What would it be like to be a snail? Something so different to ourselves that we can't empathise with it?

Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944), a pioneer of ecology, illustrated his amazing essay A Stroll through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds with double images in watercolour showing the human and mussel (for example) perspectives of city scenes. These images are somewhere between disconcerting and comical. I started doing research on the sensory perception of snails and the result was this 3-part piece.

Part 1, Encounter, shows the snail climbing up a knife blade (human & snail systems meet and the "meaning" of the knife is shown to fall away for the snail).

Part 2., Shift, is performative: the left foot films the right foot as it walks dressed in a boot and carrying a glass bubble,, in imitation of a snail's inner balance system which uses a statocyst.

Part 3, Sight, imitates the snail's visual perception, including the speed of it, based on various descriptions and absurd experiments.