Instant crush on the works and words of artist/”personal trainer” Nina Cristante ! She develops a low key, intuitive, diy, fluid, elusive (as opposed to marketable), critical/common sense approach to well-being, diet, exercise… Part of her “frugal” Fitness Povero program (a take on the italian Arte Povera) is her “homeworks” collection of physical exercises videos, which she made in her bedroom and to which she also composed the music.
Tag Archives: Art
Journées Self-Love & Bien-être collectif @Montréal, 12-21 Février
Info et planning détaillé des activités / Info and events schedule >> Politics and Care
From AI WEIWEI with LOVE
Today AI WEIWEI shuts down his exhibition in Copenhagen in protest at a new law that allows authorities to steal asylum seekers’ valuables as they enter Denmark. Meanwhile, those who couldn’t make it to his great exhibition in the Royal Academy of arts in London can now enjoy a full 360 visit of the show online – Julian Assange, for example, fellow political dissident and refugee still trapped inside the Ecuadorian embassy not far after years of a really stinky legal deadlock, is grateful and has a little foreword to share (check how he says hello).
MIAU !
Quinta-feira, dia 8, às 19h
Filme MIAU: Movimiento insurrecto por la autonomía de Una Misma
* seguido de conversa de boca cheia sobre saúde sexo e autonomia
“Convidamos todas e todos a assistir a este documentário!
É uma chamada a todas as que ignoramos o funcionamento do nosso corpo e nos vemos submetidas a qualquer estrutura machista e patriarcal, seja a médica, a farmacêutica ou qualquer pessoa ou instituição que nos tente silenciar.
Nós lutamos para viver numa sociedade livre e enquanto o fazemos, criamos laços de confiança e compartilhamos o conhecimento aprendido, esperando que se entenda que aí está a graça, em aprender e ensinar, com generosidade, matando o ego e a usura.
Por isso este documentário é uma prenda, porque é conhecimento livre.”
Sexta-feira, dia 9, às 18h
Workshop livre – Calendário menstrual e partilha de experiências
Chelsea, Holly, Mat, Jacob & Metahaven ITV with <3
“We are at the beginning of a new epoch”, Chelsea Manning in a conversation with musicians/artists Holly Herndon, Matt Dryhurst, Metahaven and Jacob Appelbaum in PAPERMAG here
LOTS OF LOVE and VISIONS !!
Support Chelsea Manning, DONATE to her defense fund
The Body as a sound Post Gender instrument – Akelarre Cyborg workshop @Lisboa 6-7/06
Neste workshop de dois dias, os participantes são introduzidos na arte da performance enquanto instrumento político, através da modificação dos corpos com recurso a diferentes tipos de próteses e da criação de identidades híbridas, que procuram ultrapassar dicotomias como natural/artificial, homem/máquina, humano/animal, homem/mulher, hetero/homo, arte/vida, ciência/pré-tecnologia, entre outras.
Akelarre Cyborg é um projeto de dois laboratórios artísticos, Transnoise e Quimera Rosa, que investigam e experimentam questões de género e sexualidade e as suas relações com as artes e a tecnologia. O seu trabalho centra-se na criação coletiva de artefactos do-it-yourself enquanto ferramenta de re-significação da nossa relação com a tecnologia e no seu papel na produção de subjetividade. Ao mesmo tempo, tenta criar um espaço recreativo através do desenvolvimento de organismos híbridos (cyber drag) num processo simbólico de mutação de objetos quotidianos.
Através da manipulação de pequenos circuitos eletrónicos serão construídas exoesculturas que serão usadas numa performance final.
Em inglês
Sala de Ensaios
Preço único 10€
excecionalmente não se aceitam reservas • venda disponível apenas até 48h antes do início da oficina
Máximo 20 participantes
Não é necessária experiencia prévia
Os participantes podem trazer os seus próprios materiais
TEATRO MARIA MATOS
LISBOA
Less is more: THSF 14-17 Mai @Toulouse
Cette fin de semaine au Toulouse Hacker Space Factory, un programme de conférences, ateliers, performances. Poussy Draama a.k.a Le cabinet mobile du DocteuRe Duchesne sera avec son camion pour des consultations en sexologie/gyneco, open source, roots, DIY, <3.
Jerémie Zimmerman, co-fondateur de La Quadrature du Net et Hacker-with-care parlera droits et libertés sur Internet. RYBN présentera Flashcrash, And More. Bon Weekend et Lots of Love.
Creative Group Therapy @FACT, Liverpool
5 March 2015 – 17 May 2015 at Foundation For Art and Creative Technology, Liverpool
Exhibition GROUP THERAPY: Mental Distress in a Digital Age
Originating from FACT’s extensive work within mental health and wellbeing, the exhibition explores the complex relationship between technology, society, and mental health.
A church inside a nut
What is the punishment of Tantalus ? A very intimate light that warms my night
What is suicide ? Slowly descending with the leisure of going up
What is Love ? A very quiet street that you only cross once
What is really hungry ? A silver ink pot filled with blood
What is nobility ? The wind coming from the woods
What is courage ? A church inside a nut
What is a head bump ? An expansion on the back of the head
What is reason ? A letter from far away
What is the night ? A very ancient text sang by a multitude of frogs
What is fate ? Love to its entire length
What is childhood ? An island that is fast emerging
What is painting ? An immense Turkish bath
What is the monarchy ? A bag of stones asking to be carried
What are we doing ? The day
What do we expect ? Your hope
Who is your mother ? A beggar who waits until it’s dark to laugh
What are we ? The eyes of a bird who died travelling
Who was Mario Cesariny ? A distracted oracle who never told the truth
Where did he live ? In the lap of a statue made of flour
Why did he live ? Because there were those who wanted to kill him
Mario Cesariny
Artwork Bruno Borges / Oficina Arara
Beach Dynamics
Artist Theo Jansen makes these pacific beasts out of electric tubes, bamboo sticks, cables, they walk propelled by the wind on the beach of La Hague, they evolve year after year, and he calls them I.A.
Way more enchanting than Boston Dynamics beasts.
FYI: A Strandbeest + documentation are currently exhibited at Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
Jesse Krimes prison artworks and symbolic escapes
Jesse Krimes prison artwork “Purgatory” is visible until May in Paris, in Le Bord Des Mondes, an unusual collective exhibition, particularly exciting to hackers-makers mind (see also Takis).
On his work and prison : “Incarceration marked a moment of personal crisis for me, providing an encounter with difference and generating desire and fear, enlightenment and profound disquiet. Being confined to a cell and mediated existence, all measure within prison seems to collapse, leaving only time to reflect. This reflection was the catalyst for significant shifts in my thinking that ultimately facilitated my body of work. The work I created in prison references the tradition of topographical reliquary, which links an object’s meaning to the sacred importance of its originating place. Interpreted through Robert Smithson’s concept of the non-site, the sheets, soaps, and playing cards correspond to Hegel’s non-being and therefore effectively represent anti-reliquaries or reliquaries from Hell. My temporary effacement from the world resulted in a limbo state between being and non-being, where my only interaction with the outside world was mediated and therefore virtual. Ironically, left with only myself, my life-long questions of self-worth and identity were finally answered. I am an artist. This sense of self fortified my identity and through my art I “escaped” prison.
Apokaluptein:16389067
My large-scale project, Apokaluptein:16389067 was conceived and executed within federal prison. The title references the Greek origin of the word apocalypse meaning to ‘uncover, reveal;’ an event involving destruction or damage on a catastrophic scale; the numbers reference my Federal Bureau of Prisons identification number. My process involved smuggling contraband works through the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the United States Postal Service, piece by piece, over a period of six years, resulting in a forced Exquisite Corpse with myself. Apokaluptein:16389067 is a series of 39 disembodied prison sheets sutured together, making up a collective installation of dimensions as vast as the history and timeline represented over my seventy-month absence. I used hair gel as a transfer medium and a plastic spoon hand-press to transfer images I collected from The New York Times. The fragmented images, removed from narrative sources are inverted and effaced from their supports. I then blended the images together through hand-drawn extensions in color pencil. The interior of the prison revealed, its skin defaced and simultaneously veiled with the transferred images of the daily reality it denies.
Purgatory
Purgatory is a series of 300 carved prison-issued soaps confined within used prison playing cards. Using a hand-printing technique, I transferred the New York Times portrait heads onto wet soap fragments, leaving inverse traces of the appropriated image. I began interpreting these “offender” portraits or decapitated heads as “ink-scaffolds,” the printed counterpart of the Foucauldian scaffold. I concealed the resulting soaps within used decks of playing cards. I sharpened the interior connector of a AAA battery on the cement floor of my prison cell as a tool to cut window-like structures into each card which were then adhered together using toothpaste and soap shavings to form containers to conceal the printed soaps. The playing card containers with altered suits and face cards expand the boundaries of chance to form new poetic constellations outside the systematic rules of the game.
>> JESSE KRIMES
TransHackFeminist convergence report
With next edition soon in Puebla, Mexico, find out what went on last summer at THF! in the convergence report HERE, and from there access many resources. Feminist Servers, Gynecology Punk Bio-labs, Corporal Decolonization, Public Key Signing Ceremonies, Hacking the Baby / Family, (Let’s talk about) Death cafés, Crips Sexuality, Liberating technologies…
Drawing lessons
To draw to take the time to look at things, to perceive and to design, to be delicate, to sense beauty, to relate to it, to rejuvenate one’s mind after the ravages of emergency, or boredom, or blackness, to save one’s eyes.
Some thoughts and drawing exercises in the Three Letters for beginners of THE ELEMENTS OF DRAWING, by John Ruskin
“5. Everything that you can see in the world around you, presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colors variously shaded. Some of these patches of color have an appearance of lines or texture within them, as a piece of cloth or silk has of threads, or an animal’s skin shows texture of hairs: but whether this be the case or not, the first broad aspect of the thing is that of a patch of some definite color; and the first thing to be learned is, how to produce extents of smooth color, without texture.”
“21. You will see that all the boughs of the tree are dark against the sky. Consider them as so many dark rivers, to be laid down in a map with absolute accuracy; and, without the least thought about the roundness of the stems, map them all out in flat shade, scrawling them in with pencil, just as you did the limbs of your letters; then correct and alter them, rubbing out and out again, never minding how much your paper is dirtied (only not destroying its surface), until every bough is exactly, or as near as your utmost power can bring it, right in curvature and in thickness. Look at the white interstices between them with as much scrupulousness as if they were little estates which you had to survey, and draw maps of, for some important lawsuit, involving heavy penalties if you cut the least bit of a corner off any of them, or gave the hedge anywhere too deep a curve; and try continually to fancy the whole tree nothing but a flat ramification on a white ground. Do not take any trouble about the little twigs, which look like a confused network or mist; leave them all out, drawing only the main branches as far as you can see them distinctly, your object at present being not to draw a tree, but to learn how to do so. (…)”
“22. You cannot do too many studies of this kind: every one will give you some new notion about trees. But when you are tired of tree boughs, take any forms whatever which are drawn in flat color, one upon another; as patterns on any kind of cloth, or flat china (tiles, for instance), executed in two colors only; and practice drawing them of the right shape and size by the eye, and filling them in with shade of the depth required.”
Tree Hug
Transmediale @Berlin 28/01-01/02
Transmediale Festival opens this week in Berlin
Check out the program ..
.. William Binney, w/ A Freedom of Information in Reverse : A screening and Discussion of SILENCED
Evgeny Morozoz, in All Watched over by Algorithms
GOODIEPAL, w/ El Camino del Hardcore
and more
Qui veut un câlin Google ?
Petite “présentation” de l’enfer pavé de bonnes intentions Google, Google nous veut du bien, dans le journal LUNDI MATIN n°7 du 19 Janvier.
Une Arme de choix / Weapon of choice (Florence Tran)
Une Arme de Choix from florence TRAN on Vimeo.
La caméra peut être une arme de prise de conscience et de résistance. Pendant la révolution égyptienne, réalisateurs et cinéastes égyptiens ont essayé, chacun à leur manière, d’agir, de témoigner, de peser sur ce long et complexe processus de transformation. Dans un contexte chaotique, explosif et volatil, comment donner du sens à tous ces bouleversements ? A travers leurs choix et leurs témoignages, ce film est une radiographie d’une société au cœur de la tempête, un état des lieux des défis et des dilemmes qui la traversent. Ceux qui filment essayent de comprendre, posent un diagnostic, proposent aussi des pistes pour s’en sortir… et surtout rester engagés, malgré les difficultés.
Weapon of Choice from florence TRAN on Vimeo.
Leçon de visualisation (Florence Tran)
Leçon de visualisation from florence TRAN on Vimeo.
And now time for something completely different
Monty Python’s Funniest Joke in the World – Killer
Free Hugs
Free Hugs Short Film from Tarquin Ramsay on Vimeo.
Para Além do Big Brother @Lisbon & Estoril Film Fest. 14-16 Nov.
VIVA ! Este fim-de-semana, o simpósio a não perder do festival de Estoril : Três dias de discussões e projecções sobre a vigilância de massas (incluído a projecção do CITIZENFOUR de Laura Poitras em sua presença) e participantes como o advogado Baltasar Garzòn, Jacob Appelbaum (TOR), Julian Assange (Wikileaks), fundadores de La Quadrature du Net Jeremie Zimmerman, Philippe Aigrain, entre outros. FORÇA !
Holly Herndon’s NSA break up song
Holly Herndon’s HOME, a love/break up song “for prying eyes” and corrupt confidants/devices. Data rain of NSA symbols in music video by Metahaven.
Holly Herndon says:
For my debut album Movement, I communicated an intimacy with my laptop. It is my instrument, memory, and window to most people that I love. It is my Home.
The ongoing NSA revelations have fundamentally changed this relationship. I entrusted so much in my device. To learn this intimacy had been compromised felt like a grand betrayal. Is everything done privately on my laptop to be considered a public performance?
Metahaven says:
The NSA spying on our network may have been tacitly known from reports going back as far as 2002, but the aesthetics of this surveillance were not so known. Code names, acronyms, icons and graphics from a shadow world designed to never be publicly exposed.
For “Home,” we created a data rain of these NSA symbols.
Body Imaging (SANCTUS, Barbara Hammer)
Barbara Hammer‘s movie SANCTUS on UBUWeb
“Sadly reduced by hype machines to a pioneer of “lesbian cinema” (whatever that means), Barbara Hammer has a long career in creative and critical filmmaking, constantly trying to find new narrative forms and technical possibilities to offer the world a personal view on such themes as physical disease, media, gender, sexuality, age or health-care. In her 1990 short Sanctus, the main point seems to be the time-honored dictum of the body as a temple, or, as the author put it, of a body in need of skeletal protection from a corrupting and diseasing environment. Hammer used old x-ray footage, rearranged, colored and orchestrated through optical printing, in order to reveal hidden bodily movements and rhythms in its constant juxtaposition.” — Sound of Eye
E agora ? What now ?
Portuguese film sound engineer, producer and director Joaquim Pinto has been living with HIV and Hepatitis C for years and lost quite a few of his friends and collaborators to the virus along the way.
Beaten but not down, blurred yet bright and sharp, he offers a rare testimony with E agora ? Lembra-me a personal diary he filmed over a year as he was undergoing experimental drug testing in Madrid. His collections and recollections though, are mostly set in and outside the home he shares with his long love and husband Nuno (also infected) in a dry luminous countryside of Portugal.
As the four seasons go round we are invited to feel along the repercussions of the clinical trials, but mostly the passing of time, with its very own pace, its redundancies big and small, challenging will, challenging life, the questions and, eventually, the answers only time can bring… The movie opens with a shot of a slug crossing the screen on a dead leaf: You could not accelerate certain processes even if you would, so bear with them. The trips to Madrid, transiting through frantic airports, seem all the more brutal in that perspective (Why do we do that to ourselves ? is among the questions that are raised).
While the announced intention of the film is to record and evaluate the effects of the drugs tested in Madrid (noting side effects you’ll never read about in a drug leaflet) it soon appears that the subject is not so much that but rather other forms and ingredients of care, which although not mentioned as such (and maybe they shouldn’t!) become evaluated in parallel, much more positively. Pretty honestly or “sem merda” as some friends around me have put it.
So yes, honestly : At the end of the day what is really keeping Joaquim, Nuno, us, alive through hardships ?
Here are some suggestions from the film:
Love, definitely. Partnerships, setting the preservation of (a good) life and care of one another as priorities… Abundance of fresh air and sunlight, a connection with nature, mediated by animals, through farming, all of which help keep regular (and circadian) cycles of work, play, rest… Being responsible for someone else, caring for them, a lover, an old dog, a young tree threatened by drought and wildfires… A connection with past generations, some sort of historical inscription in the community of mankind and on the tree of life on earth (“we are not special, just recent”)… Peaceful renunciations to what is no longer suited, all the while reaffirming commitments to what matters most… Solidarity, sharing information, experiences, expression of the voices of the weak… A relative autonomy and self-sufficiency, carefully balancing the dependencies to absurd and adverse economical and healthcare systems… Critical thinking, intellectual curiosity… Creativity, art… Cinema..? As a critic notes “this hypnotic video essay eases the discomforts of the flesh with the comforts of moviemaking” and “the film repeatedly erases the neutral hues of sickness with the lush vibrancy of nature.” So it does.
One long phrase of movement
Trio A (The Mind is a Muscle, part I), Yvonne Rainer, 1966
“[Trio A] would be about a kind of pacing where a pose is never struck. No sooner had the body arrived at the desired position than it would go immediately into the next move, not through momentum but through a very prosaic going on. And there would be different moves-getting down on the floor, getting up. There would be this pedestrian dynamic that would suffuse and connect the whole thing. So the whole thing, though it would be composed of these fragments of movement unrelated both kinetically and positionally or shapewise, would look as though it were one long phrase. There would be no dramatic changes like leaps. There was a kind of folky step that had a rhythm to it and I worked a long time to get the syncopation out of it. In a way the opening da, da, da, da of the arms set the rhythm of the whole thing. There were exceptions to this rule, but this began to be the overall structure rhythmically and dynamically of this solo.”
-Yvonne Rainer, interview with Lyn Blumenthal, 1984, reprinted in Rainer, “A Woman Who . . . Essays, Interviews, Scripts” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 64
“Feel what the medium has done to you”: Artist Yin Aiwen
Taking media analyst Marshall Mc Luhan’s famous theoretical pun that “the medium is the massage” almost to the letter as a staring point, chinese artist Yin Aiwen designs a performance-installation in which massage plays a central part, until the initial statement appears to be reversed, and “the massage” re-installs itself as “the medium”. A true human massage ultimately appears as a possible antidote to the panoply of psycho-physical pains quite willingly (=unconsciously?) inflicted to oneself by the modern human, otherwise “massaged” into a disembodied alienation by the soft, gentle, falsely-caring mass media machinery.
I as a masseuse happen to think highly about massage, and this work strikes me as interesting. I may have a few hesitations about the piece (mostly about the dispositive), still I feel it is conveying important, inspiring, and potentially emancipative material.
The dispositive is as follow: Yin Aiwen gives a 15 minutes a chinese medical massage to a participant installed in a massage chair, at the headset of which is installed a tablet playing a video-montage of clips from mass culture. A voice over reads, in a more or less relaxing, therapeutical tone, a text exploring the relationship between media, machines (computers specifically) and the receiver’s body, their pain, their vitality, all along questioning them, engaging them in instructive feedback loops with their sensations. A small audience is invited to watch the session.
It is almost a clever piece of reverse engineering, Yin Aiwen giving a massage and deducing, from the informations she collects at her expert fingertips, the design of the “end product”, the end product here being the human being in the capitalist world… So that she could then re-build this human being, re-model them, correct them, free them from this socio-economical-mechanical blocking ?
I have not assisted to the performance myself, so my judgment and impressions are of course limited. I only watched the video documentation, which I find was already quite an experience, and I strongly advise you to watch it ! As for the text, for which I post below a full transcript, it contains some gems and, in the light of my own experience, it speaks a lot of truth, however in somewhat dark aspects of it.
In the end, the piece altogether appears to be slightly too demonstrative, still too spectacular to my taste, authoritarian and somewhat cruel for the receiver (!) but Yin Aiwen completely admits it, for it serves her purpose : “The harsh, ruthless massage has no interest in your pleasure”, she writes. It gets the “message”/”massage” across…
However I believe this “message” is in essence one that emerges from massage during a private session. Indeed, a good massage will “inform” you of your condition. Here and now, and before, and even possibly give you an insight on after. It will move and question those layers of histories embedded in your flesh, sometimes it will allow images, memories, dreams, fantasies, to flash behind your eyelids, without a video being necessary. It will present to your consciousness, at your own pace, material very personal, possibly life improving; hints, cues, directions given by your senses to finding yourself again, connecting with yourself so that you be again the one “living” rather than the one being “operated” by. This way of the massage is known, and listened to, by many massage artists, practicians and therapists.This piece speaks to me of the substance of which good massage sessions are made of.
Find out more about the Massage is the medium by Yin Aiwen here.
Welcome to the plug in systems.
Your body will be massaged in a few seconds,
Please relax…
You are going to experience a story that is specifically made by you, enjoy.
Please relax…
Some cream will be applied to your neck and shoulders,
It’s going to be fine,
Things will be nice and smooth…
Good
That’s right
After your fifteen minutes massage, you’ll feel free like never before.
Now your neck is being touched, does it hurt ?
Have you noticed this type of pain before ?
I know you work in front of the computer a lot, picture that scene :
Do you see your face with the screen light on, glowing in the dark, just like everyone else ?
You work late quite often, don’t you ?
The quiet night… Only the sounds of your keyboard is in company.
Do you feel those blocks here ? It hurts a lot, doesn’t it ?
You must be the kind of person that is constantly thinking, probably getting annoyed by it sometimes.
Your tired brain creates this block.
It’s in the way in which your brain gets all the supplies.
So when it gets blocked, the supplies – oxygen, nutrients, and blood – will have difficulties to get into your brain.
Tiredness must be an old friend of yours.
That’s why you need this massage :
To clear out the scene, to make it work again…
Computers change you, starting from your hands,
Grow into your chest, get into your back, then to your neck, and eventually, to your brain…
I know you thought that your body was irrelevant, didn’t you ?
Otherwise, you wouldn’t let it be like this…
As if it’s just the operator of your mind, and you thought your mind is eternal,
travelling in the infinite universe, pluging into the mortal nervous circuits, being free…
The strain muscle you have, many people have it nowadays.
It used to be a professional injury for people doing paperwork.
But nowadays, almost everyone has it.
Even children have it.
See how stiff your front neck is.
It indicates the condition of your chest
Like here, the end point of your chest muscles, and the starting point of your arms’…
Do you feel how it goes all the way down to the hand that types the keyboard ?
Your injured body has become the burden of your digital soul.
It’s ok, many people thought so.
People say fickleness is the theme of society now
Streaming tweets, 24/7
Optical transmission, day and night…
The facebook « one for all, all for one » utopia, right in front of your eyes…
Your fingers dance on your keyboard non-stop
Your Iphone camera flashes at every corner of your life
Your exciting brain on wire, all season…
You are so willing to share yourself to the world,
That you are pleased to shatter yourself into a hundred and forty pieces…
All the consequences then fall on your back,
Sink into your neck, permeate your brain…
They change you so quietly that you thought it’s your choice.
Do you see your face with the screen light on, glowing in the dark, just like everyone else ?
Physical pain is easy to forget of course.
That’s why you constantly hurt yourself.
Do you see how badly you have hurt yourself ?
It’s so painful it almost becomes emotional.
Feel it…
Feel what has happened to you…
Feel what the medium has done to you…
Think about what you have done to yourself…
Can this pain that you have done to yourself make you regretful ?
The medium is the massage.
The sweet exciting kind of massage, catering to your every wish,
Manufacturing your desire, regulating your recognition,
Until you can’t tell if there is another kind of life anymore…
All you can see is what has been given,
ALL that has been given is ALL you can imagine…
In the world of cyber capital
Everything is soft, fluffy, gentle, fulfilling…
Like a massage.
Satisfying your longing to be cared for, to feel special, to feel loved…
All you need to do is to pick a set that is all designed.
Yes, the special design, only for you…
And a million duplications of you.
You think this massage is made for you, don’t you ?
Like this, it happens for a reason,
Reasons that are based on your condition
But so many people have the same condition,
The same analysis of you…
I did it to dozens and dozens and dozens of people.
You are the same, you are all made the same.
Together you are precious, together you are special,
Together you are unique, together you are alone.
It’s not enough that machines code your life.
It’s not enough that they design every inch of your life.
You will only be perfect when its perspective becomes yours,
Your only perspective.
Only then you will have your true freedom :
Boundless, painless, senseless, heartless…
Do you see your face with the screen light on, glowing in the dark, just like everyone else ?
In this optical fiber world, you are transcendant.
Your face is flattened after the speed of light.
You can barely see others faces, and others can barely see yours.
So you talk as loud as you can, in one way or another,
So you can grab as many hurried travellers as possible…
After all, the mass man needs the proof of his living…
So fifteen minutes of attention is already an extravagance.
If possible a massive killing weapon is in favour.
So taking a massage to you becomes a very odd, even uncomfortable idea, doesn’t it ?
You needed to have so many decent reasons to give yourself in, didn’t you ?
But you need this massage.
Through others hands, it reminds you that you are still human.
Through the pain, it reminds you that you are not entirely numb, yet.
You are more than the electrical signals from your neurons.
Your communication with people is more than a faceless P2P transmission.
The massage is the medium.
This person behind you, who’s touching you, trying to find out what happened to you,
Do you see her as a human ?
Two euros slide in a coin slot, and a piece of hamburger jumps out…
She’s not a walking commodity, providing catalogue services,
But that’s why you felt uncomfortable about the idea, isn’t it ?
It’s a better design that pryes your heart with a decent distance…
Have you noticed the silent communication between you and her ?
Or are you just struggling to fight with your body, learning about yourself ?
It’s ok, she knows what you have been through.
Underneath the fingertips size of skin that she connects to you, your trembling muscles are shedding a tear…
She knows.
The pain you’re experiencing is the last mayday your body screams out to you, do you hear that ?
Feel it…
Feel your blood running through your body…
So powerful, as if you are alive again…
Feel this warmth inside, as if you are being cared for…
Feel what is happening now…
Feel where they came from, and where they will go…
Feel it, before this massage comes to an end…
I would like to thank you for dedicating yourself to this experiment.
I hope it means something to you.
Before you unplug yourself,
Please take a deep breath,
And I would like to ask you : Do you think I am human ?