Meet Thomas Thwaites, a 34-year-old artist who’s always wanted to know what it’d be like to be an animal. As a kid, he wanted to know what it’d be like to be a cat (mainly because cats don’t go to school) and, most recently, he’s decided that what he really wanted to know was what it’d be like to be a goat crossing the alps. You know, just to get away from it all. While the rest of us might de-stress by watching Netflix and eating an entire pizza, Thwaites decided he wanted to build himself some prosthetics, eat grass, and try to cross the alps with the goats that he so admired for their perseverance.
Thwaites didn’t do it alone, though; he asked for help from an agency (The Wellcome Trust), who provided him with funds that allowed him to ship out to a goat farm where he spent several days being one with the goats (who were probably all very confused about what was going on) by testing out the prosthetics and even eating grass, which goats do on the regular, but probably isn’t very nutritious for humans. As someone who’s eaten grass, I can tell you with certainty it’s not a particularly pleasurable experience.
Still, Thwaites, who’s a graduate of the Royal College of Art Design Interactions and boasts building a toaster from scratch as part of his impressive resume, says that his time with the goats was amazing:
It was a very, I don’t know, a very special kind of time. The thing is, it became an investigation into how close we can come to fulfilling this ancient human dream because I did a bit of research and you quickly find cave paintings, of half human-half beasts and in fact this shows up in the earliest piece of figurative art, a statuette.
And as crazy as all this sounds, as Thwaites told Motherboard, there is *some* method to his madness:
“To be a nonhuman animal? So much calmer and simpler!” Thwaites wrote to me in another email. He wanted to explore what it would be like to live as a creature immune to the worries and frustrations—the “existential terror”—of everyday life, and to do so as authentically as possible with the technology that exists today. “And then the biomedical charity the Wellcome Trust said, ‘go on then,’ and gave me a small arts award,” he wrote.
Watch a photo montage of his legendary journey up top and then take a few minutes to decide whether this guy is a little bit off or completely brilliant. After all, goats may have to sleep outside and eat plants and garbage, but they don’t have to worry about taxes!
[…Moreover, it’s a cool reminder that being weird is fun and life can be odd and peculiar and strange and that that weirdness can be a good thing. Like the great sages of our era (the Indigo Girls, obvs) once said, “it’s only life after all.” -ed]
(Via PRI)
