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Sperm Economy Sperm Economy is an on-line sperm bank developed by the Bureau. It was exhibited in Blasthaus in San Francisco last April: large, nitrogen-cooled vats contained mixed anonymous sperm, called "democracies" were displayed in conjunction with a live sperm auction that evaluated preliminary market value. This project explores how database organization, more that just a technical interest, a conceptual intrigue, is used to produce human life in the lotto of life choices. Initially, it used the databases from the UCSF Urology Department and from the largest sperm bank in the world, California's Cryobank. You can choose your sperm, as in other sperm banks, according to height, years in college, eye color, skin, ethnicity, etc.

There are twelve categories in which human life choices are made. The project was triggered by the sperm crisis that last year reported a precipitous decline in human sperm count. The findings were reported widely in the New York Times among other places. These alarming reports produced the primary condition of scarcity -- scarcity is the first condition needed for an economy. The Bureau then developed this rational alternative to conventional procreation. A complete reproductive agency, the BIT Sperm Bank, deals in the currency of anonymous human sperm, incorporating online database, catalog sperm, recombinant units, and distribution agency. The BIT Sperm Bank is indexical of the new information industry -- it takes advantage of the recombinant opportunities of increasingly compatible data forms, drawing on medical, insurance, risk analysis and other sorts of data. The unit of exchange, sperm, is ideally rendered as information because it lends itself to the best accuracies of the statistical domain because of its naturally occurring large numbers. < back | next >  Page:  1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5  |  6  |  7  |  8  |  9  |  10  |  11  |  12  |