Body Extension: Life Capsule

Intro to Sculpture: Body Extensions

One of my biggest projects of the year, this is my mock-proposal to combat the climate crisis: the Life Capsule

*note that the top portion of the sphere is supposed to be covered with greenhouse plastic as well, but for material transparency constraints & viewing purposes it has been left uncovered for the demonstration.

I thought about the different ways in which we try to be sustainable in our current culture, but I repeatedly come down to the realization that all these tiny band-aids we are trying to put over this gaping wound are far from being a real solution. Commonly accepted methods of environmental "improvements" such as recycling, which takes immense amounts of fossil fuels, certified organic practices, which are becoming more and more commercialized, fuel alternatives that are nearly as environmentally careless as fossil fuels, and green consumerism, which is teaching people that they are helping the environment by buying equally-processed (albeit much more expensive), "healthy" versions of their conventional counterparts. My parody of a solution is this: the climate crisis can never be undone unless we become 100% responsible for everything we consume AND produce, on an individual level.

Where can this type of habitat be found? A man-made example is a terrarium, an enclosed space where live organisms can be contained and sustained, usually in the form of a small-scale ecosystem for the purpose of observation and study.

Going off this idea, I looked not to a pre-human earth but to a pre-industrial earth. Humans used to be responsible for themselves, either consciously or not--but it was because they had to be if they wanted to survive. So reluctantly I concluded that this weighty task must be implemented by formal decree. In order to maintain that each and every human inhabitant of the earth be responsible, I made this mock human-biome "hamster ball" in which you must live in from birth, sustaining yourself only with whatever you can grow on your own body inside your Life Capsule, and composting and regenerating energy from any waste that you produce. I constructed a "sprouting suit", lined with pockets of cheesecloth. These growing pockets can house edible plants such as sprouts, which grow easily and quickly enough to be a substantial diet for an adult human. Sprouts are of the most nutritionally dense foods available, and if everyone was responsible for growing their own, there would be no crisis in food or environmental destruction, and the Earth could regenerate its bounty.

A significant piece of work that I found a strong correlation with this piece was Hugh Pocock's My Food My Poop:

http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=30959

The two pieces both take a much closer look at human food consumption and waste production than is conventionally practiced in our society.