Plastic Surgery
Sculpting and/or Reshaping
ID cards — the human version of doggie tags. Plastic cards you play on different occasions. It’s all part of the game. All it took was Jingle to say “Plastic Surgery” to melt my mind.
“How can you become someone else?” we had asked earlier. In this age could you become someone by acquiring and accumulating all the plastic cards belonging to them? Could you undergo digital plastic surgery?
Discussions with Jingle and Ivan brought up questions about why people undergo plastic surgery.
“Identity is not who we are and how we are, it’s who we believe we are”
Plastic surgery is essentially a process that allows one to align/unite body and mind with belief.
Commonly ‘Plastic Surgery’ refers to sculpting and/or reshaping, “the art of modelling of malleable flesh”. Plastic instantly brings to mind several toys and games that involve building and re-building. Mr. Potato, Lego blocks, Play Doh, Barbie dolls — tied together by the thought of “playing out our identities” and living vicariously through plastic manifestations of our aspirations.
Sushrutha- the father of plastic surgery is said to have followed a particular method.
“The method of study was to submerge the body in water and allow it to decompose followed by examination of the decomposing body at intervals to study structures layer by layer as they got exposed following decomposition”
He peeled back layers in order to understand how to put them back on. Perhaps this surgical approach is something we could adopt in order to construct identity through dissection and deconstruction. Decomposition as a means to composition.
Planning, Precision, Haemostasis and Perfection.
