Pussy Weevil

Pussy Weevil is a screen-based installation of an individual software persona, a 2D animated character, who reacts to the viewer’s distance or proximity. Pussy Weevil’s behaviors respond to certain parameters that define its characteristics; Pussy Weevil reacts to the viewer’s position, which influences how the character acts and behaves. The piece involves choreography in space and deals with subject / object relationships vis-a-vis the viewer. Pussy Weevil variously ignores you, derides you, or runs away in fright.

Pussy Weevil was created in early 2003, at the brink of our invasion of Iraq. He is very much a response to George Bush, functioning both as a parody of his inarticulate displays of bravura, and as an avatar of my own speechless frustration. His prelinguistic behaviors are horribly familiar: Pussy Weevil is pure Id. He is a proto-Tex-Avery character, whose form is malleable and virtually indestructible. He mutates, splits, spits, and glitches; as an immediate object of a viewer’s interventions, he never finds a middle ground between dark heckling and pitiful fear. Pussy Weevil lives in the zone of biologically hazardous materials – or maybe he’s only a danger to himself. He might be just a sorrowful, botched genetic experiment that has about as much sense as a dull, reactive house pet.

Pussy Weevil drew from character development and narrative inquiry in several contexts: the animated cartoon, the physical object, and interactive space. Pussy Weevil questions how digital characters can be affected by interactions in analog spaces and examines the relationship between the real and computer-made worlds.

Technology Specs

Pussy Weevil is an installation art-technology piece consisting of a flat-screen monitor embedded in a wall or pedestal, ultrasonic proximity sensors, microcontroller, custom interface and control software, and a computer running Macromedia Flash animations and ActionScript.

Demo

The demonstration provided is full interactive and allows one to see the various Pussy Weevil modalities. The three proximity “zones” – close, near, far away – allow you to see how Pussy Weevil would react based on a visitor’s distance from the installation.