The I, Daughter of Kong Center for Research was founded in Rio Vista, California in 1978 with the goal of collecting and preserving photos, testimonials, documentation, and physical evidence of the life and work of I, Daughter of Kong. The core researchers are Cynthia Mitchell, painter/writer; Amy Hicks, video artist; Lara Allen; painter/musician, Anjali Sundaram, filmmaker.
I, Daughter of Kong (IDOK) is an exercise in imagined science, revisionist history and journalistic chicanery. It is a gesture of resistance to the marginalization of social and political discourse and the increasingly isolating homogeneity of popular culture IDOK is the creation and elaboration of a new iconic image, a springboard for artistic inspiration, personal interpretation and independent thinking.
The project brings the repressed fears and anxieties of the original movie, King Kong (1933) and its remakes, to the foreground. It takes the narrative’s implicit union of woman and beastly ape to its logical conclusion with the dissemination of an initial narrative along these lines:
In the early 1970’s a fragment of a film was discovered in a warehouse on the Hudson River in New York. The film shows fleeting black and white images of a small, blond woman who appears to have the head of a starlet and the body of an ape. This bit of film has generated a great deal of controversy. Is it documentary footage, a hoax, or a piece of a lost fiction? The ensuing years have produced much evidence in support of conflicting theories, as well as speculation about the nature and location of this creature. Many people believe that this female is the love child of Fay Wray and King Kong. It is said that she is among us, somewhere in solitude, and that she is an artist and a poet. Some believe she is a sign of a new era; perhaps even the second coming of the new Christ. Some say she is just a poor freak, a sad accident escaped from a Soviet laboratory… Some say that she doesn’t exist at all.