Tiny Mining. Extracting minerals from our own body – We Make Money Not Art

Though the demand from customers for minerals to develop electronics, clean vitality and the infrastructures that support them is skyrocketing, it is finding ever more challenging, environmentally detrimental and strength-intensive to extract some of these mineral features.

On the other hand, the human entire body incorporates minerals in the type of kidney stones, crystals shaped in urine and iron in the blood.

Could our technologies be sourced from within our individual residing bodies? Could mineral extraction no lengthier be dependent on scarce and previously polluted environmental sources? This is in which Tiny Mining will come in.

Small Mining is an open neighborhood of chemists, geologists, artists and practitioners of plants and metallic magics and substitute medicine. Their principal objectives are:
– to take a look at and exploit the dwelling human body for more than 20 valuable and uncommon earth minerals
– to share assets and assist for the Do it yourself exploration of inside prospective customers by means of local community sweatshops, documentation and video clip tutorials.

We imagine that the earth need to remain as pristine and untouched nature we have no desire to carry on extracting assets from a depleted globe, polluting and laying waste to the landscape. Preserving the world is now a issue of getting delicate to our possess geological being.

Whilst transhumanists and biohackers look for to upgrade and substitute the flesh with steel and engineering, users of the Tiny Mining group ambition to develop into mineral and purge by themselves of the metallic and the mineral.

Martin Howse at the Meta.Morf 2022 – Ecophilia meeting. Photograph: Juliane Schütz / Meta.Morf 2022

A couple of weeks in the past, programmer, performer, artists and explorer Martin Howse gave a intriguing converse at the Meta.Morf 2022 – Ecophilia conference organised by TEKS in Trondheim. In accordance to Howse, “the body is and has usually been geological” and he set up to notify us how the human human body could turn into an exploitable ore reserve but he also explored the perception systems that can be affiliated with this exploitation of the residing human physique in the curiosity of planetary and human wellness.

Mine Your self: A tutorial for Little Mining

The tutorial earlier mentioned describes Little Mining neophytes that the mining process starts with a food plan rich in oysters, dark chocolate, citrus fruits, uncooked fish or sashimi, beetroot, eco-friendly veggies, shiitake mushrooms, and so forth. There are versions in this food plan depending on the metals you want to mine. For the process of inner crystallisation, you then have to ingest starfruit, magnesium oxide health supplements and extra beetroot. The upcoming essential phase of Little Mining is chelation which freezes up the metals from the tissues permitting them to flow into and then be extracted in sweat and in urine. The chelating system is facilitated by normal chelating brokers such as onions, garlic, coriander, spirulina, chlorella and vitamin C. Or by ingesting Argotine pills and other supplements.

Later on, assessments examine the achievement of the approach and decide the ideal time for extraction.

Graphic from a Little Mining sweatshop: Antimony – sweat assortment

Impression from a Very small Mining sweatshop: Capillary Dynamolysis scanning

Picture from a Small Mining sweatshop: Chelation smoothie

Impression from a Tiny Mining sweatshop: Significant metal screen take a look at “measures the elimination (extraction ed.) of absolutely free zinc, copper and lead ions in the urine. Mercury, cadmium, nickel, cobalt and manganese ions are also detected”

The Anthropocene, Howse defined, has initiated a new cycle in which we pretty much breathe in and consume our have anthropogenic indicators (the isotopes from nuclear testing, the metallic dust from world extractions, etcetera.) The Anthropocene is now an internal story created in inner geologies and in the deep time of ingestion and digestion.

There are historic parallels of this duality of incorporation and extraction. Chinese alchemists, for instance, would extract mercury and arsenic from the earth and then include these poisonous materials back again into the body in the type of an elixir of immortality. An adept of Japan’s “self-mummification” procedures transformed his food plan in the direction of the finish of his daily life. He would go to the mountain and consume what he could forage there. Mainly chestnuts, buds, pine tree bark and roots from trees. He would be buried alive just ahead of his demise. Later on, his human body was dried above charcoal fires and smoked with the fumes of incense till fully desiccated. Eventually, the system was lacquered or applied as a base for a statue of dried clay or plaster.

What is future for Tiny Mining?

Initial of all, a V2_ e-publication titled Little MINING, A Handbook for Inner Extraction has just been released. The TM local community is also performing with a Beijing pharmaceutical company on the open resource progress and manufacturing of Argotine, an agent to aid mineral extraction.

In November, an exhibition called Becoming Geological at V2_ in Rotterdam will offer you a wider reflection on this new way of living and dying.

The Meta.Morf 2022 – Ecophilia meeting was curated by Zane Cerpina and organised by TEKS in Trondheim, Norway. The competition proceeds right up until 14 August in the course of the metropolis.