pro:phile @ design square, brooklyn, PTA

The meats that make us (part2)

Climbing into consciousness

And so an entire week has already past since last time you saw me performing my process of coming into being. Be on the lookout for the next issue of A Look Away magazine to read more about this experience and to get a sneaky scoop on what events soon will follow. Until then I'll spend my time climbing further and further into consciousness, coming to terms with the cold and the clacking sounds of stiff joints in the early winter morning.

Keen to be seen

After much consideration I realized that this constant privacy has to be dealt with. I was feeling so invisible (and visibility I now know is a thing of great importance in this world of objects) and insignificant, behind my closed front door, through which only limited visitors pass through. So I have decided to relocate myself to the place where ... Read Morethings get seen. The shop window.

Words I am familiar with and I do have the capacity to express various experiences and emotions with them, but I wanted to test this new body of mine and try to create an expression using only things that other people can experience with only their senses such as hearing and sight and tactile sensation. Hence I am performing to anyone who is willing to walk into my shop, a performance in which I illustrate to you my becoming a body.

I did so for the first time last night, and onlookers seemed to be able to interpret my movements and sounds…what a fascinating phenomenon… So I will be carrying on doing so...

Spying on the neighbors

It is the strangest thing to me here, how everybody does everything in secret. Only friends that you know come visit you, and while they are there, you are fully aware of their presence and they do not even snoop around through your things when you are not looking. Every body seems so private, hidden behind the most vulgar polo-necks and woolly ... Read Morescarfs, thick drapes and sometimes bad hairstyles.

This privacy bothers me so, I keep staring through my peep-hole waiting to see some eye on the other side, but hours pass by, without even a fly.

There are some places though that seem to me as the interfaces where strangers meet, and stare and stalk and sometimes talk. Shopping Malls and bars and stationary stores and petrol stations, but mostly shopping malls seem to me like the place to be, cause the people there aren't to scared to stare.

The meat that makes us

Something quite silly came to my attention today as I was purchasing some meat products for a night time meal. The butcher seemed somewhat surprised at my delight to see the cutting of the fresh meats behind the counter. “Can I have a closer look”, I asked the man, which - from his look in his eye I could tell – considered rather to assist some other costumer, someone less fascinated by his occupation.

As I am told the meats inside me must be somewhat similar to those of the animals we eat. To my disappointment it seemed that the meats had no smell - or maybe that is just because I have contracted what you would call a cold, which somehow seems to be interfering with the smells of all things.

The colour on the other hand is something quite exquisite. And the texture so soft and malleable, I just wanted so badly to taste them all. But then I had to leave, so with my plastic bag of meats I said farewell to the relieved butcher, who was left to slice and saw in his own silence.

The dilema with the eyes

I woke up again this morning. What a strange notion, in that before recently I have never slept before. I woke up and I had this strange feeling of being lost. This is not that strange in itself, since I frequently end up in places where I have no recollection of getting there. But this displacement is different. It is different in the sense that the place to which I am displaced is more specific, much smaller and much more contained. Human eyes seem to only see that far, and furthermore, there are many opaque obstacles, which hinders sight from relocating one self again.

In attempt to achieve some form of clarity, I drove up a tiny mountain to look down at the city of Pretoria. Seeing so many things and places simultaneously made me feel a bit more at ease, but the problem than arose in that distance seems to diminish detail. Hence the dilemma with the eye.

I drove down again into the city.