Nick Soni
ONE HUNDRED PEOPLE
Adam wrote a very insightful piece relating to humanity a while back on SpaceCollective. I found it very interesting and a possible approach to understanding the politics of skin in a different way.
Link or read below:
From Adam's Personal Cargo
"Who gets to go?
If we would want a space colony of 100 people to represent the worldâs population accurately, the demographics would look something like this:
The colony would have 60 Asians, 14 Africans, 12 Europeans, 8 Latin Americans, 5 from the USA and Canada, and 1 from the South Pacific
51 would be male, 49 would be female
2 would be non-white
67 would be non-Christian
67 would be unable to read
50 would be malnourished and 1 dying of starvation
33 would be without access to a safe water supply
39 would lack access to improved sanitation
24 would not have any electricity.
11 would be homosexual
7 people would have access to the Internet
1 would have a college education
1 would have HIV
2 would be near birth; 1 near death
5 would control 32% of the entire worldâs wealth; all 5 would be US citizens
33 would be receiving âand attempting to live onâ only 3% of the income of âthe villageâ
30 would smoke.
Question: Do you get to smoke in outerspace?
Mon, May 14, 2007"
Posted on May 5, 2008
MONSTERS OF THE FLESH: SUMMARY
In one sentence
Our social organizations of humanity through time can be understood through the physical organizations of our bodies and recognized as images of human identity in these reorganized skins.
In one paragraph
Skin is the identity of humanity. It is something that defines our human image on all levels of our senses, and is essential to the human symbol. As humanity continues to move forward and create new and different organizations of society, our social bodies continually change; organizations of family, government, or class and power. We can use the organizations of our own physical body to understand these social bodies, and thus producing variable human images and identities through the reorganization of flesh.
Posted on April 23, 2008
MONSTERS OF THE FLESH
Images Text
SKIN
SKIN IS THE HUMAN IDENTITY
It is countless cells, layered, complex, and fragile. It is living, breathing, protective flesh. It is our physical social self. It is dark, it is light. It is beautiful, it is monstrous, it is human.
SKIN MAKES US HUMAN
Humans recognize each other as human through our skins. It is the touch, look, smell, taste, and sounds of the human symbol. Skin is the outermost layer of our body that represents our own human image. It is how one is recognized, accepted, rejected, loved, hated, glorified, pitied, forgotten, and remembered. To have human skin, is...to be human.
SOCIAL BODIES
Humans are social organisms. We work, build, innovate, and live together. Over time, our social bodies have changed and evolved. What was once a way of organizing our society 3000 years ago is different from 100 years ago and will be different 100 years from now,and who knows in another 1000 years.
SOCIAL ORGANIZATION
As humanity continues to move forward and create new and different organizations of society, our social bodies continually change; organizations of family, government, or class and power. There can be shifts seen in the past, and the shifts that need to be made in the future to accommodate our new societies. Our social flesh is one of evolution and change.
BODIES AS ORGANIZATION
We can use our own bodies to understand our social bodies. Understanding our social selves through our own human skins is a way for flesh, the image of the human, to work on the greater social scale. This is a way to bring the flesh of the many different skins of the world into one socially fleshed body. We can look to the anatomy of our social bodies through our own.
SKIN AS ORGANIZATION
Skin is the formation of flesh around the organs of the human body. Skin is the manifestation of our organs being organized in a specific method. If our organs are reorganized, so is our skin, thus changing the human image.
THE MONSTROSITY OF THE FLESH
When imagining this monster, it is the equivalent of the destruction of the human through genetic engineering mistakes, industrial, nuclear, and even natural disasters.
"The unformed and unordered are horrifying" (192 Multitude).
However, the social organizations of our flesh only seem unordered and horrifying, but rather are simply different formations of our skins, different formations of humanity. We are all monsters, it is just a matter of our skins.
IDENTITY OF THE HUMAN
We can use the organizations of our own physical body to understand these social bodies, and thus producing variable human images and identities through the reorganization of flesh. In the creation of these monsters, we can better understand our social selves through our physical selves, all due to our new formations of skin.
Posted on April 23, 2008
MULTITUDE
"Looking at our postmodern society,...one can see that what we experience is a kind of social flesh, flesh that is not a body, a flesh that is common, living substance" (192).
"The flesh of the multitude is pure potential, an unformed life force, and in this sense an element of social being, aimed constantly at the fullness of life" (192).
Posted on April 17, 2008
HUMAN AS HIERARCHY
The human skin is a binding factor of humanity. It is how we understand each other, and recognize ourselves as being human. As we lose this skin, or as it changes, we become 'monsters', less and less human.
Michael Hardt and Atonio Negri, in their non-fiction book Multitude speak of a monstrosity of the flesh. This monstrosity of the flesh is in reaction to our post-modern society in which individuals must ban together in goal of the fullness of life to achieve true democracy.
However, Realizing that our contemporary society is moving towards a globalized world in which power is handed to the few, and the multitude, the people of the Earth, are left at the bottom of this hierarchal society.
Using skin and flesh as a metaphor for this transition of human identity, I want to redefine the image of the human in this approaching empire.
Currently we are in a state of biology that reflects our shifting society that relies on a hierarchal power, but is still able to function even with the loss of certain organs and flesh. There is undoubtedly an amount of control we rely upon in our bodies with organs such as the brain, and heart, but this is also true in our own society where we rely upon the government and other entities to provide certain things for us.
By understanding this parallel of our bodies to our social organization I have began to think about what our bodies would be like, what monster would be created, if our bodies reflected the approaching globalization and empire of the world. Multitude describes the monster of the flesh as a constantly adapting and rearranging organ that changes in accordance to needs. In contrast, I would like to explore what the body would become in a world where there is a rearrangement, but according to a adhering hierarchical society, rather than a fluid democracy.
Posted on April 17, 2008
CONCEPT PROPOSALS
Wrappers
We recognize humans by their skin. The tone, look, and feel of it all help us classify humans over other species on this planet. It is something that we alone, as humans have in common, and is the most outward part of ourselves that we can recognize together.
The moment we begin to apply this skin to other objects it becomes more human. A robot, no matter how humanistic it looks, if it is still made of steel, looks like a robot. But the moment we wrap it in a skin, the robot gains even more human qualities. Just as if I were to wrap a branch of a tree, or a bottle of water, the skin is automatically recognized as a human characteristic.
The idea of wrapping and identifying ourselves in these ways seems like a integral part of being human, or at least as what we consider more human, than if we did not have skin.
Christo's Wrapped Reichstag.
Destruction of Flesh
Nearly every horror movie depicts people being cut, gored, stabbed, and pretty much having their skin torn apart. The constant fear of what can happen to our skin is ever present. It is something we cannot escape. But why did we evolve in this way? Have our own tools and inventions of machines and clothing led to the destruction of one of our most basic survival organs? Why is the toughness of elephant skin not present on our own bodies, and why has our skin become so weak. Easily destroyed, our flesh is relatively useless in the protection of our bodies against most man made tools.
Zombies!
I think it would be very interesting to explore how easy and vulnerable our flesh is, and how that affects how people act and react in the world. How it scares people to be cutting into something that seems so human, and how penetration of the body in many ways is just damn scary.
Posted on April 15, 2008
POLITICS OF SKIN
Suicide Club
A Independent Japanese film from 1992 depicting an underground type of suicide club where people are killing themselves all over Tokyo for no apparent reason and leaving behind small white bags as a symbol. In the white bags are rolls of skin the people who kill themselves leave behind.
The roll of skin in this case has to be symbolic of something. Cutting one's own skin off is like detaching a small part of their body, their being. Skin's connection to the self and the being is very important and deep to people. Skin means much more than just a layer of cells wrapping around our blood and bones, but the outward and physical appearance of our selves.
Orlan
This was pretty creepy to research. A French artist who filmed and broad casted several plastic surgeries of herself transforming her body and face and showed it in places around the world.
"I can observe my own body cut open, without suffering!... I see myself all the way down to my entrails; a new mirror stage. "I can see to the heart of my lover; his splendid design has nothing to do with sickly sentimentalities"- Darling, I love your spleen; I love your liver; I adore your pancreas, and the line of your femur excites me" (Orlan from Carnal Art Manifesto).
In another famous work Orlan exposed her sexual organs, during her period, under a magnifying glass. Gross? I think I have a weak stomach.
Orlan however becomes a work of art herself. She subjects herself to the artistic world and challenges the meaning of beauty and the body. She takes it upon her self, and her surgeries to display her importance to art and science and technology. She deals with the problems of peeling, dissection, revealing what is underneath our skins. Creepy, but powerful stuff.
Orlan.
Stelarc
Stealarc is a Australian performance artist who believes that the human body has become obsolete. He is most well known for 25 performances where he hooked and hung himself from his skin on hooks. Another interesting work was when he let people control his body stimulations over the internet, attempting to broaden his audience more and more over time.
Hanging by hooks.
"There was only the initial intention of doing one suspension. But having hung the body horizontally face-down it triggered a series of 4 performances rotating the body in space. Positioned upside down, horizontal face-up and vertical, upright. Not only was the body in different positions but now longer static in suspension. It was spun, swung, hoisted and rotated and propelled. They were titled as events for stretched skin- the realisation that the body suspended in a 1G gravitational field pay the physical consequences for its ideas. The skin becomes part of the bodyâs support structure, itâs stretching generates what can be described as a gravitational landscape. This is the authentication of the action of suspending a body with mass and weight in the IG gravitational field" (Stelarc).
Posted on April 15, 2008
SKIN
It is the outside that keeps our insides inside.
Leaving off from the human body I decided to keep looking at the human in a very physical way. The first thing I could see was that we were wrapped in skin. It was one thing to see how we understand the world, but another to see the importance of this organ among others when characterizing a human being. Our skin alone is not responsible for all our other senses, but it is one that is truly powerful in understanding a great deal of the world around us.
Normal human skin.
Functions
Human skin is a very sophisticated organ, and covers nearly all of the human body. Skin is able to protect the body, regulate heat, understand temperature sensation, control evaporation, storage of body material, excretion of waste, absorption, water resistance, and especially important in Los Angeles, works as a form of aesthetics and communication of mood or physical state.
Identity
Skin is obviously a crucial factor of the human experiences, but I wanted to know how it truly separates us from a lot of other creatures on the planet, or at least to find how it changes our image of ourselves. For this I looked to the fingerprint, a representation of our identities.
A human fingerprint.
A fingerprint is formed by the friction ridges all over our fingers. Fingerprints are consistent and unique to individuals and are only found on primates, and oddly the koala bear. I was hoping it would be a truly unique human characteristic form of identity for the human, but just like so many other things on Earth, it shares at least a few qualities.
The power, or lack of, of skin
Skin does a lot of things for humans and is undoubtedly a complicated organ, but no matter how much it tries to protect us, flesh is easily penetrable and fragile. Heat can burn it easily, and a car accident can destroy it in a completely different way. Even though skin can do so much for us, in many ways it is evolutionarily weak when compared to the toughness of cow hide, or a wolf's coat. The fragility does not destroy the beauty of its function however, and must be noted when trying to understand this important material of the human condition.
Posted on April 14, 2008
BRAND HUMANS
I'll begin at the beginning.
Last quarter, when critiquing the Voyager disk, my group and I realized just how horrible it was as a symbol of humanity and what humans were. It was a boring, lame, dry, and biased view of what humanity was. The first thing we decided was that we could not just present ourselves in pictures and words for aliens and ourselves to understand us, but to provide and experience. This was the stepping ground for the rest of the direction of our project. I would like to return to that point once again.
Pioneer's image of humans.
Experience
The idea of experience in general is important to the communication of this project. I want to provide an experience of what it means to be human to other life forms, and this requires knowing how we as humans experience that in the first place.
Sensory Beings
There are many philosophies about what it means to be human, and what constitutes experience. For this I looked at how we interact with the world in a very physical way. We know reality through our senses of sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste. The interactions of our sensory receptors send signals to our brain which are interpreted and understood as perception. This is integral to the experience of being a human being on Earth.
Shock To Thought
Understanding why we perceive these reality the way we do is very interesting to me. There is a moment where our minds snap and understand the signals that our sensory receptors are feeding it. The very notion of understanding a feeling or input, and recognizing it is very integral in understanding the human being.
Posted on April 14, 2008
