Magic flies

These flies are magic, they look like they have been embroidered by hand, one by one. I’m wearing this bracelet day and night. I even sewed it on around my wrist. I keep looking at these embroidered flies. I’m sure they bring luck. Or protection against evil. Or both.

They were on sale for a ridiculous price in the Guerrilla Fanshop at SKOR . I’m not sure whether they would still be selling at the moment. I think they gave them all back to me.
I’m thinking of having them sold in the new fan shop .
Certainly not for the same price though.
Now that I am testing their magic influence and finding it so powerful, I’m not so sure I want to sell them anymore. Or at least, not as a “pretty” thing. It’s not a question of money, it’s a question of attributing them the power they have, the power they can give to the person wearing them.
For more than 15 years, the fly has been my symbol, it’s in my name, it’s represented in all kind of ways on my website.
I am the fly, and the fly is me.
In 2000 I created  a work called “Lullaby for a dead fly”, made with selected answers to this piece of online narrative which ends up with “How can I write this since I’m dead?”
I accumulated thousands of stories written by the viewers about the life and death of a fly, and put them back online, giving life to the thoughts of the viewers after they had been “killing” this fly online, interweaving narratives around the notion of digital mortality/immortality.
Using this database of stories I also created new works, re-staging the stories written by the visitors in different backdrops and avatars.
Here is Ghostcity, one of these works staging (among others) a statue of Curt Cobain, a picture of Mouchette in the Bresson film, an angel, a fly, an old lady holding a doll, ect…
Flies die and flies get born around us everyday. For us it’s the same fly, and yet we know it’s a different fly every time, and in the same manner a web page comes to life on our desktop and disappears when we click it away, in a sort of everyday life magic.

I feel that the power of all the “fly” stories told by my viewers are present in these embroidered flies, they are connected, from pure matter to information and back again.

And if the shape of this fly, made from a digital file, mechanically woven, looks like a hand made item, painstakingly embroidered, one stitch after another, it only proves that this everyday life magic is here at work, bringing information to life and life to information.
(the design of this bracelet is by Karen Willey)