potty mouth
Who would have thought that my rather tangential posting on technologically enhanced Japanese toilets would have brought any response? Well up pops Derek, (an old friend from our ancient days in Ontario College of Art’s Photo/Electric Arts Program and inveterate otaku thinker), with some decidedly anomophilic links.
Derek speculates on the use of technologies based on porous silicon sensors like a:
“neat little home tricorder and urine-assay unit, (installed) right in the toilet bowl), (monitoring) your moods, blood-sugar, the neuro-peptides that percolate up through the
brain-stem, bacterial colonies in your gut, the whole nine yards’ . . . .
Derek’s vision of the extension of the panopticon into the deep recesses of our bowels is completely technologically feasible and one wonders how long before ‘urine tricorders’ get installed in every work place?
Derek also sends this link to Belgian artist Wim Dalvoye’s enigmatic work, Cloaca, an exquisitely engineered art machine that simulates (not *stimulates*) the human digestive tract.
Well it seems that ‘The Show So Far’ has taken a rather scatalogical direction today, and I apologize. Yet as Patti Smith sang in her 1978 ‘25th Floor and High on Rebellion‘:
the transformation of waste
the transformation of waste
the transformation of waste
the transformation of waste is perhaps the oldest pre-occupation of man. man being the chosen alloy,
He must be reconnected via shit, at all cost. inherent with(in) us is the dream of the task of the alchemist to create from the clay of man.
And to re-create from excretion of man pure and then soft and then solid gold. . . .
