Becoming Skin Cell
Never forget this: your body does not end at the skin. Your contours are not constrained by physical appearance. Your morphological imaginary is fluid and changeable. Indeed, your tissues can absorb all kinds of fantasies. Your imagination generates more than mere mental images; its reach extends through your entire sensorium. Simultaneously visual and kinaesthetic, imaginings carry an affective charge. They can excite your muscles, tissues, and fascia, heighten or alter your senses. You can fold semiosis into sensation.Perceptual experiments can rearticulate your sensorium.And by imagining otherwise, and telling different stories, you can open up new sensible worlds. (Myers: 2014, npn)
To try to embody these thoughts offered by Natasha Myers (2014) is to situate ourselves in the materiality of our bodies, to acknowledge that our ‘body does not end at the skin’. This project seeks to disrupt patriarchal and colonial histories of the female nude, which
have sedimented a very specific ideal of what a 'perfect' woman looks like. The historical feminine skin has been sealed, it doesn't leak or sweat, it is hairless, wrinkles have been banished as the skin is always youthful. These skins speak of very specific identities, one that is usually white, youthful, slim, able bodied and heterosexual.In contemporary society, young women grow up often not seeing themselves reflected in the images that surround them, it perpetuates a paradoxical relationship of wanting to look like images that are impossible to emulate. This project seeks to disrupt the very notion of how we view the skin, and to do that it looks at the materiality of the skin, what the skin actually is.
To put your skin into context you have approximately 1.6 trillion skin cells at any one time. 30,000 to 40,000 of them fall away every hour. It is a journey which you are part of on a daily basis, one which usually takes four to six weeks but one that you are always in the middle of, forever commencing and also ending. The out layer of the skin is crawling with non human life forms, microbes that live within the cracks, exist between the sweat glands. And although this thought can make us feel uncomfortable, it is when we think about this, that we can start to disrupt the idealised and controlled image of the 'perfect' woman. 'Becoming Skin Cell' is an immersive art work that challenges these understandings of the historical skin and instead delves deep into the epidermis to ‘think through the skin’ (Ahmed and Stacey: 2001).
Make yourself comfortable in whatever space you are in. Spread a small amount of PVA glue on the back of your hand(s). Feel it’s coolness as you start to relax into your body.
Then play the film below and immerse yourself in what is a truly post-human experience.
To try to embody these thoughts offered by Natasha Myers (2014) is to situate ourselves in the materiality of our bodies, to acknowledge that our ‘body does not end at the skin’. This project seeks to disrupt patriarchal and colonial histories of the female nude, which
have sedimented a very specific ideal of what a 'perfect' woman looks like. The historical feminine skin has been sealed, it doesn't leak or sweat, it is hairless, wrinkles have been banished as the skin is always youthful. These skins speak of very specific identities, one that is usually white, youthful, slim, able bodied and heterosexual.In contemporary society, young women grow up often not seeing themselves reflected in the images that surround them, it perpetuates a paradoxical relationship of wanting to look like images that are impossible to emulate. This project seeks to disrupt the very notion of how we view the skin, and to do that it looks at the materiality of the skin, what the skin actually is.
To put your skin into context you have approximately 1.6 trillion skin cells at any one time. 30,000 to 40,000 of them fall away every hour. It is a journey which you are part of on a daily basis, one which usually takes four to six weeks but one that you are always in the middle of, forever commencing and also ending. The out layer of the skin is crawling with non human life forms, microbes that live within the cracks, exist between the sweat glands. And although this thought can make us feel uncomfortable, it is when we think about this, that we can start to disrupt the idealised and controlled image of the 'perfect' woman. 'Becoming Skin Cell' is an immersive art work that challenges these understandings of the historical skin and instead delves deep into the epidermis to ‘think through the skin’ (Ahmed and Stacey: 2001).
Make yourself comfortable in whatever space you are in. Spread a small amount of PVA glue on the back of your hand(s). Feel it’s coolness as you start to relax into your body.
Then play the film below and immerse yourself in what is a truly post-human experience.
Becoming Skin Cell: a morphological imagining
Close your eyes
and
Breathe.
Feel the breath expand your lungs and breathe out. Connect to this rhythm; be aware of the coolness of the skin as air is pulled upwards into your nose. Then follow this air through your body and draw your attention to your skin connecting with your clothes as you breathe. Imagine your clothes dissolving and that you are suspended in a cool water, swimming where the sensation of the water embraces your entire form, a moment where you can feel your whole surface.
Suspend yourself in this imaginary water and draw your attention to the outermost limit of the self.
Sink inwards and let go of your bodily self. Feel your bones dissolve. Your flesh melts away and you become membrane, become a thin single line of cells interlocked through a structure mimicking rows of bubble wrap.
You are infinite.
Play with this feeling; stretch with this malleable matter until you sense each bubble-wrapped cell start to divide. As one cell remains to divide over and over again, the other part of you is pulled magnetically upwards. You are morphing. Biochemical changes are occurring; you are generating a fibrous protein (keratin) that slowly fills up your structure. Feel your boundaries swell as your movement continues to pull you up, up.
You sense change. You are morphing, stretching from your centre. Feel this expansion as your nucleus begins to degenerate. You secrete a gooey matter (containing lipids, cholesterol, free saturated acids and ceramides). Fluids shift around you and fill spaces between, they form a protective barrier as you feel the sense of being pulled ever upwards. You can feel the presence of the cell next to you, now multiply this sensation, sense your surroundings of millions upon millions of ‘you’, sense this stratified and squamous scaly frontier. You have become one giant organ, a sensing agentic multi-layered membrane.
You are pulled forward, ejected into the light. You are dazzled, surrounded in your multitude, you feel the rush of a breeze across your surface. The air caresses and cajoles you, it teases you, cools you. Rest for a moment and drink in the light, feel the energetic thrill of connection, being a part of something that is all at once you and more than you.
You are connected but also in the process of leaving. Your cell-like self is sloughing, shedding, awaiting and sensing the beginning of the next cycle. You depart and arrive. You are one and a multitude, you are in constant state of becoming.
Suspend your disbelief in the true state of your being. Revel in your accomplishment of being entangled in human and post human becomings.
Refocus. Change is afoot. Time pushes on, the feeling of the machine-like qualities of the self simultaneously and continuously rises beneath you, a constant rumble of shifting and morphing cells embarking on the same journey you have just completed.
Your journey could perhaps be terminated here. You are flat, dead in biological terms. How can this be when you still feel active? Draw your attention for a moment to the life that occurs between your cell structures. You stretch out - a cracked desert - seemingly dry, but what little do you know of yourself? Streams of micro-bacterial life surge between your nooks and crannies. Sense these collaborations; sense the micro-organisms that crawl through and with you. You are part of a collaboration and intra-action; you are a more than human assemblage.
You pause, acknowledging your fellow travellers.
A force thrusts you into the air, you are suspended in space. Your connection is ruptured, and you float free, extending the surface beyond, you have diversified, dissolved, disintegrated. You are but matter, flecks of what once was treasured in its glory days as skin, pampered, washed and oiled. Now you are but dust that we each breathe in, ‘so even the essence of our neighbours tints our blood streams’ (Briscoe: 1997, 236).
Now it’s time to re-centre. Draw in your particles, re-stabilise yourself, draw back your cells to form once more the layer you sense as your skin. Feel the blood, flesh and bones, revitalise your core.
Come back to your breath.
Come back to your body.
But ask, is this the same body? Imagine seeing our true lively selves, our shedding skins suspended around us like a biodome. We each carry our neighbours, we are all together and separate, both single and whole.
Our imaginary boundaries are fleeting.
Close your eyes
and
Breathe.
Feel the breath expand your lungs and breathe out. Connect to this rhythm; be aware of the coolness of the skin as air is pulled upwards into your nose. Then follow this air through your body and draw your attention to your skin connecting with your clothes as you breathe. Imagine your clothes dissolving and that you are suspended in a cool water, swimming where the sensation of the water embraces your entire form, a moment where you can feel your whole surface.
Suspend yourself in this imaginary water and draw your attention to the outermost limit of the self.
Sink inwards and let go of your bodily self. Feel your bones dissolve. Your flesh melts away and you become membrane, become a thin single line of cells interlocked through a structure mimicking rows of bubble wrap.
You are infinite.
Play with this feeling; stretch with this malleable matter until you sense each bubble-wrapped cell start to divide. As one cell remains to divide over and over again, the other part of you is pulled magnetically upwards. You are morphing. Biochemical changes are occurring; you are generating a fibrous protein (keratin) that slowly fills up your structure. Feel your boundaries swell as your movement continues to pull you up, up.
You sense change. You are morphing, stretching from your centre. Feel this expansion as your nucleus begins to degenerate. You secrete a gooey matter (containing lipids, cholesterol, free saturated acids and ceramides). Fluids shift around you and fill spaces between, they form a protective barrier as you feel the sense of being pulled ever upwards. You can feel the presence of the cell next to you, now multiply this sensation, sense your surroundings of millions upon millions of ‘you’, sense this stratified and squamous scaly frontier. You have become one giant organ, a sensing agentic multi-layered membrane.
You are pulled forward, ejected into the light. You are dazzled, surrounded in your multitude, you feel the rush of a breeze across your surface. The air caresses and cajoles you, it teases you, cools you. Rest for a moment and drink in the light, feel the energetic thrill of connection, being a part of something that is all at once you and more than you.
You are connected but also in the process of leaving. Your cell-like self is sloughing, shedding, awaiting and sensing the beginning of the next cycle. You depart and arrive. You are one and a multitude, you are in constant state of becoming.
Suspend your disbelief in the true state of your being. Revel in your accomplishment of being entangled in human and post human becomings.
Refocus. Change is afoot. Time pushes on, the feeling of the machine-like qualities of the self simultaneously and continuously rises beneath you, a constant rumble of shifting and morphing cells embarking on the same journey you have just completed.
Your journey could perhaps be terminated here. You are flat, dead in biological terms. How can this be when you still feel active? Draw your attention for a moment to the life that occurs between your cell structures. You stretch out - a cracked desert - seemingly dry, but what little do you know of yourself? Streams of micro-bacterial life surge between your nooks and crannies. Sense these collaborations; sense the micro-organisms that crawl through and with you. You are part of a collaboration and intra-action; you are a more than human assemblage.
You pause, acknowledging your fellow travellers.
A force thrusts you into the air, you are suspended in space. Your connection is ruptured, and you float free, extending the surface beyond, you have diversified, dissolved, disintegrated. You are but matter, flecks of what once was treasured in its glory days as skin, pampered, washed and oiled. Now you are but dust that we each breathe in, ‘so even the essence of our neighbours tints our blood streams’ (Briscoe: 1997, 236).
Now it’s time to re-centre. Draw in your particles, re-stabilise yourself, draw back your cells to form once more the layer you sense as your skin. Feel the blood, flesh and bones, revitalise your core.
Come back to your breath.
Come back to your body.
But ask, is this the same body? Imagine seeing our true lively selves, our shedding skins suspended around us like a biodome. We each carry our neighbours, we are all together and separate, both single and whole.
Our imaginary boundaries are fleeting.