Could your next holiday be a break from your humanity?
In the face of the climate crisis, inequality and many more issues besides, humans have plenty to worry about. What if, when it all gets too much, we could temporarily escape to another mode of being? What if we could experience the worry-free life of an animal? Meet the GoatMan.
Judging by the Triennale di Milano’s current headline exhibition Broken Nature: Design Takes On Human Survival, the time has come for humanity to face the music about the destructive forces that have come with our self-perceived dominance over the other living things and systems on our planet. It’s time to make an attempt at reparation while we still can.
The exhibition (which runs till 1 September 2019) prods at how we can use design to move beyond the anxiety that comes with the realities of our era and instead begin mending our broken relationship with nature. Curator Paola Antonelli has drawn from a wide variety of sources to consider sustainability as being linked not only to environmental factors, but also to structures such as family, gender, race, class and nationhood. These, she suggests in her catalogue essay, need to be as fluid and open as changing circumstances demand them to be. But just how fluid can (and should) we be when it comes to our identity and our sense of self in the world?
Among the exhibited projects (which number over 100) is one that strikes as particularly curious. Presented on a plinth is an abstract skeleton of curved laminated pine that hints at quadruped form but notions to an absence thanks to an attached pair of ice skates, a
PVC harness and grip blocks. They await, of course, a human body, and together the ensemble would help to transform the rider of this prototype contraption into an unfamiliar version of itself – a goat-like form.
But why, you ask? It all began with the personal anxiety felt by British designer Thomas Thwaites – worries about his own prospects in life and about the future of the world. “To be human is to worry,” he wrote in the delightful book that followed his experimental project, GoatMan: How I Took A Holiday From Being Human.1 But what if, he wondered as he observed the carefree days of his niece’s dog, we could temporarily escape that? “Wouldn’t it be nice,” he wrote, “to just switch off that particularly human ability for a couple of weeks? To live totally in the moment, with no worries about what you’ve done, what you’re doing, or what you should do? … To have a holiday from being human?”2
In Broken Nature, Antonelli has grouped the GoatMan project with others that serve as bridges between humans and non-humans – examples of a necessary shift toward a more inclusive multispecies justice. For Thwaites, although the project began as an escape hatch, it quickly became a multifaceted investigation into the nature of transformation encompassing ancient beliefs, psychology, physiology and communication. How could design help him change his body and his mindset sufficiently to be able to experience the world as a goat would?
The choice of the goat as his ‘partner being’ came at the suggestion of a Danish shaman – it being an animal with which Thwaites would have some affinity, living not far from a goat sanctuary as he does.
His first problem was how he might encapsulate the ‘soul’ of a goat. Thwaites researched the long history of people trying to bridge the gap with animals, not only via shamanic rituals but also via hybrids depicted in cave paintings and totems and the spectrum of ancient belief systems around the world.
After some less-than-successful experimentation with ‘shamanic journeying’, he turned to science and the possibility of brain hacking with transcranial magnetic stimulation – temporarily switching off the parts of his brain that are responsible for imagination and language. The advice of a doctor was that actually achieving that might be possible in – say – another 50 years. So Thwaites found himself left with the reduced prospect of focusing on altering his context and his way of moving.
He designed and constructed a series of rudimentary exoskeletons that would allow him to walk on all fours, but the initial results were less than comfortable. The input of a veterinary science professor and a prosthetics clinic resulted in a set of ankle-foot orthotics and ‘front legs’ for Thwaites’ arms. But there was a final complication. To fulfill a concept proposal that had secured him a grant to undertake the project, Thwaites needed to embark on a journey across the
Alps – as a goat. The functionality and comfort of his orthotics aside, he needed to eat. And that meant digesting grass, like a goat can. A prosthetic rumen was developed to make that possible, aided by a pressure cooker for a campfire. So off went Thwaites to Switzerland in a waterproof suit made by his mum. It was time to seek the acceptance of a herd.
How did he do? It was tough going on rocky ground, to be sure.
But he had ‘a moment’; after he unwittingly challenged the hierarchy at play in the herd by climbing to high ground, a particular goat he had been ‘hanging out’ with walked through the group to break the tension. Success?
Was it worry that spurred the goat intervention? Or the anxiousness that comes with the fight-or-flight instinct of the wild? Either way, Thwaites’ unusual experiment focused attention on the many facets – physical and non-physical – that make all creatures what they are. Dissecting those facets and contemplating each, and then bringing them together through an experience, provided fertile ground for design – bypassing the typically segregated realms of the sciences and spirituality, and thinking through how aspects of knowledge can be harnessed for deeper and broader understanding. And as Broken Nature drives home, we certainly need a broad perspective right now.
“Wouldn’t it be nice … to live totally in the moment, with no worries about what you’ve done, what you’re doing, or what you should do? … To have a holiday from being human?” Thomas Thwaites.