Writings as an issuance from the gut-brain, as meditation on alimentary and media circulations, and on bodily infrastructures and incorporation processes. "Metabolising Media, Incorporating a Nightshade" is a a pre- and post-digestive contemplation on mental and physical incorporation for our media-determined condition and situation. Eating is an everyday material-discursive entanglement and/as creative, attentional and narrative practice, that, in our contemporary world, is more often than not accompanied in some way by digital and media systems and experiences.
"Metabolic media" is exposed, who and what inspires these, and then a story about eating a tomato while looking at a smartphone is told. These are attempts to understand the intra-actions of infra-ordinary human and nonhuman elements within complex systems as a kind of planetary intimacy and trans-scalar integration of matter and media. Quotidian and commonplace, for those who self-inform, distract or multitask while consuming foodstuffs and other mind-body altering edibles, there is here an attempt to understand the planetary resonances of the smallest acts. Also described are creative practice processionals of group-bodily assimilations, and meditations on the biosemiotics of attentional eating.
What desires are stoked, what requirements fulfilled, and what ideas are metabolised along with the fleshy vegetable placenta of a lycopersicum, the plump, red, wolf-peach, tomato? Discoveries along this processional reflection touch upon the openings, closings, and dual outsides of bodies and lives intertwined with media and histories of technological agriculture, modern food infrastructures and preparation practices, digestive and digested tissues, nutrients and wastes. How the tomato mediates us, and we mediate it, decidedly if humbly performs a (trans)sensorial practice of mutual co-constitutions.
"Metabolising Media, Incorporating a Nightshade" emerged in response to the pa01ta00ta10_(trans)materialidades invitation of Prof. Dr. Esther Moñivas Mayor and Ana Eva Iribas-Rudin (Departament of Painting and Conservation-Restoration, Complutense University of Madrid) for ACCESOS Revista de investigación artística (Artistic Research Journal) summer 2024 issue.