where is my body

I read extremely normal amounts. I know people who read much more and have much stronger memory, and those are abilities I would definitely choose to have if I could. Hearing people recite shers from memory gives me both extreme pleasure and a dull pain.

But since I do have really shitty memory - as you would know annoyingly, if you know me personally - it becomes important to organise some sort of a personal archive. And this is not just because of bad memory; we all build these archives in some way or another, with our screenshots folder or browser history. We collect links and pin things and bookmark; all in the hope of someday being a version of ourselves that will actually go through the contents of this ever growing list. In a lot of ways this kind of collecting is like putting things in a void or in the garbage can; you know that you are never actually going to see them again.

Building a personal archive is a different exercise. I like to think of it as building a home to which you can return when you're lost and struggling to find yourself. Not in any dramatic way, but everyday ways like when you get stared at on the street and now in the back of your head there is a lingering thought that there might be something wrong with how your dressed, or how you look. In fact most of the times, I did not even need to be stared at to be reminded of this feeling of being a stranger inside my own body. There was relief to be found among the many texts I was reading, and since the initial idea of building a twitter stream of things people were saying about bodies was turning out to be quite depressing, I turned towards the manual approach and told the software engineer inside me to shut up for just one second.

I read and read (still very normal amounts) and made a spreadsheet which turned into a notion database ¹ which turned into a twitter account and a very tiny game ² where you pick items from this collection based on phrases and words and decide yourself whether you thought you won or not based on the items that you picked.

play here

let's get physical

And then Future Landing became physical and we descended upon a very lovely building, the Excise Building in Goa, and where is my body was to have a separate room for itself. Maybe because so many things were a first for me with this one, I decided on a somewhat ³ ambitious idea of making a typewriter that hosts the archive and also acts as its' mouthpiece.

So you would say something, i.e. type something on the typewriter and see it on paper in front of you of course; and then the typewriter would respond to you from the archive. This back and forth could continue until you ran out of paper or patience at which point you could do as you wished with the paper sheets; take them back or leave them there for other people to read.

Footnotes

1. what is up with the title field of notion databases, like honestly not everything has a title notion! ↩

2. very tiny "game" ↩

3. very much, I did not even own an Arduino at this point ↩