Be Earth Skin
This project is an exploration of the inseparability of people and the land. The book itself is a collection of observational images of myself and NASA images of Earth. The images that I chose from NASA are ones of natural disasters like forest fires, storms, and desertification as well as farms to see how the land has been affected by humans. Some of the images of myself are from a photo shoot where I projected a video of a collection of nature video footage I had taken and a highly distorted video of myself overlayed. I wanted to investigate human nature to apply normalcy and meaning to things that we see so they do not disrupt our worldview. In some of the images I used an AI image generator, I fed the AI prompts such as nature, humans, forests, etc., and chose places on my body or the land for it to generate visuals for. My reason for using AI is that AI itself is a conglomeration of human ideas and beliefs through the exploration of seeing what AI comes up with for these prompts I can see what we as humans (at least those whose information is used for the AI creation) believe that nature is or human is. I think that AI is an extremely important tool that can help us deepen our understanding of ourselves and how we rationalize the world around us and our collective beliefs.
I'm going to try to briefly describe how I came to create this book.
It began with figuring out what self was or what that word stood for in my self-interpretation of it, and I came to the conclusion that the self is the projected reality of being conscious so the self is what translates the conscious experience into reality, the self is just a projection of what the interpretation of perception is which is built and effected by experiences that the mind and body go through. So then from there, I wanted to kind of think about more what I thought consciousness was, I think consciousness refers to being aware of existence, and in what capacity I’m not sure I don’t think that consciousness has to be aware of self and conscious because I don’t think that self is something that is needed to experience existence. But something that I couldn’t stop thinking about was the body, what its role is in determining reality, And also how it is used as a value of measurement.
What part of the body is what creates this consciousness what is needed for it how much is needed and brought me to thinking about breaking down the body to the the microscopic level, down to the cells within our bodies which each have their own consciousness and their own intelligence, and they can perceive an understand the rules around it they have a sense of it from whatever faculties that their body gives them, so if you go up to a more macro level I’m a person a human who is interacting with other humans on in some sort of vicinity, creating community, and it works in that community like has a consciousness. It has a way of being a way of perceiving, and then we go out even further, and we have Earth, where we exist, and what relation does the consciousness, and the self of the planet has to do with me and myself and my consciousness then there are no real selves there are just levels and layers of consciousness of experience that are layered on top of each other on different scales all completely entwined are done to me, or that I do is not also replicated and done to the earth and everything that is done to the Earth to the land that I’m tied to the metaphorical land and the physical land the place is that I have it Everything that is done to. It is also done to me.
So, I have been exploring for the past almost year now the idea of existing without consciousness, but without self not seeing without ego, but without the kind of like layers of projected of my understanding of reality projected onto experience I’m just the literal idea of the famous line be here now
I took a performance class last semester for the first time, and I had an experience during that class where I can only describe my experience, as being a literal vessel of experience, and I tried to find ways afterward for a few months to replicate it, and I really couldn’t the performance was also like just repetitious movement of the body, and like letting go of this repetitious movement, and letting the mind settle and calm, and just experience being a body, living breathing on this planet with this planet as part of this planet and as part of like everything else so now maybe in like September of this year I started to take my yoga practice seriously and so I started it wasn’t serious before but I decided that I wanted to do yoga teacher training, so they’ve been doing that for the past few months, within that, I found breath work and meditation at a much more serious level than I had beforehand, and within both breath, work, and meditation, I experienced that same state of being that I’d experienced in that performance, and like nine months ago.
Thinking of what it actually would be like to see and perceive even less and digest even less of perception than could then we do normally or then we could do experientially I thought this is feasible because I have had glimpses of this deafening of all of the senses and pure existence, of being body.
So now, when I relate this to Simulacra and I put it under the lens of simulacra, I start to think oh my God how many of my human behaviors or seemingly human behaviors are just simulations of ideas that have been implanted in me of how I think behavior between humans and of humans should be behavior that is like to the world that is too Etc. and what this means and where they all began and where they hold meaning and where they don’t because I also think that language is in itself simulacra because it’s trying to describe the experience that is described as what self is doing so it is inherently in trying to communicate an idea, and a perception one is simulating it through the conduit of language They’re trying to create a picture almost a lake understanding of what they are experiencing.
Some philosophers believe that the source of simulacra is nature, and I found this idea extremely striking, especially because so much of our natural life, that we well that we deem natural is very unnatural and is constructed by us humans so much of our green land and tree land, and whatever landscapes that we deem as natural and interact with as kind of our nature time, our ones that have been completely constructed by other humans and what their beliefs of nature are and what they want us to experience as natural like what they think that people will want to experience, as well as kind of putting in their own like aesthetic, touches on it as well and thinking, especially about America bunch of our land is defined by colonialism, and so if I keep up with this idea of the body being tied to the land, while our land is still colonized, and forever will have traces of colonization. Then, so will our bodies, and because these two are not untouchable concepts, they don’t live in a vacuum they are one and the same but they are one of one like, but just exist in different levels if we want to categorize it as that.
So, as our land continues to be destroyed by us, we destroy ourselves, and we can see this quite clearly. I mean, it’s like really traumatic for people to live in land that is polluted that has all of this other terrible stuff done to it that causes like strife so climate changes like quite a relevant and real thing and we can directly see if it affects like and what is going on, with the like events going on the Earth that I think it’s like we should continue to study the earth to understand ourselves more, and the treatment of ourselves, like kind of as a species almost seems like we’re a little bit suicidal because of the things that we’re doing anyway.
So I decided to kind of have all of my ideas culminate in a kind of like and more artistic practice so I created a book, but before that, I created multiple videos that were kind of to describe this feeling that I felt with the earth, and how myself and my identity in my consciousness, and all of that is directly bound to it, but so much of my experience are supposed to experience is Ululated and it’s hard to understand like what how to separate the two from each other. The feeling that I feel on Earth is one of frustration, I feel extremely separate from the Earth and I feel that my belonging in society is dictating what relationship I can have with the land. So, my relationship feels very disjointed and I feel estranged almost from one that is in theory, my mother.
So I began with making a video. I wanted to use my body. I was kind of a landscape for this imagery, and from that, I took photos of them, and then I manipulated the photos and then some of the photos I also Like to AI like the AI illustrator stuff like I fed it all of these images that I had created and of course it has a bank it pulls from. I wanted to see what it would produce and how well it would kind of fit into this imagery there’s one image that I have that has some of the last virgin forests in the US, and on top of that, I like and put onto that project onto that is a projection of me and this nature scene videos I made and then I kind of like blended them and prompted AI to make trees and leaves and things and I also created the shapes for it so I dictated that because I kind of found it interesting like dictating these shapes with this kind of like landscape of paper that I’m using I’m dictating where these ideas can kind of grow and I mean that’s something that we do, with the land. It’s so noticeable with farming, and with mining how much we shape the land and the boundaries we set and the plants, we see we like the plants we put in the soil or what we extract from the land. So, as we shape the landscape we shape ourselves. And I want us to all take heed as we interact with natural spaces for most of them are completely manmade, a simulacra. We must be careful or else all will be simulacra, including ourselves, and without a source, everything will become devoid of meaning eventually.