I’ve cut my mouth. Nobody witnessed me eating 32 sheets of paper sat on the floor begging the film to end.
I turned to Ericka Fischer-Lichte to help me justify my actions.
‘When Beuys spent three days living with a coyote, or when Abramavic wrapped pythons around her body, the artists relinquished whatever limited control they might have over the course of the performance. They created situations which made predictions about the performance’s further development difficult, if not impossible…The artists exposed themselves and others to an uncontrollable situation created by them and thus made the spectators aware of their shared responsibility in the event.’
I had no spectators. They couldn’t stop me when I forced more paper down my throat and gagged and choked. I chose not to stop myself but to use the length of a strip of film to determine how long I would continue. The camera was my spectator. A camera I had made myself from a matchbox and gaffa tape. I constructed my own spectator. I was the subject, object and perceiver. It exists of me and for me.
Autopoiesis – self creation
Self-reproduction.
The process whereby an organization produces itself.
Self-producing systems, where a system can be a cell, an organism and perhaps a corporation.
…a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components that produces the components that: (i) through their interactions and transformations continously regenerate the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realizations as such a network. (Maturana and Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition (1980), p.79
