Huck: It’s lunchtime on the Friday of Houghton Festival, and my thumb is in between a stranger’s toes. As I crouch down and splash water on his feet, and dust dribbles off onto a silver plate, he shows me his collection of Nintendo DS games. He’s got Mario Kart, Nintendogs and Animal Crossing, along with a host of other nostalgic classics and niche digs from the 2000s in a case that flips like a CD wallet.
2 comments:
Wow. I know you can go far for the arts but not as far as the Pedilavium. Sure yes human connectivity can be experienced as the person having their feet cleaned due to the intimate proximity, but I can’t imagine how grossed out I’d be having to clean strangers’ feet one after the other. So instead of dwelling on how nasty it would be for the people cleaning the feet, I’ll put myself in the shoes of those having their feet cleaned. Come to think of it, our feet are also the parts of our bodies that physically support us through our everyday movements, so trusting a stranger to care for them naturally indicates a deeper form of connection, as we give someone else permission to care for the very foundation that carries us through life. Originally looking to see if this practice can be replaced by cleaning a different body part, I realized this intimate feeling cannot be experienced the same way as when one’s feet are cleaned, so I have great reverence for the people who commit to this ritual.
I didn't expect a foot washing tent to be the most interesting thing at an electronic music festival, but here we are. A lot of it is actually design work. They built the tent, the benches, the signs, the white robes, all of it so the piece reads as slightly cult-like the second you walk past. If it looked like a spa or a first aid station nobody would have the same reaction, and the whole thing depends on that reaction.
The piece I really wish I could have seen is the older one where they strapped a heart monitor to you, ran it through a PA speaker, and had eight musicians play along to your heartbeat. I've worked on an installation driven by live biometric data (brain waves) before and the hardest part is always that the signal won't behave, so I'd love to know how they handled the messy readings. He says uneven heartbeats just turn it into jazz, which I think is being generous about a noisy input.
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