Kingston University students Luke Evans and Josh Lake recently made creative use of 35 mm film by swallowing it to see how their digestive systems process it. The piece, titled, "I Turn Myself Inside Out," began when the team put film strips inside a brightly-colored capsule (to avoid damage to their colons) and swallowed them. Since they are artists and not doctors, we're guessing they crossed their fingers and hoped for the best.
Eventually they excreted the film (phew!), sorted out the tablets, used fixer on the film and scanned it with an electron microscope. They blew up the resulting images into massive black-and-white prints, showing the details of the body at work. In an interview with Wired's Olivia Solon, they said, "There is a physicality to film that we wanted to explore: the soft emulsion layer, its thickness, the way it reacts to touch and temperature" The duo continued, "At this point we were really excited because there was absolutely no way to envision how the results would look, and that no two would be the same." The images below look like electric storms on a distant planet, rather than an object expelled from a human gastrointestinal tract, don't they?
The works will show at London's Hoxton Gallery on June 12 and 13.
