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cull ‘ tivate. Kai Lossgott. 2008. Video. 3 mins 21 sec.

During a long period of illness in which I could not leave the house, I began to intuit how keenly our bodily processes are aligned to the coming and going of the sun, to subtle rhythms which depend entirely on the time of day. If there was a natural 'language', an unconscious rhythm of silence and sound that ran through every living thing, this was where to find it: deep in the body, outside the workings of the conscious mind.

I began to see myself as I had previously only regarded plants. I began to wonder about the difference between humans and plants.

This video is a meditation on time, language and the changing body. Unlike plants which blossom, bear fruit and die, human life is not linear. We are different people at different times, and as we grow and adapt we invent personal myths to make sense of the constant radical changes in the fast-paced world around us. Perhaps we are not evolved enough to live at this speed. In this video, images of myself between the ages of fifteen and twenty-eight build into sequences which interrupt themselves, run backwards at times, and blend into each other along the symmetrical growth cleft which unites all mutations of sentient life. Plant, human or animal, our biological processes bear certain similarities, and these processes are the only thing we can be certain of.

The human mind is programmed to be selective as it navigates this world. It does not care about what is 'true' and what is not. It cares about what the body must believe in order to survive. In this way, the body remembers and forgets at will. This is part of our biology. All we know is that

There are waves of perception that pass through us in smaller and larger amounts, a kind of universal music. There are gaps between the things we understand, places where language fails us. The silence requires the sound, the sound requires the silence, and this allows language or culture and therefore any kind of artwork to come into being.

When humans first grew plants we came to understand these processes as metaphors. There are times at which a plant must be removed in order to make space for others to grow and new generations to evolve. That is the very essence of cultivation and of thought as we know it. The pictograms, sign language and the semantic processes of this video represent these metaphors.

Kai working on part II of cull ' tivate at the Nirox Foundation outside Johannesburg, South Africa.

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