther von Hagen's Body Worlds.
Drew and Martin on Korperwelten - 3 min - 2.8mbWell, fast forward half a year, and Body Worlds has come to Los Angeles. It's not quite a converted slaughterhouse and you probably can't bring in your bottle of champagne, but Body Worlds is at the California Science Center in Exposition Park (across the street from USC) thru 23 January 2005. While it's just fine for state governors to spew untold human carnage across giant silver-screens and wrestling rings, it's apparently controversial to exhibit actual "plastinated" human "specimens," so to inoculate itself from controversy the museum had an "ethics board" consisting of half the clergy in the county approve the thing. 
I was fortunate to spend several hours there. I'd heard so much about it from so many sources that I think on first entering the first room I was somewhat let down. The "specimens" are sort of fascinating, but they're also, what's the word... "weird." What I did think was cool was how many students were seated in front of the specimens or the 2D wall graphics doing life drawing. After touring the upstairs rooms I wandered a bit, went and saw the related Imax movie and then took a second spin thru the exhibits. Maybe the specimens were starting to sink in on me, or maybe it was just that the school groups had all gone and the rooms were now very quiet and sparsely populated, but the second pass was certainly more sublime. I've always been a fan of the much-derided "white cube" in art exhibition, and the exhibit now took on a white cube sort of isolation, focus, and feature presentation. Almost more than the muscles and bones which I'd seen things at least a little like before, I was amazed by the man, woman and child "bodies" consisting of only the vascular system.And then there's the "chess player." This specimen displays the nervous system and all it's tributaries. It's funny, when you slide the door open on your Mac G5, or your massively parallel "Connection Machine," it seems obvious that that pathetic silicon could never be conscious. But when you look at the grey jell-o that is everything we ever think or feel or believe, when you look at the grey jell-o that is "the three pound universe" - the human brain - it seems even less likely that it could be conscious. In the chess player specimen Hagens et al meticulously display the spinal cord and all those nerve bundles running off from it. As I looked it reminded me of nothing so much as electronic "wire bundles." It's also interesting that they chose to display the nervous system specimen playing chess. Chess is, of course, a sort of pinnacle achievement for thinking humans. But as the years since Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov march on, even as machine vision continues to be unable to do what a fly can do, one begins to realize that it is the sensation and perception, the physical worldfulness of our bodies that is the most extraordinary. I should note that Hagens insists that he is creating neither art nor science, but that his mission is one of public information. Fantastic Voyage Perhaps not surprisingly, 24 hours after Tim told me the sad news about Iris, Fantastic Voyage, Ray Kurzweil's new book about immortality arrived in the mail. In a series of books, The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990) The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) and the upcoming The Singularity is Near (2005) Kurzweil makes the case for, among other things, "mind porting" of one's, uh, "sentience" to another substrate, perhaps initially silicon, perhaps later something more organic and supple.  I won't have a chance to crack Fantastic Voyage for at least a couple of days, but I think Kurzweil and co-author Terry Grossman M.D.'s drift is that mind-porting is around the corner and you'll really be a loser if you eat too much artery-clogging fat and die of a heart attack or stroke the week before you could have become "immortal." Really, who wants to be the last one to die? Of course there really won't be a "last one to die," because as far as I know, in whatever 21st century year it might be that some male from the pacific northwest achieves "immortality" (whatever that means...) in that same year 20 million sub-saharan Africans will die of Aids. It seems that the century of the long boom is destined to be the century of unprecedented disparity (let's not even start on the recent election!) Border Patrol Lastly, Martin Herman, Amy Knoles and I just got funding from American Public Media for two pilots for a New Music radio interview program. Lots more on that... soon... Uh... Live long and prosper, -- Glenn Zucman, Rosemead, CA 
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