Ben's Eight Questions (so far)

1. View:

The Big Picture is where alcohol production/consumption and microbiology meet… the meeting place implicates evolutionary process, symbiosis, intoxication, dialogues, drinking, interspecies bodies, metabolic processes, etc. The main values it’s in opposition to include innate material, nature culture dualism, and the individual self. I’m using intoxication as an allure to consume other people’s symbiotic microbial flora.


2. Intention:

The concrete intentions are to use bodily microflora to brew ciders that are then intended to be drunk. The implicit intentions are to redefine what a body is, how we are constituted (in and of ourselves) by populations, and how we are not only inside an ecology but are an ecology.

3. Speech:

In order to communicate clearly, I have to make something completely unappetizing and perceived as potentially dangerous totally normal and benign. Yeasts aren’t harmful but other culture grown from body parts have potential to be. So my job is to remove yeast from body parts (feet, armpits, groins) and other cultures (streptococcus for example) in order to use them to brew. Concepts I have to develop run oppose our germophobic culture. Spaces of dialogue include science, art, and drunken ramblings.

4. Action:

Drinking, brewing, plating.

5. Livelihood:

A lab is where I need to work as opposed to a studio. Maybe a kitchen. I don’t need an actual biology lab because the techniques I’m using aren’t that complicated or expensive. Sterility is the only real issue. My livelihood is isolating cultures, brewing, sharing.

6. Effort:

Perfection would be the most optimal-tasting yeast that comes from the most undesirable part of a stranger’s body. I’m striving for not only a rethinking of what it means to live (i.e. always symbiotically an collectively) but also an ethics and politics that can be derived from this.

7. Mindfulness:

I get carried away with metaphorical / poetic / philosophical implications of work often before it even happens, so I think I have to follow actual physical process in this project to avoid that problem… that’s especially relevant right now because I happen to be rather lost as to what my most important problems actually are. In a way I have to let the yeast’s metabolic processes do my thinking.

8. Concentration:

I’m locating my efforts of making in an interspace between art and lab science. I’m not sure where I’m locating the sharing aspect of this work as a final piece. Obviously not in a gallery nor a ‘bar’. So far it’s been intimate conversations between friends over quarts of cider… I’m happy with this for the moment.