Bodies (I'm not an animal)

Look at your hands as they rest on your keyboard. See the image of your face dimly in the screen. Previous ages offered the crowds strong men, bearded ladies & Siamese twins. Our own bodies reflected back to us at a safe distance in a distorted hall of mirrors. The Amazing Human Body exhibition features whole human bodies & their constituent parts dissected and then reassembled to satisfy our curiosity & wonder. Skin peeled back to reveal nerve endings, blood vessels, bones. The effect is unnerving - revolting, educating, darkly comic. At the end I suffer from flesh fatigue - I want to wash my mind by watching paint dry or some other suitably inorganic process.

N.B. We don't quite know what do with our bodies. We discipline them like machines - optimising nutritional inputs & completing scheduled exercise. We indulge them. Castigate & mortify them. Put them on hold.

I have to admit to being a trifle puzzled about Second Life. I have enough difficulty managing my first one so I can't promise that Ricardo5D Negulesco will get up to much but we'll have to see. Quite why crude 3D renderings of a fantasy world would be appealing to large numbers of people defeats me (except here you can choose the body you want without resorting to expensive plastic surgery). I spent a year living in Coventry (a crude 3D fantasy world of crazed 50s architects) and have no strong desire to inhabit its virtual equivalent. May be you Second Lifers out there can persuade me otherwise.



Human bodies also feature in the World Press Photo exhibition. A one-legged football team in Sierra Leone. A Bangladeshi kiosk attendant revealed like an angel in the desert of Kuwait. A Mexican thief tied to a lamppost. No fewer than three dead babies.

The world reflected here is in turmoil. And some of the bodies are broken beyond repair and no matter how beautiful the photography bathing them they will never move again. Another virtual world on display.

Will you make your body vulnerable and bring it out into this violent world?