FAUNA: WILD ANIMAL ELONGATED CENTS

The fact that defaced currency (and the act of defacing it) has become associated with American tourist traps and other environments of manufactured fun is among the many miracles of late capitalism. For a mere 51¢ (usually), the ubiquitous penny machine allows users to transform pocket change into a commemoration of their own passage through time and space. Once created primarily by hijacking the force of bypassing trains, the smashed penny — or elongated, to numismatists and other serious folk — is now a relatively commonplace form of souvenir kitsch.

For roughly the past 10 years, Pittsburgh-based artists Stuart Anderson and Shaun Slifer have been devising a far more punk rock penny machine: Fauna. Finding common ground in their desire to work against dominant progress narratives, the pair have subverted the standard penny machine to invite ideological questions about the nature of industry, memory, and ecological destruction and adaptation.

Described by its progenitors as an “interactive kinetic sculpture,” the third and most current iteration of Fauna is a functional, built-from-scratch machine that presses two-sided pennies via a crank mechanism (a handsome ship’s wheel). For one side of the coin, users choose from nine either extinct or critically endangered animals, like the jaguar, red wolf, or passenger pigeon. Available for the flip side are nine sets of tracks, each representing a species of adapted urban wildlife, such as coyotes, raccoons, and groundhogs — what Anderson and Slifer referred to as “faunal weeds” in a recent telephone interview.

The initial concept for Fauna came from Slifer, who has collected souvenir elongated pennies for years. The project became reality by way of Anderson’s considerable mechanical abilities — constructing a hand-powered machine capable of repeatedly, accurately reproducing 81 possible image combinations, on metal, is no small task. Since the pair first met in 2003, Anderson has received his PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon, driven, he writes on his website, by an overarching fascination with the “turbulent boundaries between formal models and natural systems.” For Fauna, he innovated a set of two die carriages (modeled on the standard industrial rolling mill), each bearing three wheels of three designs each.

Though the 18 image options are original designs that Slifer solicited from fellow members of the Justseeds activist arts collective, Fauna is not intended to be shown at galleries. Instead, Slifer and Anderson hope to place the work within its “natural” setting of zoos and natural history museums — places “where people are already interacting with animals, either live or taxidermied,” Slifer said.

To read the complete article, see:
Smashing Pennies to Protest Industrial Capitalism (https://hyperallergic.com/390319/smashing-pennies-to-protest-industrial-capitalism/)

Created by Stuart Anderson and Justseeds member Shaun Slifer, the Fauna penny press is an interactive kinetic sculpture that creates an experience designed to catalyze thought about the role of humans in the natural world. Fauna uses the human desire to identify with wild animals to present questions about how extinction alters our concept of nature, how adaptation drives our ecological future, and how an animal’s symbolic and cultural value can determine its survival.

Participants use the machine to create double-sided pennies featuring embossed images selected from eighteen original illustrations (most by Justseeds members) of North American wild animals. These durable images present critically endangered and extinct species on the face of the coin, and display the tracks of animals that have successfully adapted to the built human urban environment on the back.

While the elongated penny originated in the 1890s, the practice of carrying coins as markers of identity, duty, or debt can be traced for thousands of years. The coins produced by Fauna give their bearers an opportunity to reflect on their personal relationship with wildness, extinction, and survival.

To read the complete article, see:
Fauna : A Penny Press (https://justseeds.org/project/fauna/)

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