EAT ME is a worldbuilding project conceptualised by writer, performer and professional dominatrix Brittany Newell (San Francisco) and visual artist and filmmaker Jenkin Van Zyl (London). It is a conceptual exploration of the emergent nature of fantasy, the potential of eros to dissolve boundaries, the perceived limits of relationality and the techno-imaginative fetish of vorarephilia, which will ideally result in a script and 'world map' for Van Zyl's forthcoming large-scale film and installation.

Selected collaborators: Noa Jansma, Clara Benito Ortiz, Jove Spucchi and Elena Bartolomé.

Day 1 - Wednesday January 24 (Brief Day)

Today was our first time meeting in-person– what a treat! We heard presentations on all of the projects and brief introductory morsels from each of the collaborators. We discussed the wider theme of “Synthetic Minds” and how the EAT ME project fits in with the batch. We’re excited that our project offers a different flavor from the others, directly confronting and exploring sexuality with an expanded bouquet of erotics to select from in our emerging recipes of the synthetic mind. 

 

As we pour over the initial brief for the project, It’s clear that we each come from a different stock, each bringing different ingredients to the table for one another to sample, and incorporate.

 

We take a first look at all the research we’ve been adding to Are.na, and select our readings for our first course. We’ll read over the next few days, discussing as we go and expanding the menu with all the informational cuisines that tickle our fancies.

Day 2 - Thursday January 25 (Brief Day)

The morning session was entirely stuffed with Pecha Kucha presentations from each of the collaborators from the program.

 

Bogna:

  - Post-humanist version of Vore

  - Donna Haraway -- we are not posthuman, we are compost

  - Being inside of a woman in the most literal way 

  - Contrast between being eaten vs being inside

  - total penetration

  - Current vore 

  - In a situation where you should blur, merge, post-human, you actually emerge unchanged

  - Re-imagined Vore

  - You are changed, integrated, as food in a cosmic eating circle 

PM Mentor feedback: 

Ed:

 - *Dangerous Visions* Anthologies - Harlan Ellison

- Sci-Fi character who is involved in interdimensional police work, who look for moral transgressions

- Jump to one that is identical to earth where humans are bred to be milked 

- tries to intervene and rescue a human female, but no purpose because they are bred to only have livestock-level cognition

- Ethical questions

- Is it more appropriate to breed and farm cows? Or other humans?

 - *Under the Skin*

 - People with the desire to self-amputate

- Example where someone would experience dysphoria from seeing their own shadow with 5 fingers, and amputated

- Self-mutilation? Or movement toward ideal embodiment?

- Similarity to trans narratives

- *The Skin I Live In* (*Occhi Senza Volta*)

 - Eco ideas really resonated

 - Is this a design proposal? Or a speculative design proposal?

- Is it a proposal to help people eat each other?

- What does it mean to look at the project as a real proposal vs. a critique

- *Daybreakers* film - critique of consumption and late-capitalism

- Compare to Cronenberg (*Videodrome, eXistenz*)

- Paradigm shifting

 - How can we pull back the curtain on vore?

 - More importantly, how are we pulling people INTO the system, integrating them?

 - Impossibility of the fantasy

 - We are all food

 - Carlos Castaneda -- Death as Advisor

- Everyone must confront death

- Only upon confrontation of death are we able to live

- Facing the reality of death and using as a catalyst for optimism of the will

- Life-positive, being-positive affirmation

 - Deep Ecology Angle -- Aldo Leopold

- One cannot get away from the idea of the closure of lives leads to the creation of lives

- Awareness of the webs of life and death

 - Dune as Ecological Meditation

- Multi-thousand year scale consciousness

- One of the appendices of the first books, the original terraformer of the planet from 1000 years ago works with the Fremen to build a pedagogy to span the 1000-year period. 

- They rework the linguistic structure to include deep ecology so that it is unavoidable

- What could we do to make awareness of consumerism unavoidable in terms of redesigning language, media

- Re-presenting existing media in a way that does this

 - Temple ... 

- Humane design of slaughterhouses

- Designed a movement sequence so that animals would not be "spooked" before they arrived for slaughter

 - Likes the idea of project generating Awareness -- how would we generate awareness for a "tourist"

 - Power Dynamics Between Bodies

- Gender

- predator and prey

 - *Strange Days* - Katheryn Bigelow

- Set in apocalyptic LA

- Racial Violence

- Technology that allows for recording of perception that people can later play back

- People make snuff films

- Scene where the device is used to capture a death from the perspective of killer and victim

- Braindance 

- Inside you of physical sex, literal consumption vs. inhabiting consciousness, co-feeling

 - What does it mean when Christ is inside me?

- Transmutation of material that transcends body and blood

- Has the capacity to transmute the consumer into something divine

- Possibility for that transmutation that carries a pharmakon component, escaping from time component

 - Approach the idea of co-feeling alchemically

 - What are the vectors and channels for co-feeling

 - Philip K. Dick -- merging with Christ

- *Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep*

- Humans regulate emotions with drugs

- Device for humans to have collective religious experience with christ analog named Mercer-- everyone experienced being martyred, stoned

- Co-feeling, shared experience

- "Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because, ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the success-ful and the defeated. As in the fusion with Mercer, everyone ascended together or, when the cycle had come to an end, fell together into the trough of the tomb world. Oddly, it resembled a sort of biological insurance, but double-edged. As long as some creature experienced joy, then the condition for all other creatures included a fragment of joy. However, if any living being suffered, then for all the rest the shadow could not be entirely cast off."

- "The old man said, "You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe."

- "Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community, whereas intelligence to some degree could be found throughout every phylum and order including the arachnida."

 

Day 3 - Friday January 26 (Critical Session)

 

WEEKEND- spent roaming and seeing other sights of Madrid - nightlife, obsessive doll collections, giantess folk costumes… 

 

Day 4 - Monday January 29 (Research- off site day at the Prado)

 

Applying hours of research and conversation culled at Matadero to “real life” and incorporating art history of nudes, fleshy bodies, still lifes of fruit, etc etc into our ongoing discussion and investigation into vore by going to the Prado and being free to wander and see what inspires us, speaks to us, call to us, with our renewed lens of “vore” as a guiding perspective –how do we reimagine and relate to these historic paintings now, after immersing ourselves in the sexual imaginaries of vore and their online communities? Can we note the aesthetic differences?

 

Day 5 - Tuesday January 30 (Mentor Feedback)

 

This was the day we came to a solidified outline/draft of how we wanted to present our research at the end, varied though it was, in the form of a pre-recorded performative lecture with different “chapters” for each collaborator so as to allow the space for myriad viewpoints — originally we conceptualized a narrative arc for our lecture of the “being eaten” i.e. brittany’s part about romance/poetics of vore would be THE MOUTH, leading to an angel/discussion of vore that would be labeled THE THROAT, then to the STOMACH where things are digested, finally to WASTE/ANUS when conceptualizing vore’s relationship to AI and computer landscape whereby vore could maybe (somewhat precariously) be used as a metaphor to understand the looming AI cannibalism of culture.

 

Day 6 - Wednesday January 31 (State of the Projects Presentation)

The morning session focused on completing the presentation and upload for later, condensing what we had worked on thus far, Brittany presenting her rough draft of her lyric micro-essay on the romance of vore and Jove detailing our working process thus far.

 

Day 7 - Thursday February 1

Independent research and work now that we had each zeroed in on what we desired to present and contribute to the lecture – we found we were able to work much quicker and more effectively now that we had moved past and through the collective brainstorming phase into the more independent but still supported “creation” phase of our project so everyone was free to hunker down and commit to their visions, drafting, writing, editing failed attempts at algorithms or rendered images, learning from mistakes, rewriting drafts, etc, all within the collectively held space of being able to turn to other teammates for input or perspective

 

Day 8 - Friday February 2 (Critical Sessions)

Similar to Day 7, but spiced up by the critical sessions which allowed us to gain outsider perspective and take a beat, a pause, to look at our work thus far from a distance and ask what direction we were still heading and if this direction felt right……… ultimately deciding to loosen the “stomach” narrative of the performative lecture and create something that was a little less literal and more visually jarring – Brittany and Jenkin began filming her portion, a lyrical micro-essay, in the style of fetishstic Giantess TikToks, this was the first piece of the lecture and allowed for the rest to fall into place as we sorted out the remaining narrative and edited her piece down to fit the constraints of time 

 

Mentor Notes 2.2

Bogna:

  - Overarching narrative structure needed to tie everything together

  - Potential time-based narrative of vore from past (history/theory), present (sex-work), future (AI, post-human)

  - Ethereal, Spoken, maybe poetic linking narrative

  - Need some further contextualization

  - For Vore, and for fetish

  - Do we want to retain aesthetic distinctness across each of our pieces? 

  - What will unify the visuals?

  - What will cohere the visual narrative?

  - Sees Noa's piece as speculative because it is not how vore is currently practiced or conceptualized

 

Bani:

  - Synthetic mind does not have to be as literal as AI

  - Make sure that we explain things in such a way that is accessible for wider, more public audience

Day 9 - Saturday February 3

Porno adventures in Madrid’s skeazy corners

Day 10 - Monday February 5 (Workshop & Final Documentation)

Monday Morning was the Deadline for everyone’s contributions to the lecture to be submitted to Miss Jenny so that she could begin the labor of piecing everything together into a hopefully cohesive whole and finding the arc via editing. 

 

Day 11 - Tuesday February 6 (Workshop & Final Documentation)

This was the day that Jenkin really shone and did the work of sewing together all of our various threads –our entry points into the lecture–creating something that would be coherent to audience, she buckled down and put on her editing beret and cranked it out, whilst still being graceful and generous when collaborators needed advice and requested to edit their portion. 

 

 

 

Day 11 - Wednesday February 7 (Workshop & Final Documentation)

 

We presented our rough draft of a performative lecture and listened attentively to feedback from group, Clara did her portion of the lecture live, Elena made gummy people!