“I shall please,” the translation of the Latin word “placebo”, suggests the willing complicity of a patient to imagine a cure. This empty control procedure might also be applied to various belief systems necessary for us to create what we understand as reality. Increasingly our intermediary existence between physical and virtual lives raises these questions about that which we have previously dismissed as purely ephemeral.

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We finally got a chance to fully test augmented reality prescriptions for patients with smartphone addictions. We were given the opportunity to open a small clinic at the “Off Label Festival”  at Open Space Gallery in Victoria, British Columbia. The effect seemed to work well with volunteers wandering throughout the gallery during the opening, October 27. Many of our subjects still want to spend a good deal of time talking about the nature of virtual drugs and their involvement with smartphones.  At one point it was noted by a patient that I was continually holding my iPhone. I proceeded to place it on the table and fully admit my own over identification with this object. A full portfolio of some of the visions can be viewed here. We don’t really use placebos in our studies but we thought we’d give a nod to the title of our portion of the event by translating “Art of the Placebo”  to its derivation “I Shall Please“.

October 9: Video documentation of Occupy Wall Street colony breaching the barriers set up at the NYSE with mounted police. Later strange clump-like behavior above the drum circle at Zuccotti Park, with a very large rising uber OWS toad.

As of today, October 5, the outbreak of a new bufo colony was documented in augmented reality in a barricaded area in front of the New York Stock Exchange. We will simply call it the Occupy Wall Street Colony, or the OWS Colony for short. This particular species seems to have markings on its skin in the form of a swirling NYSE façade and generate above, a hovering pie chart of the US skewed distribution of wealth.

Bufo toad of the Occupy Wall Street Colony at an organizational meeting of Occupy Wall Street leaders at Liberty Park, including Michael Moore in the orange hat. Police presence severely hampering cell phone reception, causing toad to adopt a highly decreased size.  VIDEO

33 1/2 RPM Sunset Colony from Will Pappenheimer on Vimeo.

A evening moment with the 33 1/2 RPM Sunset Bufo Toads in the process of colonizing the ICA Boston. apparently they have adopted a record skip associated with the “Record” show there.

It seems that the Sex and Death Colony hatched quietly in the Sydney Botanical Gardens has gotten out of control and is spreading to a series of smaller Australian towns (d/lux MEDIA ARTS). Colonies seem to be appearing westward and southward with no apparent rhyme or reason. My colleague there, Warren Armstrong, (the organizer of (Un)seen Sculptures), is vigorously monitoring the situation and calls weekly on Saturday nights to let me know the conditions. It’s uncanny that this subspecies should spread in a country that has been plagued by its ancestor. This is I suppose, a similar sort of infestation, with all good intentions of those of us at VF, looking for a means to free internet living. Warren has ambitiously set up a site to track what he calls “Bufo’s Progress“.

Reports are surfacing of a new Bufo Virtanus outbreak in Sydney, Austrailia, developing in the area of the Royal Botanic Gardens Glass Pyramid. The subspecies has been named the Sex and Death Bufo Colony, because it has developed visual traits of the orchid exhibition created in 2005. In addition to sex and death, there were three themes identified during that exhibition; “Seduction”, “Cooperation” and “Deception.” We have heard that the toads change different textural colors; pink, white, red and black. These are the colorations of some of the orchids in the preceding exhibition. They seduce with pink, cooperate or copulate with red and white, and finally deceive and die with a display of black. We have also heard unconfirmed reports that possible other colonies spreading southward. This will probably not be confirmed till early April during the Surry Hills Festival, with its event (Un)Seen Sculptures curated by Warren Armstrong.

As we have previously noted, the prototype for Bufo Virtanus is the bufo toad, the species known in Australia as the Cane Toad, which was introduced to Queensland in 1935 to combat the Cane Beetle. Unfortunately this bio-attack never solved the beetle problem and the giant species of cane toads instead became an uncontrollable infestation. in this case we might be dealing with that kind of virtual plague, with the toads as harbingers of a plethora imagery and information leaking, cascading into the physical landscape.

We were up at the very beautiful Diller Scofidio designed ICA Boston only to find a peculiar giant bufo virtanus, an apparent new subspecies of blender bufos taking on attributes of the 2 upcoming shows- Catherine Opie and The Record. We can only call this “33 1/2 RPM Sunset Bufo.” (to part of Manifest.AR at the ICA, Boston, for Cyberarts, opening April 22nd)