Hot Milks @MFA : Murakami CAT++

Is this the art?

The Hot Milks return to the MFA to perform for Murakami’s exhibition opening. As per Murakami’s model, we surveilled millennial trends and optimized artwork accordingly: Give them what they want. A breathing 7ft cat, 2 robocats, beanie baby sacrifice, chimera construction, 2 cat goddesses and a soundtrack of Bernie Sanders populist meowing. Multiple questions of “is this the art?” spurred us onwards throughout the night.

Memory in the brain is a constructive process, and museums are not just spaces for static remembering. #mfaNOW Uncanny Cat Café (#mfaMEOW) is an interactive installation for remixing memories; a pop-up café in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) cafeteria where waitstaff await with menus of memories (beloved childhood Beanie Babies). Attendees make their selections while lounging with doula robotic cats, and step into a makerspace with their tray of choices. Sitting at the cafeteria tables, they sacrifice the past and give birth to new chimera creations from separated parts, each made animate with motors, scissors, sewing and digital voice boxes. The Frankenstein future is then passed along to the factory line’s finish, where the creatures are assigned new memories by other attendees. Half-alive, hyper-relevant, chewed-up parts and expelled wholes. An Exquisite Corpse with memory and mechanical reinvigoration, as the museum begins a parallel transition from preservation to process.

Collaborators

With the Hot Milks Foundation (Adam Horowitz, Akito van Troyer, Sands Fish, Xin Lu, Gershon Dublon, Rainar Aasrand and Pip Mothersill )

Date

October 13th 2017

Piece commissioned by

Boston Museum of Fine Art

Text by

Adam Horowitz