Why hair? Tongue and mouth videos also

Looking at the videos I've been making I see the connection with  the element I return to throughout my practice: human hair which carries DNA and links us with our origins; as we became more evolved or 'civilised' we lost body hair and distanced ourselves from other animal species. Also associations with female sexuality and power; Also can cause feelings of repulsion ; hair is a dead thing as soon as it is cut from a head.

I am interested  not only in hair but the communication of our bodies with our surroundings on a biological and chemical level. On the most fundamental level we respire; without breath there is no life. So the sensory organs of our bodies enable us to survive and link us indissolubly to our environment. We need to take into our bodies the elements that are essential for survival and through chemical processes we exchange energy with our environment.

The videos I have done so far have been full of movement; this movement being caused by my breathing; so hair, skin, etc shimmers and moves with the force of my breath.We are not static solitary individuals in a stage setting but are interwoven with the fabric of our universe on so many levels; physical, psychological, philosophical. We have evolved to exactly match our universe; it wasn't made for us . We have learned to mould ourselves to it yet we have also imagined and created
it within our own parameters of understanding. We think that we can describe ourselves and our universe however we are simply superimposing human sized patterns and templates on a world of chaos and stating that this is reality. It is only reality from a certain perspective. We can't even see or share other people's reality truly; for example we don't experience the same colours, the same emotions, Essentially we are solitary individuals set apart from our surroundings yet linked to it and to each other by a complex network of physical and emotional transferences or communications.


Undertongue  Need to redo this as it slips in and out of focus. I like this piece; very strong and strange looking. The tongue videos are the strongest so far. Maybe the lack of audio is right; we are alone and unable to truly communicate or understand each other although language is what marks us out and has enabled our success as a species.

Mouthnoteeth: tried this with audio of lip smacking. Couldn't slow it down to get the sound deep enough or even in sync with the video. Need to adjust background noises too; more experimenting needed with audio. Also not happy with this as feel it's too obviously a mouth, though  I like the tongue closeup all corrugated.

Face to face experience; not remote through technology but actual physical experience of being embodied within the universe.

Ann Hamilton: live, tactile, visceral, face-to-face experiences in a media saturated world.

Distinction between physiological and phenomenological experience. The first is automatic,  the second is made up of thoughts arising from personal experience.