4PG065 - Erin Doran

Radiant Slugs is a set of digitally altered smartphone photographs that Voss produced between 2012 and 2015. This is our (first) quarantine salon; we write this at a time where we are all collectively suffering the impact of extreme individualism. Voss created these images at a very different time, when smartphones felt like the antithesis of collective living. Now being apart from each other is the best thing we can do for each other, and we must find new ways to use technology as a proxy for togetherness.

We researched the gastropod and learned that slugs and snails are not a binary, but a spectrum. Some wear hard, protective spirals. Some wear a half-absorbed shield on their backs. Some go fully vulnerable, open to all the world has to offer, good and bad. Here we walk through 10 of Voss’ images as a meditation on the act of constructing a shell for yourself. It’s not a time in the world to be fully vulnerable, nor can we just wall ourselves off and pretend everything will be fine.

Slug Love Uprising

by Wren, Pigeon, Bluebird & Finch

Here we are once again exploring the invisible world. All revolutions start in the invisible world. A world that was always there, under the surface, charged to the brim with energy. Most invisible worlds are only invisible because we choose to ignore them. A world of paths of drips and discharge, what the high-perched, yet ever-ambulatory creatures wanted to ignore. Peering down, they finally noticed the hard-working beings who often get kicked, and stepped on, and they realized that if you stepped on something, yes it does get injured, if you step on it another time, it might break, if you keep stepping on it — well, it dies, and as all the beings who actually built the world and actually kept it functioning continued to die — the perched creatures realized that their perches were starting to sink. No new beings volunteered to upkeep the decomposing garden. They were done eating the filth thrown down, done being slipped on, done being told that their jobs were less important, that their health was less valuable, that their actual lives were disposable. 

O brave shell-less snail, oozing along your slug slime trail…

You sit in your room alone and stare at the phone that is not-a-phone. You are building your home. Observe the world, ignite an electric pulse, reinforce a myelin sheath and construct a calcium shell cell by cell.

From here you are aware of the ascent up a stair from the dark loamy earth to the bright breathy air. You stop to feel the cool marble but you do not touch the copper rail.

R e v e r b e r a t e

U n d u l a t e

Postulate the wisdom of the stairs and record it in your shell. Notice the patterns that are less rigid, but fit together just as well.

Use distortion to see better, like selecting a photo’s ISO. Balance the costs and benefits of loadsharing sensory experience with neural perception.

O muse, sing to me the song of slugs fused in kinship and love! Hermaphroditic bonds unbounded by gender!

I am more than shell deep.

I am Semi- / I am in / capable / Retract with in / protect / With out / In side, hiding soft. Project protect repel expel

Not pest not protect

I am Both I am Not one two, little o' A or B or any gray in-between. I slide not to hide but challenge and reject forceful demand to inspect your faulty classification.

Tingle with the memories of those encounters, stay warm when the world is cold.

You assume time spent below the surface serves a coward’s purpose, that I survive only because I hide.

I dare you not to see me. No, I burrow, I retreat, I seek the darkness to defeat the desiccation of your cracked landscape.

And when the peril of your drought pushes my continued existence into doubt,

I persist, biologically gifted to sit this one out.

Hibernation as declaration, I shelter cocooned as paper, waiting out this torrid air, this violation easily causing annihilation.

Wake me with the dew.

Seek green spaces. Touch the wood, smell the flowers, and consume the leaves.

Convert the objects around you into sensory maps, record it in your shell.

And now and now and now

Feel the moments continuously, not discretely. You do not march up the stairs in lefts and rights. You maintain continuous, sensuous, contact with every part of every step with your entire underbelly.

Here now, be.

Take a lesson: look down to the ground and under foot, buried by ability to blend, the need to burrow.

Here I am. In my prime, my time meaning as background.

Existing, comfortably collectively in this moment and in this mind my own magical mirage.

Protected by my power to dis and re connect with the world, the screens, the slimy trails leading home, through my dreams.