Claude Zervas
EVENT: Zervas' iris prints of monkey brain cross-sections are in The Privacy Show at SOIL (1205 Pike St, 264-8061) through Feb 25.

Where do the monkey brain images come from? "They're cryo-sections of a small monkey's brain. They freeze the monkey's head in a block of ice and then plane off slices and take pictures of them. It was kind of fortuitous. I came across a database with these images, and I thought it would be interesting to stitch them together and animate them. To me they look really beautiful and sad. It looks pretty much like a human brain, and something touched a chord in me. It reminds us of our own anthropocentric view of the world and of our own mortality. You know that chronic anxiety you get thinking about your own mortal condition?

"And the brain produces that anxiety. As if we could get at what the brain is about by taking it apart and studying the slices, but of course it becomes more abstract in the process.

"That's another thing--I couldn't understand what they were trying to see. Except maybe to map it out more accurately. What kind of data can you extract from these slices? You can't really get any information about how the brain functions."

How does it fit into the privacy theme? "Privacy is such a human thing--we don't extend it to any other animal. If we could, we wouldn't extend it to anyone else except ourselves. It's a very egocentric idea. And the monkeys... I think there's this low-level guilt that people have when they see monkeys in zoos. They're reflections of ourselves."