Thesis Paper

THESIS POST V

A failed 3D print of my body

Mind Body Problems

In A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality,  John Perry discusses personal identity. The book is a dialogue between Gretchen Weirob, a woman on her deathbed after a motorcycle injury and her friend Miller. Her friend is trying to comfort her by developing an argument for how she may survive even after her death. The two argue about what it is that makes a person a person, discussing the mind, body and soul. Weirob believes our identity is our body and consciousness while Miller thinks identity is based on a continuous flow of consciousness, tracked through memory. There is much debate in this reading, and an example to counter every theory. For example, we know who we are when we wake up before we open our eyes and see our bodies, and false memories not only exist, but are easy to create. I find this exploration fascinating, especially with my interest in avatars, and my critical thoughts on bodies and identity. 

In mind body dualism, especially that described by Rene Descartes,  mind and body are completely separated because of their essential qualities. This makes sense- bodies are physical and minds are not. How can the two ever converge if they are opposite? However, this ignores the fact that our minds (even emotional) attachment to our bodies affects us deeply. How we are treated by others is influenced greatly by what we look like and what happens to our body affects our mind, ie trauma. 

I am interested in the element of control over bodies. It is much easier to control a body than a mind, our bodies are almost the prisons that allow us to get stuck in bad situations because we cannot transcend our physical form. I think about season 2 episode 5 of Courage the Cowardly Dog, Human Habitrail. In this episode, a vacuum salesman gerbil comes to the house, shrinks Muriel and Eustace, and sucks them into a vacuum. He puts a bunch of potions on them in the form of giant tubes of toothpaste and massive deodorants and their bodies change in strange ways, like growing hair rapidly before the hair then explodes. No one else even remembers this episode of Courage the Cowardly Dog when I bring it up, but when I think about the show, it’s the most memorable, because it tapped into some weird fascination I had with control as a child. I don’t know what came first, the fantasy or watching this episode, but when I was really young I would imagine shrinking people down into tiny forms and keeping them in a terrarium to…. I don’t know, take care of them? Change their hair? It seems very obvious that this episode directly influenced that regular fantasy installment in my mind. Having a body is quite complicated and I have a long fascination with avatars, mostly because I’ve never made an avatar that felt like me. My Sims and Bitmojis never had my elbow scar, they were perfectly symmetrical, they never had the correct ethnic features options for my jewish nose and hair. When I got a 3D scan done of myself I was overwhelmed by how much it felt like me. It made all the other imitations of “me” I had tried to create feel so inadequate. I realized, although I fixated on the lack of options for hair and face, the body ended up being much more important to me, and I realized how much avatar creations only allow you to customize the body in terms of a sliding scale of weight. 

I 3D printed a model of myself and used the model to conduct an experiment at the Winter Show. I placed the model on a pedestal in a quiet, isolated room, and placed paints out in front of it. I invited participants to go inside the room and paint my body. I stayed outside, as I was the “mind” and I wanted to have some separation between the “mind” and the “body” to show that they were still disconnected despite physical separation. At first I struggled with developing this experience because I wanted every conceptual thread to be connected and for every participant to come away with some understanding. But then I realized that I wasn’t necessarily trying to teach anyone anything here, I wanted to observe. It was actually better that my audience be confused because then I could get more authentic reactions. 

Here is what I realized: It was easy for me to disassociate a bit because I was separated from this extension of my body. Because I couldn’t see what was happening to it, my mind filled in the blanks in a positive way. It wasn’t until someone I know went inside and came out and said “You’re so brave to do this, I could never, people can be so mean” that I started to feel uncomfortable and scared. What had they seen when they went in there? How could I allow the public access to my body in that way, not only to have full freedom to stare at it and consume its image but also to enact their own ideas onto me? Suddenly I felt so vulnerable and like I had given a piece of myself out and taken nothing in return.

 I have been interested in the concept of destruction in art since I was a sophomore in highschool. I went to the Hirshhorn Museum in DC and saw an exhibit called Damage Control which was all about different ways destruction had manifested in art. This was a really influential show on me and I carry that fascination with destruction to this day. For the Spring Show, I showed a piece I made with Adnan Aga where by looking at the piece, viewers destroyed it. I spent hours and hours hand carving women’s bodies out of bath bombs, which were then put inside a box that had peepholes. When viewers looked through the peepholes they triggered a sensor which started a water pump to start dripping onto the statue, effectively destroying it with their own voyeurism. The message was what do we take from something by looking at it and objectifying it? There was also the secondary implication of them destroying hours of my work because they want to look at it. With my 3D models, I allowed the audience full reign to steal whatever they wanted from me with their eyes. 

This was all meaningful and impactful for me and having this intensive thesis development experience was jarring and draining. When people asked me what it meant, I had a completely different understanding at the end than I did at the beginning. I wanted to show how other people’s treatment of my body influenced the next person who came through. The way people interpret me and treat me is not isolated, nor does it happen in a vacuum. I am impacted by every person who has ever perceived me and interacted with me, my observations of how they speak to me gives me information and makes me give myself context in this world. It’s unavoidable.  As I am affected by people’s actions, it changes how I respond when the next person comes along, and who you are doesn’t come from any one singular event. This is why, I believe what makes us who we are is continuity. Everything that happens to us is a flow from one thing to the next. You can track the development of who you are as a person and the lessons you learned from each life experience. Each person who came in and painted me was impacted by the last person because they had effectively changed me. Sure, someone would come along and wipe out the collaboration of 20 people who delicately decorated my body with a single swipe of white paint, but they are still reacting to the previous people, and the paint placed by the previous people is still there, just smeared in a different way. My mind was not in my body in those moments but it still affected me knowing someone could come along and swipe away everything in a single moment. This is the start of my exploration of perception and bodies, and how having a body changes who we are. We have to look like something, and while most people wouldn’t say that your body isn’t the entirety of your identity, the vast majority of the time your body is the way you are identified. 

What are some instances in which we are identified without our bodies? Only by people who know us very well, or those who are particularly observant. I was in a drawing class in undergrad where throughout the semester we just piled our drawings up in one big pile and w4e sorted through it at the end of the semester. For the majority of the drawings, we were all able to give them to their rightful creator just by looking at the style. This is a trace we leave behind that others can know us by. I remember one of my classmates gave me a drawing of mine that to me looked like none of my others, and probably to the untrained eye, it was. But we had begun to know each other in this specific intimate way that allowed us to be identified by the work of our minds, not through our bodies. Another example would be during the game Jackbox with close friends, oftentimes a friend will look at the anonymous answers and say “I know Zoe did that one” and often they are right. In this way, others can know what makes us us, more than we can know ourselves. I plan to explore this distinction of identity more, to call into question how ridiculous it is to have a body at all, and how our physical appearance serves not much purpose beyond making it easy for others to identify us quickly. My next steps are to work on self portraits that show how I identify myself in my mind, because it varies so much from this 3D representation of me. Though the scan is technically more “accurate” I believe a self portrait contains more of the mind instead of just the body, which is all this scan can contain. I have explored the body with this experiment at the Winter Show, and I’d like to work over Winter Term to develop experiments pertaining to the mind and the soul.