adam in the world

sarahillenberger_01.jpg, originally uploaded by WurzelStock™.

Sara Hillenberger, "Völlig Weichgestrikt" , She's also knitted the brain and the intestines.

The project "Hochgekocht" is also a bodily delight - if Arcimboldo had been into sculpture...

And now I would like to present essayist, architect, artist, sportsman and now also guest blogger - Tine Bernstorff Aagaard - who've written this delightfully vulgar text as part of the Food Workshop on easa007 in Elefsina, Greece. All text and images by her.

Disgust vs. Lust

A flaneurs sensitive stroll through a meat market. The fascination of organs and limbs; cold, lifeless as well as warm and pulsing in the mediterranean evening sun. The fascination as the duality between attraction and disgust. The colors and shapes of the exhibited organic structures in an ocean of variety teasing the eye of the perceiver and forces the willing body to continue along the meatpacked arcade; moving even deeper into the all embracing atmosphere. The harsh smell of blood lingers all around.
Meat color. The weight of exposed, overwhelmingly naked body parts as one would never relate to living creatures. A somehow structured mess that does not catch the viewers eye. The Sound of butchers hammers smashing bones and bits of bodies into more bits of bodies and more meat atoms are released.
Heavy laughs and tricksy sale speaches hits bypassers without a living chance of avoiding. Coming on to one as one comes on to the flesh. One cant escape; not even ones own desire to stay.

Caught between oneself sensing the body parts as the butchers sensing one. One becomes an object. The foreigner is exposed while sketching. The breathing on ones neck. Eyes on the paper. On one. The lust of investigating every little shape, deformation of the body parts. Like stroking the slightly sticky skin gently with the palm of ones hand - with the line of the pen against the pure paper. The disgusting feeling of exposing ones desires in this ruthless environment.

In the middle of this a box appears. The content is a massive structure of snails. Moving all on top of each other. Looking like the hanging stomachs would, if they were still functioning. The structure lets some snails depart to escape. The sound of the shells hitting the tiled, wet, floor as they tip over the edge, is somehow similar to the should of the hammers smashing into the flesh and bones. The slow page of their movements seems so fast due to the fixed time of the massive 'stilleben' one is situated in. The roughness of slaughter an animal makes the process of growing of snails, seem more like the act of growing vegetables and fruits. Despite the little creatures slim chance of surviving, these escapists shows a way out. Or at least a will to get out. To escape.

One leaves with a bag full of living snails. 3,5 euro for approximately the make body count as class in primary school. One makes a habitat of lettuce and a white plastic bowl to make them survive more than the two days because of the heat one were told. One gives them names and have them - not just participating in a dinner party, but even controlling the whole autonomy of the evening. Keeping them alive for how long? This situation is even more artificial than the situation in the box in the meat market.

A dilemma again. Playing it passive perhaps. Time might choose and leave one as an observer. They might by now have lost their sliminess and will to live. Their possibility to escape was part of the game. But most are still there. With the names of the peoples one know. They were all most still last time one observed the situation. Excrements were lying all over. Like the snails might be doing now. Dry and dead.

I've been dealing a bit with advanced interface-design before, here & here. And in fact what Jeff Han is doing here is not really different from what Microsoft Surface can do. He just have a much better idea of what to use it for. In other words - this is so much more useful fx. looking at graphic visualizations of complex data, where the ability to both see the big picture and infinitely small details is important... rather than using it as an interactive sofa table... thank you microsoft for really making a difference.

Towards the end of the interview he says something really interesting about a possible 3D-version. It turns out the actual problem with this is that the human body has great difficulty doing very presize gestures when it doesn't have anything to push against. It's the problem of keeping your fingertip in an excact point in space, while taking a step to the side. Something that's very easy to do if you rest it against a wall.

So maybe even Jeff Hans design is a dead end too. Lot's of more videos of this on Youtube.

Last night I went and saw this show, "Fallen From The Sky" by the Circo da Madrugada. Taking place in a park in Ørestaden surrounded by tall buildings from where the performers entered, sliding fastly hundreds of meters on suspended wires. The visual impact of the whole thing and the proximity of the performers - flying around right above ones head and running about in the crowd - really gave a sense of presence. Extremely nice.

Only drawback was the rather annoying narrator. The story so banal it would have stood much stronger had the performance been allowed to speak for itself.

photo by P-Real

If you are in Copenhagen this weekend go to see Halfmachine on their new ship. Robot-performance-underground-arty-farty stuff. Submarine ballet, floating interactive flamethrowers, sounds, etc... - all together a living world of eclectic imagery.

Or check out some of the other events that's part of the wonderful and brand new Metropolis Biennale

This video is based on data from the Visible Human Project which I wrote about back in '05. The aim of the project "is the creation of complete, anatomically detailed, three-dimensional representations of the normal male and female human bodies. ... The male was sectioned at one millimeter intervals, the female at one-third of a millimeter intervals."

It's the best video of this project I found on the net. It really shows how different sections can be cut through the 3D model, giving some rather unusual perspectives on it. I even quite like the music.

Made by Les Frère Lefdrup ...

And now of to bed with sweet dreams of traveling through bodies... I'll be good soon and post some proper stuff... promise ... boy-scout honour ... in the near, near future... it's just that not only did my feet stay in Greece - so did most of my fingers on my right hand and a few on the left. Difficult to type. And the net-connection is really slow too.

From the project 'Running the Numbers' by Chris Jordan. Above you see 6 panels displaying 2.3 million folded prison uniforms, equal to the number of Americans incarcerated in 2005. Below is a detail in actual size.

The brilliance of this project is how it visualizes those unfathomable quantities in a way so they become almost tangible. 2.3 mill. is no longer an abstract number, but can now be "experienced fundamentally through a bodily identification rather than as mere external objects" - if you remember Pallasmaas and Benjamins thoughts from this post.

You step up close to the panels. Zoom in. And can imagine the human body fitting inside each of the folded uniforms. You take five steps back. And as you do it, the overwhelming scale and tragedy of the American prison system presents itself. The abstract numbers are really understood through your body, its position in space, its relation to the image on the wall.

One thing leads to another - we all know that. And so the movie from yesterday led me on to these two:

This is the HeartLander, a so-called cardiac robot. It is inserted through a small hole in the body to mend a broken heart ... well, doesn't that just sound too good to be true! Above is the first prototype, below is the new slimmer, faster and funkier version. One of it's great successes so far is a myocardial injection which as far is I can understand is about tatooing a dot on the heart. Very handy. But what do I know.

Apparently one of its very funky abilities is that it can move about on a beating heart. An ability I'm sure patients still alive will appreciate. Obviously it's all still in early testing. None the less it is a rather impressive little robot they've made. So bloody simple.

I guess the finetuning of its mechanics might not hav been so simple though. Not to mention the practice it takes to learn controlling it - with what looks like a pretty regular joystick. All in all amazingly amazing.

I've used the term long pork before without elaborating on its meaning. But since my discovery that the photo in that post now rank no. 1 in google image searches on the term I feel obliged to do just that.

Long pork is a term used by south east pacific islanders as an euphemism for human flesh. Isn't that wonderful. Most sources claim it refers to the taste being pig-like. But according to amarican occult journalist William Buehler Seabrook human flesh is more "like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef. It was very definitely like that, and it was not like any other meat I had ever tasted. It was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal."

Pictured above is the pioneer plaque send with pioneer 10 and 11 into deep space. It is devised to describe to extra terrastials what humans look like and where to get them. Just like the menus the myriad of local pizza joints keep leaving in my mailbox. If aliens do ever arrive here to have a taste of the exotic delicacy we might be to them this recipy for whole roast human seem to me like a good, if time consuming, choice. Otherwise I've heard that the upper arm of a young woman is supposed to be the most tasty and tender cut. Bon appetit.

For a thorough read on cannibalism i suggest you turn to wikipedias article on the subject. Or return here - quite a few interesting links came up during research which I'll be posting in the future.

Sometimes there's a long way between the snaps'... or should that be snapses - as in shots drunk in collectivity at regular intervals during lunch. The snaps itself and its digestive qualities being the only reasons for the toast.
Anyway - the snaps'... sometimes they're just too far apart in the big lunch of life. And sometimes they're just to far apart on a blog with more ambition than... erm... blogging... and sometimes they land on shore like long sets of waves sailing in from an endless sea of snaps. Yes, that's how it is.

The above picture depicts mr Green, sculptured by Juan Balandran, blogging rough and intimate short stories from LA as The Red Rooster. He doesn't post often. But the snaps' are very very close. And come full of booze and sweat and painful women.

His subject matter - people and destinies in LA I guess we'll call it - reminds me of P.S. Zollo who take fantastic portraits and descriptions of the encounters with people on the streets of Hollywood. Many of them homeless. Read the whole story and comments about Persephone and cry in your heart.

Persephone & Bert, originally uploaded by P.S.Zollo.

After reading the previous post my beautiful assistant Petter reminded me of Eddie Lins Deep End Dining-blog...well written and witty gastro journalism by a man who fears nothing. So please be introduced to the term extreme dining. Best way of being that is this video I believe:

live tentacles from alba on Vimeo

Live tentacles served in The Prince restaurant in L.A. "The Prince, however, has a culinary dark side. At the end of the heavy bound menu near the bottom of the page are a couple of secret items known only to those who can decipher the Korean script. " - a masterpiece in gastro-journalism starting off with a beautiful story of his little sister.

Also be sure to read other classic posts such as the egg of darkness - balut aka duck fetus or Eddies take on a extreme dining classic - Eat Fugu - or Die Tryin' ... the poisonous-blowfish-sushi also famously eaten by Homer Simpson:

Food, it's production and consumption - the act of eating is fundamentally connected to human existence and experience. On level with only sex. And as sex it is an act of close contact between two bodies. Resulting in complex sensorial experiences of smells, flavours and textures. Be it a chicken or a pomegranate, processed or whole and raw - there's a bit of cannibalism involved in every meal. And as such it is ourselfs we look into when we eat.

"In the “Disembodied Cuisine” we will attempt to grow frog skeletal muscle over biopolymer for potential food consumption. A biopsy will be taken from an animal which will continue to live and be displayed in the gallery along side the growing “steak”. This installation will culminate in a “feast”. The idea and research into this project began in Harvard in 2000. The first steak we have grown was made out of pre-natal sheep cells (skeletal muscle). We used cells harvested as part of research into tissue engineering techniques in utero. The steak was grown from an animal that was not yet born."

A view of the installation including the kitchen, the frog's aquarium and the dining table - all enclosed within an airthight environment to comply with regulations for biohazards. Photos from the feast here.

Marti Guixe is celebrating 10 years working with food design. And he has made so incredibly many, incredibly nice small and big, funny and thoughtprovoking designs. Fx. above orangeflavoured lollipop with an orangeseed inside. Lot's of pictures at his site. I believe he has also been associated with Droog Design somehow... they do quite a lot of food-stuff too...

Finally we are obliged to end this trail of thought with Cloaca - a wonderful installation, a machine that turns food into shit.

Via Culiblog - a must for all food designers... oh - a post on Drawing Reastraint 9 and food

and We Make Money Not Art

Last night I went to Kristine and Petters place and saw their brand new child for the first time. It's a she. She's got red hair. And her name is Saga. Which is a bit strange, but we'll just have to get used to it. Anyway it means the one who sees and tell stories. So there's already great expectations on her little shoulders. And she looks very very sweet. Hip Hip Hooray for Kristine and Petter - they are so cool

This however has made me wonder. About the more practical side of this whole procreation thing. The process. Or rather - the production design. It doesn't really seem thought properly through in my opinion.

Now, what we see here is an entire child on its way out, head first, through an opening we men know to normally fit rather nicely around something the size of large carrot. Incredible, but not very practical.

Also notice how clean the child looks on this image - made to be shown in American courtrooms. This of course has nothing to do with actual conditions...

by Raul Gutierrez

What a mess. Not even the baby looks happy about it. Intelligent designer - come on! The umbellical cord is rather cool though.

Apparently there was a time when it could be done with grace and dignity... only the bare foot reveals a bit of tension, a slight twitch of the toes. I'm sure that's how Kristine handled the situation as well (well, actually Petter said she'd made faces he'd never seen before and sounds he'd never imagined her able to voice) :

Ah, the good old days - all a woman would need was a stool and a pair of fashionably dressed and descrete ladies to hold up her dress. Now please enjoy Monty Pythons take on the situation:

Robert Gligorov - born 1960 in Macedonia, working in Italy - makes disturbing and fascinating images. With a strong sense of materiality, texture, tactility. Though many of them are pretty darn gory, they are at the same time poetic and sensitive... a combination I really appreciate.

He's a photographer who also works with other media and artforms. And even in his photography it seem to me that the greatest part of the art and work lies in the construction of the motif. Some extremely elaborate and some snapshot-like of a simple great idea (...all great artists have a little octopus and a white bird in their studio - just in case serendipity should strike).

Here's a couple of galleries of his images... lots of fantasticness:

Lipanjepuntin

Artnet

Are you satisfied Petter?

Politiken reported the other day that Copenhagen pedestrians are in the world elite. Of the 32 cities in the survey, the pace of life project, only singaporeans are faster.

In each of these cities prof. Richard Wiseman has chosen 1 (just one?!) 20 m stretch of street and measured the average time it would take people to walk it. Copenhagen 10.82 sec. Blantyre in Malawi 31.60 sec. For 20 meters. That's pretty damn slow. Complete list HERE.

" A study carried out in the early 1990s demonstrated that pedestrians’ speed of walking provides a reliable measure of the pace of life in a city, and that people in fast-moving cities are less likely to help others and have higher rates of coronary heart disease."

Meanwhile over at Pruned the latest post is about piezoelectrical technology. Fx. as used in this shoe, BrightWalk, “that incorporates piezo-electric transducers and electroluminescent polymers to generate light while the user is walking or running.”

Pruned has several other very (more) interesting examples. Fx the wavegarden and the sustainable dancefloor... and from there the imagination of a young urban planner just goes on and on...

The original thought with this post was to say something clever about the energy potentially produced in Copenhagen and Blantyre. But now I lost it. If you have anything smart to say please enlighten me.

Instead let's look at Muybridge (not him personally) one of the fathers of looking very closely at (naked) people walking...

Photos by Stephane Fugier.

Are they surreal or symbolic? I fear the answer. And since it's his birthday I'll dedicate them to my friend Jeppe. Then he can think about it. They're definately both beautiful and funny.

More excellent photos, including real women, on his site.

Nicole Tran Ba Vang makes pretty fantastic images examening clothing, the skin and the (female) body. Several nice sets of photos on her site. The downside is that she doesn't actually make the clothes... which is a shame. On the other hand it has been seen before anyway. What's that Argentineans(?) name? The one with the bellybuttons- and nipples- handbags and clothing.

...now that I think about it - I should probably have more naked ladies on this blog. That always seem to be popular.

More skin then:

"... skin is the largest organ of the integumentary system ... accounting for about 15 percent of body weight."

Clones
Originally uploaded by MarcoVision / GenAid.com.

A seducing vision of a not so tempting future.

One of my all time favorite sets on flickr. They seem to be made with very simple means... but get a very convincing reality out of it.

Marco, who made these darned nice pictures, calls them GenAid... checking that out led me on to... genaid.com:

"Welcome to Genaid Corporation. We are a Cloning and Evolution Improvement clinic established in 2002, offering our expertise and products to improve .. YOU".

And they use such terms as Smart Evolution.

Not bad.

And while we're at it I'd better link back to my old post about Transhumanism... they really mean business.