8 Question Redo

1. View: 

Paradigms:

Crisis I: Somebody drinks my homemade cider. This is great, they say, how did you make it? I say: with my spit and toe fungus. They spit it out in disgust and get angry.

Crisis II: My old sweet Aunt Betty asks what kind of art I’m making if I’m not painting anymore. We’re at the dinner table. I have no idea how to begin to tell her what I’m doing.

Problems: How do I get people to drink my spit? How can this all be articulated and talked about from every perspective involved (human and non-)?

I’m fighting against a germophobic, communal-phobic paradigm. I’m trying to establish us as strictly communal sites for collaboration, symbiosis, dynamic change. This is implicating the world of microbes, the world of humans, and the world of alcohol production and consumption. These worlds already meet every time we have a glass of wine, but I’m trying to intersect that process, deregulate it, exaggerate it, so that it can be critically and intuitively examined. It’s important that this project not be simply ‘gross’ but compelling—this is why it’s so difficult to talk about, because people get caught up in the grossness of growing microbes from groins, or at least I imagine that they do.

2. Intention:

Explicit: I’m interested in making drinkable fermented beverages using our bodily yeasts as collaborators.

Implicit: I’m interested in creating a culture of general acceptance of our (and each others) communal and plural selves (or maybe it’d be better to say non-selves). I would like to cultivate a practice of thinking of ourselves as communities, ecosystems, flows and movements. This could happen consciously or by trickery.

3. Speech:

Speech is my problem! I don’t know how to do it yet. Not only from my end (how I talk about my project concretely, simply, in a non-jackass way. In a way I think it mostly comes down to letting the ciders/wines do the talking. Drinking as talking. The way I articulate the vision is to create Utopic communal drinks. Simple enough. But then I begin to get lost in to much meta-bologna when I start to articulate philosophy of individuality, symbiosis, agency, body w.o. organs, etc. This is getting better but is taking time (necessarily).

In a sense I have to defend myself against conventions that have to do with bodies, cleanliness and culture. I have to defend myself against scientists who, in the worst (most fruitful) case scenario would say: this is pseudo-science, a willful bending of scientific facts, and also biohazard. I have to defend myself against brewing practices which optimizes, processes, filters, and abstracts alcohol from its vital sources.

4. Action:

Drinking (and all the things that go with it) is the only mode for engagement as a participant.

Brewing (collaborating, chewing, squishing, waiting, setting up environments for other creatures to thrive in for a while) is the mode of making.

5. Livelihood:

I guess I am now a brewer, not an artist. But not a normal one. Like a schizophrenic brewer. Also maybe a lab scientist. But this can just be folded into brewing. But lab science might be  a good way to allocate resources, funding, and materials. Currently I’m working with friends, acquaintances, but could be working with mycologists, microbiologists, and local brewers, archaeologists.

6. Effort:

Perfection looks dirty, tainted and impure… it’s when you and I achieve new microbiota from consuming each other’s microbiota. It also involves a change in perspective, compromises, and complacency.

7. Mindfulness:

The general logic and trajectory is tending toward a world where we can only think, make and evolve by combining ourselves with and implicating other things. We can only do anything with at least one partner.

8. Concentration:

Pragmatically, I really need to know how to selectively grow and propagate yeasts and fungi over bacteria. So I’m concentrating on the laboratory skills more than anything.