Natacha Merritt

I believe in the co-evolution of art and technology, and one of the key drivers of this is erotic. When I look at the chronology of my work the recurrent theme is technology. I was given my first digital camera in 1996. It was a little Casio and it was magical. I had never taken any other images prior. Its little swivel lens and half a megapixel opened up the beauty of the world to me. There was no flash or memory cards. I could just grab a few grainy images. All that remains from these images is a few prints that I photographed.

In the following months I was shooting for my first book to be published by Taschen “Digital-Diaries”. I had moved up to my all time favorite magical low resolution camera: the 1 megapixel 1024x768 Agfa 1280. With a built in flash and the fantastic swivel screen I really could explore. I would put a piece of tape (often a bandaid) over the flash, turn the flash on and it would trigger a Vivitar flash. I started sprinkling my images with different lights. 

Next was the Nikon cool pix 990. With external flash capability and a full 2 megapixels I was in the big leagues. At 1600 x 1200 I could nearly print. 

And so the book chapters were laid out by camera. And a much larger trajectory started. 

I spoke at numerous conferences, notably Ars Electronica, that year entitled ["Next Sex Art in the age of its procreative superfluousness"][1]. It was a foreshadowing of my interests to come decades later.The linked to article is one of my favorite examples of the blunt naive and hilarious stuff I was quoted saying at 21.

[1]: http://Sexual Artist Enjoys the Freedom

After returning to school to study evolution (if you’re curious about sex, all roads lead to genetics and evolution) I turned my lens slightly away from myself and my sex life and more towards other species. After extensive studies of plants and fishes I fell in love with spiders, specifically their penises. All of these years of artistic and scientific exploration culminated in my second book “Sexual Selection”. I captured the images of spider genitals at the San Francisco Academy of sciences, that’s to some great friends: world famous arachnologists. These body parts are only millimeters in length. So we took dozens of images at different focal length that we then merged into one. In the case of some of the species, the erect penises had never been seen before. A year later I printed the first ever 3D printed spider penis. I spoke at CODAME in 2013 at Adobe SF about this process.