Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven / AMVK

(96 Eroticised Concepts)

"In the context of a cultural undercover project in Bruges townhouses, a space was assigned to me in the Gezelle Quarter, where poet-priest Guido Gezelle lived in the nineteenth century. The house dated from the fourteenth or fifteenth century and there was a large window in the façade, like a shop window in a red light district.

I knew from my school days that Gezelle hated women and that he kept words he found interesting in a filing card system. Every day for 96 days I sent, by fax, a naked woman from my database, coupled with a word or notion from thermodynamics or artificial intelligence.

That neighbourhood needed to show more female-friendliness. I've always felt an intrinsic connection between the use or abuse of images of women in the mass media and things that are going wrong in society."

− AMVK

"On Women Images

Keeping records on images of women and on words out of particular fields made me at a certain point combine them. The same way as cardealers present their newest products with scarsely dressed females. As an example I sampled words related to particular problems of elasticity , knowledge representation and symmetry in space to connect them with my files of 1. naked women only dressed with a belt, 2. women showing their breasts while fixating the spectator, 3. women busy taking of their blouses over their heads.
In re-interpretating the images, I re-use them across the chosen word. For this I invent slightly fighting logical schemes to induce a certain random factor, for the sake of serendipity, synchronicity. In this way I try things out, I see how they work, if they work. Whereby I use the spectator as a measurement.
The images serve as an instrument in a system to be proved.
At present I use my computer to store images and words. I use my computer to collect them, to create systems in order to reveal things while working. Thus the information becomes the form, a tool; it becomes the canvas on which I work.
The information, the data, becomes the paint, a mixed storage of passed, present and future intelligence.
It’s just the way you use the information that decides on the content of the work, that gives the content needed for the actual purpose."

− AMVK, 22.3.97