 Ecology and technology and asking questions about innovation, but that's not actually really what I, yeah that's not the focus of tonight. Tonight I was quite inspired by the premise of SolarPunk of really talking about how we bring things into reality because that's really at the core of a lot of my projects and what I've found is that once things get into reality they get messy and beautiful and complicated in ways that there's actually no way to imagine until you do it. But without further ado I'm going to introduce the first work. So this is human cheese, it's cheese made from human milk and it's pictured in front of its urban pasture so kind of the premise of the project was in a city of eight million people which so this work was 10 years ago and I can't account for the New York City population at this time, but in a city of eight million people and not one cow maybe it's more kind of local and natural to be eating cheese made from human milk. So this was an idea that I had and that started actually really as a response to the rise, to kind of the two movements that were happening side by side in 2009-2011 which is around the time this work was happening. So in New York it was the rise of the local food movement and I remember going to a farmer's market and you could buy your meat from the farmer's market and there was like a picture of the farmer with the cow taped to the table where you're buying your meat from and at the same time there was a lot of stuff in the news about human women renting their rooms especially in poorer countries to richer people that were implanting their eggs into these women and these women were bringing these babies to term and there was like some some debate around the ethics of this but mostly it was just happening and it's still just happening although some countries have now started to ban or at least regulate the ways in which this can happen and so I just became really interested in how we decide which kind of human bioavailabilities we are okay with using, selling, buying, trading, eating, fucking, you know using to make babies and which things remain taboo and how we decide what that is so that was how this idea came. I want to make cheese from human milk and and kind of quite let's say a critical from quite a critical standpoint but thankfully I wasn't I really wanted to actually do it instead of kind of faking it or making a video or making a bunch of symbols which is sometimes in the art world one way that things happen I did really want to do it so what did I do I went to try to see where I could get human milk and I went to the same place I used to go get everything which is Craigslist and I was really lucky because I think normally Craigslist is not always available but just in the moment that I was trying to figure out if this is even possible I found this ad so breast milk for sale two dollars two dollars an ounce is actually pretty cheap even 10 years ago. So in the end I didn't end up using the the Craigslist source but what I did find in an effort to to get this stuff was the gray market online for human breast milk. So by like by going yeah so again by by needing to make this real finding this online gray market I started to understand that there's like an entire political rich and interesting and complicated political history behind the selling and trading of human milk so wet nurse is one of the oldest professions alongside with prostitution but the selling of like milk itself and attached to the kind of renting of the woman that's producing it is pretty new and it is this gray market because unlike human organs which are regulated it's definitely illegal to sell and trade in the U.S. which is where this project was done. Human milk is not regulated but it's also not approved by the FDA so it's technically you can get in trouble for selling it especially like with the normal food establishments but this kind of online trade is in this legal gray area and so yeah this is the this is actually the screenshot from this website now you can exist you can go browse around on it as you can see by the marketing now it's quite interesting 10 years later they've made it quite more wholesome so when it first came out there definitely was and is a market among people that adopt kids or people that can't breastfeed that have babies for variety reasons but there's also a pretty wide variety of other uses so you can see here like man-brying breast milk usually kind of fetish situations I don't know that there's yeah there's also they don't have a special section for currently but there's like bodybuilders that believe in the use of breast milk to help them along people with different forms of cancer that are interested in the immunoproperties of breast milk so there's kind of a wide variety of reasons that women are selling milk and what is even more interesting is you have these women that are marketing themselves right so there's really different marketing strategies that that the women using this website use whether it's like as you can see healthy diet no drinking no smoking no drugs and you can see me with my baby or like more sexualized images that are probably have a little bit of a different audience to all this kind of like yeah vegan hyper vegan breast milk for sale so I used this site and then actually just word of mouth to collect to buy actually the milk of three different women and I used it to make three different cheeses so one thing that I encountered along the way um yeah so here's like literally the email exchange that I had once I posted on the website that I was looking for some milk um one kind of big concern that I had because I was actually interested in offering people this to eat or to see if they would eat it and so like certainly have it readily available right not as a again not as a thought experiment but as a like smelly cheesy hopefully tasty substance that was confronting them in this way that that proved to be really powerful in shifting what people thought their reactions would be in both directions right um but one of the things was that of course like breast milk uh is the one way that we can communicate human diseases um so things like uh HIV and yeah basically any any disease that can be communicated um through blood can usually be communicated through breast milk as well so that became a really big concern so one of the things that I actually asked for was blood tests from the women that I was buying milk from so this is uh later in an exhibition kind of a portrait of a mother right so it's one one portrait of a mother is just a readout of her blood test depending on what is important to you to know about so I'm kind of interested like in the in within a more art historical uh context like what does this mean as portraiture but that's um but but it came from like a very real uh problem that I really didn't want to get anyone sick um there's also of course the issue of trust and I was extra scared uh so I did double boil the milk which also just kills any diseases which cheese makers were really upset about because by doing that you're killing off of of course a lot of bacteria um which is kind of like the essence of what makes cheese unique and special and cheese um but that was the call I made this is just like some fun um surveys that I asked the women to fill out around like what color food they eat why they decided to do that uh yeah like basic kind of height weight age um profession just thinking about like what is the information that you would want to know um about the person that you're consuming food from their body um and of course perhaps that raises the question of like what is the information that you do or do not know about the other animals from whose bodies we consume food um and then I uh I actually really try to find a cheese maker to make this cheese because cheese making is a art of its own um and not one that I was familiar with but cheese makers really didn't want to touch me with a 10-foot pole because they were actually in the midst of their own political fight um precisely around like pasta as milk and wanting to use unpasteurized milk to make more fancy cheeses um so I had to learn to make the cheese myself which again I think was actually uh quite beneficial to understanding what this thing was because I do have to be honest you know I was like in this project found this milk reading a lot talking a lot to people really clear and fine with what I was doing and then I like had the milk and had to start you know sterilizing it and the smell was uh in the beginning like totally nauseating and like that might be psychological that might be physiological it's probably a mix but of course it's like super interesting um that yeah again like that by doing it all of these ideas that I had just went out the window because I was not nauseous um making this stuff but the good thing is is that I had to do it a lot and so basically in the end a very kind of quite quickly I got used to it and stopped being nauseous um I got over it um but of course like this um like this boundary or something this like biophysical reaction that I had maybe it was purely emotional but like manifested physically um gave me a lot of food for thought around how taboos are established, how taboos get implanted in your body um yeah just things that there would not have been accessed to if I hadn't actually been forced to cook this stuff in my kitchen um so one thing for the bio people out there so human milk is a little tricky actually does not coagulate um as well as other mammal milk so this is like pure human milk coagulation so you can see it's like sticky enough that it's not running through my finger but it doesn't it's all like little bits and it doesn't um coalesce into a single mass so actually all of the cheeses I made were human cow human goat blends which in the beginning was kind of a compromise um I really wanted it to be 100 pure and there are like possible ways to do that and that are basically just require expensive equipment like molecular sieves um or pressure boilers but in the end again uh I actually then realized that it's almost more interesting right so uh yeah it's like places the human and the other mammal quite evenly in the same I mean we eat like sheep goat blend or sheep cow blend all the time um or even like bacon wrapped cheese right so uh yeah again like through being forced to have to make a piece of cheese like the the project got even more complicated and then of course you saw like different reactions and what people wanted to eat if they were like more drawn to the human cow or the human goat reaction um the the the kind of project itself was also posited a little bit less in the news media a little bit less as an artwork and more as a viable product um especially you know piggybacking off of like sustainable local circular economy kind of ideas that were just becoming popular at the moment so this is just like the life cycle analysis of making of me making human cheese so that you have the woman pumping the milk and then I was taking the subway to transport the milk cooking uh making the cheese using transport to distribute the cheese eating the cheese digesting the cheese excreting the cheese and then kind of looking at all the inflection points at which these processes affect the food air and water quality that the woman then consumes that then goes into her body and goes into the milk goes into the cheese and yeah continues in this way so human milk is um one of the biggest ways that industrial pollutants that end up in bodies get expelled because the pollutants often lodge themselves inside the fat um and yeah milk is one of the best ways actually like remove uh stuff from fat um and so there was just a question there around like I don't know do we begin to care more about the pollutants entering our neighbor's bodies if we are eating cheese that they make with them but like I said in the beginning I was really committed and interested in being able to serve this cheese um and having people come to the same maybe inflection point that I did with my initial nausea or not um um this work was actually I mean it's like one of my first works and it was initially uh a thesis work at NYU so it was shown in this like um show exhibition at NYU as a work in progress and the lawyers uh for NYU I mean it was like a big debate that lasted a month and then in the end the lawyers said okay you can have the cheese on display but it needs to be covered in uh like a glass um or plexiglass container so that nobody by accident can ingest this cheese um was just of course in and of itself it's like yeah totally crazy so this is uh we we cheated a bit and took the plastic off and kind of took this photo but this is the way that it was presented in this um initial work in progress show but ultimately I opened um kind of an art exhibit but in a low-key gallery not in a gallery neighborhood like just a little storefront that was in between a wine shop and a bodega um called the lady cheese shop and I was really playing with whether this was real or not um and because the because it involved boobs I think uh it got a lot of media attention so it was featured like in the metro which is the newspaper that they give out in the subway um so it got a lot of attention and it got a lot of attention more or less as a cheese shop um and not so much as an art project which was for me uh at the time really interesting um so just briefly on the right you see two of the different cheeses and those are all three of the different cheeses that we serve from the three different women um so they are served with a couturement that are inspired by the terroir of each woman so terroir is this really um cheesy cheese term uh wine term as well of course but it is this kind of invented um cultural invention to naturalize certain um elements of culture I mean like one of the biggest ways it's used is in France for all sorts of like legal claims over champagne being called champagne being only from a specific place but basically the idea is that the very specific microbes culture um an environment of a place affects the taste of the cheese right so like this this cheese can really only be produced in this tiny little village otherwise it's something else so I was interested in this idea um and kind of played a lot with the women's biographies where they were from and what they did for living and what kind of person they were to choose which cheese I made with their milk and also like what were the so these are pickles it pickled in human way and these are like cheese curds for the woman from Wisconsin um and then yeah we had a blue cheese with a woman that really loved blue cheese and also worked with a chef so in like eight oatmeal cookies every day so we had oat crackers and apple uh apple jam so yeah it was this kind of also a bit playing with the um intense foodieism of the moment there's a line at the cheese shop in the east village um and then so dialogue uh I mean like this project in particular I was actually really interested in people's responses um so dialogue became a part of the work in and of itself um and that happened through a number of different ways so on top you have the the like just these really simple comment cards that I would give people at different exhibitions and tastings and things that I was doing that is really simple just ask you questions like how was it and what's next um so this is one of the one of the answers um and I just thought it was really interesting that like this person answered you know what's next mass production question mark question mark human farming um and then I also like I said that this work did get a lot of news attention um so this is an interview I did like a live interview I did on Sun TV which is kind of the Canadian version of Fox News um where they also kind of had the thing under me saying human farming um which which was in some ways precisely the question that I was interested in um but some other things that happened along the way that that really surprised me I mean like like I said I started this I think as a really dystopic work and like in the process first working with these women that were really excited that I was using um their milk either because I was buying it but some of them it wasn't really for the money they just like you know they pump this substance with labor from their own body um and their baby can't consume all of it and they like literally just can't bring themselves to throw it away so they you know maybe thought it was a little weird but um we're just like happy it was being used or like the breast milk breastfeeding advocates that I encountered that were like super gung ho about the whole work because they thought it was um normalizing and making you know uh making human milk more of a food than maybe uh like this taboo thing um so with that I'm just gonna show one video um that is um yeah just one of the women that I worked with I'm 36 years old I live in Chelsea um I grew up in New Jersey I have two kids my daughter is two and a half and my son is eight months old I have a pretty uh I eat most everything I eat a fair amount of meat I like a lot of vegetables I'm not a huge fan of fruit I love pasta because I used to cook pasta in the restaurant so I eat a lot of pasta and I love cheese that's my favorite thing what's your favorite kind of cheese gorgonzola I don't eat that many sweets except for cookies in the afternoon I drink coffee I drink tea I drink water and I drink wine I eat meat um I usually try and buy organic meat um or like grass-fed pastured meat which I get through my local CSA pumping because I often pump when I have to like if I have too much milk so I compare it to like when you really have to go to the bathroom and then you finally get to go to the bathroom well I was uncertain about the whole breastfeeding thing and then it came so easily to me I have a friend who described it as like it gave her so much confidence as a mother and you really feel like sort of accomplished like look what I've done I've fed this baby you know and you can see the baby's growing so much and you're not feeding it anything else so you know because like you never think about your breast that way at all until you suddenly start doing it and you're like oh well and then it's hard to think about them in any other way once you stop like now I think of them these very functional sort of organs I don't know what struck me like what prompted me to participate rather than just read about it I think probably just because I produce so much milk and I'm not really interested in donating it because there's so many restrictions and I'm I don't know I want to be able to eat what I want to eat and stuff so oh it just seemed like a I tend to volunteer for things so it's sort of in my nature it freaks me out a little bit like I definitely that that part of it I'm like that's weird like who would want to do that cheese makers maybe that doesn't bother me like if people are just really into cheese and doing it as a cheese learning experience people are really into breast milk that kind of freaks me out I think the regulations that would come out of it if it became sort of a mass thing would be very disturbing because it would be regulating women and what they were doing in their own homes and what they were eating and it's just completely you can imagine completely creepy regulations coming out of it I don't know it just reminds me I took a a really interesting class in law school about the regulation of pornography and it started to get into this whole like protecting women from themselves and and you can see the debate going down sort of the same path of like what should we let women do with their bodies and not let them do with their bodies and how much should the government be involved in that decision I don't know I don't feel like uh I mean I guess you have the thing that like only women can do it and typically women selling things related to their bodies has become a big ethical issue but I think of it more as like a like a labor rather than a commodity and having been in a labor industry like cooking I feel like it's not all that different I feel like it's kind of the same as me sort of spending an hour making someone a pasta or someone like that I had to spend a lot of time with that person in order to get them to talk that openly with me um on the video um and I thought of um I mean I guess like yeah it's interesting to to watch that now um that uh final point which I think is one of the most important things that I learned through this whole process thinking about like what if we think about human milk as a labor rather than a commodity um is kind of precisely everything about making it real because this like beginning idea that is just so being and kind of questioning position that I had around like why do we have taboos around this um human bioproducts and not this other one how do we negotiate and regulate that um where does medicalization come in is kind of not the point right like the point is what kind of labor does producing all of these um bioproducts I guess you can call them entail um like physical physiological emotional all sorts and and yeah and that and arriving there was only through like the step by step by step of actually doing this thing um okay uh I'm going to talk about um another another work um that's a little bit quicker uh yeah so I did this um artist residency uh in Santa Fe Art Institutes um and the the residency was around food justice um uh I'm just yeah I'm going to do a quick introduction it was around food justice um and I arrived at the residency in New Mexico it's a state in the US uh it's a state that where you can carry a concealed weapon a gun without a license so as a result of that because of insurance um the space where I was to live and work which was also a public um space where they had exhibitions um because it was a public space they had to put a sign on the door that said like no guns um and I had arrived after a really long travel quite tired and and uh from a part of the country that guns are not so prevalent um and was just like quite freaked out by this uh that I was living in a place where they had to like put a sticker on the door asking people to not bring guns inside um but I was born in the US and have an American passport and so uh I guess it was my time to reckon with that and at the same time so I was doing this food justice residency um and there were people artists working on all kinds of different things like um food inside of jails or the TPP the trade agreement that was going to really affect farmers in Asia um all kinds of really interesting topics um but all of them really thinking about justice from a human point of view justice for humans and I really started thinking about like what about justice uh for the animals that we eat because I was at that time a meat eater um and kind of struggling with it um but also not examining it so that I could just keep happily eating it um and then so I I kind of took this again like conflation of happenstance to realize that I was going to like learn what it was to be an American or like to be a person from the US but to be this American um and learn what it was to to kill what I ate by my own hand right we are all uh if if we consume animal products we're all killing just we're having somebody else do it for us um and I really began this project thinking I would not I would be able to do it because I can make myself do almost anything if it's under the guise of an art practice no matter how much I don't want to um but like thinking I would hate it and become a vegetarian um but what I found along the way was something uh really really different so uh the the end result of this work is an exhibition that includes I can show quickly the slides um yeah a series of of images that are shot through with various caliber bullets um and some other some other works that involve kind of animal some paintings that are shot through with bullets um and some various other animal animal parts um sculptures that I can show in a bit but um at the core is really the film that's uh almost 20 minutes I won't show it here it's called imagine lines and alibis um it's a film that I made uh on the process of learning to hunt um hunt and kill and and skin and butcher and cook um to jack rabbits um but I have a kind of very few minute trailer that I will share with you now it is bloody so just a disclaimer I guess synopsis the giant wild domesticated pig is dead is lying by the side of highway 40 near some oil fields and the all you can eat buffet at the pow wow restaurant and lounge different machines to kill different beings 100 natural raccoon urine to cover your tracks is rabbit shit still wet do you notice the dirt patch where that jack rolled around to hunt just to be twisted together with other creatures fully embedded in landscape I don't really buy it but I feel it the gps won't stop beeping I'm klutzy and terrified intricate patterns in the map dictate places for living and dying breathe evenly and slowly to get a clean shot women tend to be better shots they don't get so excited are more efficient in their calm that pig was the only one we found in eight weeks had to settle for jackrabbit you look like Laura croft the tomb raider he says I wonder do you envision yourself as a superhero every time you hold this semi-automatic or is it just my ponytail steady on the reservation kidneys are tied to branches for birds but here on public land we just throw the warm rabbit guts into the brush seven weeks of 4 a.m. starts staring and scanning out that truck window so hard my eyeballs hurt suddenly all qualms go out that very same window I just really want to kill the fucking thing where is a carrot when you need one against regulation not fair chase what a way to regulate bodies and species out here in the wild or is it the great american west fair chase for the ethical kill you can't prop your 22 on the car door for stability but you can blow the beans of smithereens within a r10 we have never been ambivalent towards our technologies just as we have always played favorite with species it took her less than a minute to stop shaking it felt good to butcher her I've never wanted to eat neck meat so badly your predator instinct is coming out he says perhaps but that seems way too easy mostly I am amazed in how quickly a life turns into just another material in my hands and what if I truly had been hungry I'm getting real I just wanted to show yeah this piece with the voice over yeah so I wanted to learn to hunt and I didn't really know how to do it and I had never shot a gun before so I just started like hanging out actually at the hunting store in Santa Fe and talking to people telling them I want to learn to shoot guns and hunt animals and just waiting around basically for somebody that I felt safe enough to drive into the desert with with a bunch of guns and I found it took it took a while and but eventually I did find this one man named John um who you know this was like couple this was a year before Trump got elected um yeah and he was you know I was like an artist um from New York um with all of the ideas you know kind of like fully embodying that stereotype I think in a lot of ways never touched the gun um quite kind of against guns politically without really knowing too much about it or probably thinking too hard about it um and he was like a republican had moved to New Mexico actually precisely because of the liberal gun laws and because he loved hunting um and so like uh yeah very politically opposed people but we ended up spending you know just hours and hours and hours together basically driving around looking for animals to kill um and you know turned off like was one of the most generous generous people I've encountered um anyways without like getting into all of the backstories I think like some of the voiceover alludes to the very many contradictions um within hunting animals including like uh it's basically hunters that have um been the strongest force for conservation at least in the US but I think in many countries around the world um yeah thinking about what we what we kill what we are happy killing what we are less happy killing the ways in which we are allowed to kill so like I said um in New Mexico for example you're not allowed to use the corridor to hold up the rifle because it's considered like not fair chase not fair to the animal you're also not allowed to cover yourself uh and I'm sure you're not allowed to use um the scent of a of an animal that they want to eat to kind of call the animals out but you are allowed to douse yourself in raccoon urine so that they can't smell you just like all of these fine fine lines of how we legislate ethics and nature and and which technology these are allowed to be used um yeah that that are all only possible through like through going through the process but I guess the biggest thing that I'll say um is like I said I thought I I started this project thinking for sure I would become a vegetarian um and hate shooting guns and what I learned is that shooting guns especially shooting big guns um is one of the most exhilarating feelings I've ever experienced um and I completely understand why people um are so adamantly protective of their gun rights in the US and believe even much much more that we really need gun control because it's really exciting to shoot big guns um but also I think like the the animal part of it um like really uh so I I mentioned in the video but so I had a one month art residency but in the beginning John refused so let us go hunting for rabbits because um that was like wasn't real hunting we had to go look for wild domesticated pigs because we couldn't shoot like rams or elk or the usual things that are hunted because you had to apply for a permit and like actually enter a lottery a year before in order to be able to do that legally so we were like we spent a month almost looking for wild domesticated pigs and couldn't find a needed kill except for this one dead one by the road um and by the time we started hunting rabbits it turned out to be a lot harder to kill a rabbit they're pretty fast um um and they come out at night and you're not allowed to shoot between dusk and dawn um and so the the the artist residency actually had to extend my artist residency for another month so that I could kill something and like finish my art project so people often say you know it's okay that you are killing because you were killing for food but really I wasn't killing for food I was killing for art uh which is a question all in of itself um but yeah in the end uh I like shot these animals skin these animals like skinned every little bit of these animals used every little bit of these animals um and was totally also amazed at how um kind of similar I guess to the cooking of human cheese it went from being you know like when I was first cutting that face off that rabbit it was uh pretty hardcore um but slowly it's like just another suing projects kind of like a really delicate craft um and the animal turns into like skin and leather and bones and meat um and I uh became you know I had been reading tons of philosophy and history around thinking through animal rights and the animals eating animals and humans eating animals and humans raising animals and or humans eating wild animals um but like in that moment doing that work I just felt okay about it um I don't know what that says exactly about me as a person but like found my place in that situation um okay like comfortable I stopped eating uh store bought meat for about five years after that and never like for five years didn't eat any meat that I didn't know who killed it um because it was such an intimate process that it was like quite disgusting to me to walk into a supermarket and see all that packaged meat um but those things also fade uh so yeah through yeah just again like through doing the work um it all gets really really complicated um both yeah like the human relationships and the human human animal relationships um yeah and then I just wanted to show I think they were earlier yeah this is just like some of this sculptural work this one is called right right right like all spelled I don't have the title here but like all the three different uh ways to spell and say right like the yeah to rights the rights and then like the right of passage so that's just a dear hoof that a hunter friend gave me in an astronaut pen um yeah these were some other objects and a photograph an image um three little pigs uh I'm just looking at the time and wondering if we want to skip the third work um because that's kind of a big one and if there are any questions if there's any questions I'll just do I'll do like a real quick overview of the one of the last things that I worked on so I was asked to join the MIT Media Lab um a couple years ago and kind of under the like upon being asked that you know I was asked what I want to work on before we agreed if that would happen um and I said uh yes awesome I want to be a part of the future factory which is like the how the news called the media lab I want to also make make real futures um and I want to work on thinking about how humans respond to a sea level rise um uh yeah so and I'm just going to show kind of like some of the thinking and partly also like my pitch within the media lab for this work and then how the work evolved through encountering um all kinds of harsh realities uh so yeah the pitch was like this is you know a hurricane from Texas from a couple years ago like uh we all know what what's happening and everybody lives in cities most of them are on the coast and like still this is the primary solution that cities have almost every city around the globe other than like a little bit in Holland they're doing some experimental stuff but it's literally to build a sea wall so like a wall against the sea um which is not only inevitably going to break eventually but also just a really problematic metaphor and a metaphor that's like encapsulates precisely the way we've related to nature for hundreds of years that have brought us to this position um where nature uh is causing problems for for our way of living um and I have been for many years thinking about uh the ways in which humans and also non-humans are agents of our own evolution um so uh my proposal at the time when I arrived was um instead of building a wall against the sea I was interested in how humans can evolve like instead of trying to change the environment to fit our needs we change ourselves to fit a changing environment so how can humans um adapt themselves in order to live in on and under the water uh as the water rises um so when I got there uh I wasn't I had no idea what that would look like I thought it would be like all kinds of like implants robotics crazy MIT stuff um but two things happened the first was that I really realized I was doing tons of research like thinking a lot writing a lot um talking to a lot of a lot of engineers and scientists about what's possible um and at first I had the idea to kind of come up with like a compendium of all the different possible genes of different underwater creatures that we might want to think about making use of for for ourselves like whether either directly in our bodies or for technologies that we would use um kind of like a shopping catalog and then I and then I realized that that was again like precisely the wrong way to approach um other species and natural environments in this like super extractivist um consumerist way um and so in order to just like get myself out of that um because our environment does affect the way we think I realized like I needed to go underwater um so I started I took freediving classes um while at MIT that was like one of the biggest um things I learned how to do there um and in doing in doing freediving um you know the first uh lesson I went from like 15 being able to hold my breath for 15 seconds to two and a half minutes right in the first like four hour session um which is kind of incredible and then I learned that like the the world record for the human breath holds is 11 minutes and 54 seconds um well beyond what any kind of medical doctor thought was possible 20 years ago even and so I just really began to understand um that the capacity of the human body as it is already before we start to augment and implant and all kinds of other things is really quite well beyond what we understand right so like if with breath we are able to do so much more than we realize what about all of the other um traits that we have and and how do we know like which technologies we need to add on to ourselves if we don't know uh what we can already do with what we already have um so that was kind of a big a big thing that happened the other thing that happened is that as I was going around the media lab um you know everybody's like oh what are you working on and I was like oh I want to change people so we can figure out how to live like in and under the sea and everyone was like cool like the little mermaid um and I was kind of shocked by that response it was just like no definitely not like the little mermaid but it did get me thinking about the little mermaid um and I watched the movie again and I realized I don't want to be a little mermaid like I want to be Ursula in that story um which is how I started really thinking about octopuses um and cephalopods um so the project that came out of it uh is this training transhumanism program so it's a it's a project for transhumanism but we're using training as our main technology um and we are evolving the future of the human but the model for the future of the human is um not a machine which tends to be kind of the predominant cultural narrative but rather cephalopod so not just octopuses are awesome but also cuttlefish um squid nautilus um I have this image because like I'm of course also interested in um human and non-human relations and and what we so it's like kind of also a bit of a play on the idea of a model species and what are different ways that we can learn from other species other than um as like very efficient scientific testing uh specimens so a bit of a play like oh yeah this idea of the role model species um and thinking about transhumanism in a bit of a different way um this is just like a really uh good image to again like think about how this thinking can can shift right so like we can look at this image and we can say these people are using underwater metaphor to train for going to space but you can also say that they're using the metaphor and dream of space to train for being underwater um this image I also really love because um you know uh there is a certain dominant narrative that says like one of these examples is somebody more advanced and somebody less advanced but in fact they're just two really different approaches to being able to be underwater for a very long time right and they both have their um uh benefits and drawbacks um so I developed a training program um together with dancers and engineers um and after spending tons and tons of time with different cephalopods and people that raise cephalopods and study cephalopods um so there's like a training manual with a set of dry exercises and wet exercises um there's a lexicon of this world and I'll just actually finish perfectly on time um with a very short excerpt of so there's like a 25 minute film that's kind of part uh invitation to join this movement and part documentation of um the process through which we developed and and became as cephalopods we can get um so I'll let that take us out oh and just before before I do that um just to say that there is this janky tumblr website um that kind of houses all the project like including all the different parts and then I we do workshops this is like an ongoing an ongoing thing and it in if you go to urges to breathe is alive which is a direct quote from my freediving instructor as she's like holding my face underwater underneath the pool and my chest is convulsing um but it did turn out that my urges should breathe was alive uh so if you scroll the way down in the passwords octopus you can watch the whole film um but here's just a quick a quick excerpt the cephalopod has such complicated neural structures in each of its arms it would be for us as if our fingertips have brains I mean people have really severe reactions to a lot of the work that I do like especially the first two projects weirdly people are much more okay with human cheese than with the rabbits um but I leave that in there again but I think of like as far as the approach itself I mean uh the most interesting thing that I was told by by someone I really respect was um like really they were thinking about the work process itself I mean like I come from GM treatment search methods and like the whole process as a performance and thinking about performance as research in and of itself and then so then maybe the inverse which is actually really interesting proposition that maybe then research is all that's all