Amos Latteier (Toronto, ON)

Amos Latteier is an interdisciplinary artist who performs PowerPoint lectures and creates interactive public art using technology. He delivers slide lectures on scientific and cultural topics including ant societies, models, statistics, and pigeon aerial photography. He has performed lectures across North America and in Europe. His recent public art projects include a telephone-operated karaoke protest song project, a pigeon condo, cell phone-operated nature tour, a 500 lb potato battery, a chainsaw-powered walking machine and several hovercrafts.

Contact info: amos@latteier.com
Website: http://latteier.com

Ant and Human Societies (Interdisciplinary Performance)

The performance takes the form of a business presentation - I stand at a lectern and present PowerPoint slides. However, the content chafes against the form of the lecture, producing a simultaneously unsettling, philosophic, and humorous interdisciplinary performance. The fluid way in which the performance slips between satire and serious exhortation mirrors the central theme of lecture, which is trying the change how we understand ourselves as individuals in society.
I begin by examining ant achievements in the realms of architecture and agriculture. Next the performance turns to questions on individuality and freedom in ant societies. I explore why we don't see ants as free individuals by looking at self-interest and profit in ant and huuman societies. The lecture concludes by looking at ways in which we can improve human society by learning from ants.

- Amos Latteier, 2004

Birds and Gods (Video)

Birds and Gods weaves the history of aviation with Lacanian psychology, popular culture, and computer animation. The result is a simultaneously serious and humorous examination of technology and society. Birds and Gods looks at the cultural meanings of space travel. The video demonstrates how the history of space flight is bound up with human myth, symbolism, and our understandings of gender. Pushing past the metaphor of rocket ship as phallus, it examines more interesting scenarios, such as how the fetus is figured as an astronaut, and the US military's concern that menstruation would cause problems in space.

- Amos Latteier, 2002