Human Tank

snaka or: a creeping thing Cockroaches are known to be one of the few species able to outlive humanity. Maybe because of their pronotum, their shield. How can one build their own pronotum? Cooperation and competition are balanced in cockroach group decision-making behavior. Cockroaches appear to use just two pieces of information to decide where to go, namely how dark their surroundings are and how many other cockroaches there are. How do they acknowledge each other’s existence? What exactly is their perception of the others — or the Other? While wandering amongst aesthetic forms, gathered around and into a swarm of familiar and unknown hominids, one often feels estranged. The multiple semantic layers displayed in contexts such as social gatherings may be alienating; one could feel the urge to let themselves get absorbed by anything but other breathing, buzzing players. Tacit rules are so agglutinated that most spaces for agency are often clogged. The snake bites its own tail: Digital worlds are loopholes, yet subjectivities end up reified through virtual behaviors. Thus, balance between flesh and pixels is essential. One needs a dialectical way to keep afloat the AFK puddles — “Away From Keyboard”, rather than the obsolete “In Real Life”. Luckily, metaverses can subvert commodification and fetishization. While being a term much overused nowadays, a metaverse is merely a shared digital space of any kind, inhabited by proxies of human beings, also known as avatars. Metaverses function as filters enabling to see reality — the tangible one, where beings are sentient. Swaying between these multi-user materialities and socializations, one might finally find and maintain their persona. Let’s defeat shallow performativity by exploring both corporeal and virtual spaces, following various paths, shedding old skin(s), wrapping ourselves into our wings, gliding through sludgy water, crawling in wisteria blooms, squeezing through any crack. Let’s embrace our liquid times and drift gently through endless modes of incarnations, interactions, and representations. In this infinite quest, let’s embody our preferred selves. Once we have chosen how to dress our character, do we disappear or become hypervisible?