a meat world

With titles like 'Kiss the fat' for her paintings that aesthetically glorify meat, Victoria Reynolds seems to emphasize the intricate and sensual beauty of biological material. After the rise of modernism, people evidently became alienated from this, even up to a point where it is a taboo to even speak about such things and feelings of disgust are conditioned into us associated with these realms of perception.



But in the future, the organic will become ours to create, giving us a new toolkit to construct our world with. Already, functioning hearts, livers and fleshly objects alike can be grown on demand from mice cells. It is time we face the perspective that we are just a bunch of cells, like any other organism, and incorporate flesh into our daily awareness.

But besides that, I also find it just a fantastic choice of medium to depict these abstract structures of flesh like a 17th century Baroque oil painting, and shows us how things like nature don't mean much to us anymore. Instead, we came to prefer creating our own world, and in that increasingly match the complexity of the nature that gave rise to our own nascence. I'd say yes to a world made of pulsating, throbbing, interacting and interconnected structures of meat, instead of all this cold concrete we live in now.

now you can taste like bacon

In my experience, life is a process of refining and evolving the memes your actions are based on towards higher, more integral states of being. This does not mean that the memes we used to thrive by before disappear; instead they serve as a platform for the higher ones to emerge. Then if at some point we lose touch with the highest meme we live by, we always have the lower ones as anchor point and we can relapse towards them. But how big a relapse back to the summit of consumerism is this? Dead animals now become branded as objects to smear onto one's body for the intimate indulgence in the grandiose smell and taste of killed meat. This is not the Simpsons, it's real: buy it at amazon.com, 13 bucks for a four pack.

flesh, the new plastic

Tactility it's what it's all about in the work of Jason Briggs. In looking like scrambled up versions of the human body, his sculptural objects almost pornographically refer to the details of raw, naked flesh, with names like 'toe', 'squirt', and 'cinch'. To me though, although they look rather eerie, these objects look quite like complete organisms, or should I say organic products, as well. I can easily imagine this to be future products that almost in a sexual way are able to merge with a human user, to which it could provide certain functionalities in a very intimate, empathic and mutualistic fashion, even aligning its entire physiology to that of the human carrier. What if you'd have to dial a number on your cellphone by sticking your finger into a soft, warm, throbbing hole?

In product design, a trend towards softness and providing a wider range of tactile experiences can also definitely be seen, such as with designs like the strawberry skin juice package by Fukasawa, or the Gel remote control by Panasonic (see below). We are collectively bored with anything resembling modernism with all its coldness. Moreover have we visually been conditioned to like glossy, clean and sharp looking imagery, while this is actually drawing us further and further away from the intrinsic qualities of the body with which we stand into the world, which is undeniably soft, warm, and in a way also dirty. Maybe we should learn to embrace these properties too before we can fully start living, without facades clouding our perception.

Are we ready to succumb to the intimate touch of the machine?

Flesh controls

A screenshot from the third movie of Matthew Barney's magnum opus The Cremaster Cycle, where a main character, the apprentice, has landed on the surgery table, and doctors reveal what seems to be a turning knob from under some kind of horizontal labia. As the movie is from 2002 it is not very recent, but still very relevant and worth bringing under the attention.

The thought of having mechanical parts substitute for the body parts I have now somehow creates an enormous feeling of aversion. Unless grown from within, in continuous interaction with the rest of the body, it will always be a misfit, resulting in many unforeseen problems for the whole body.

Anyway, where Barney set the stage by provoking questions about such issues by means of metaphorical imagery, it is now time that we lose symbolic thinking, get real, and seriously plow through these issues for ourselves. We really want to gain some wisdom and sensitivity about our bodies and their interaction with their world, before we start to use our entire body as an open platform for modification the way we do with tattoos and piercings now. From consciously designing an identity that actually represents only a part of us, we need to learn how to revert to  our core selves and attune to our unconscious processes.