THE MULCH SPIDER’S DREAM

“What is it like to be a bat?” asks Thomas Nagel in the title of his famous essay (1974), in which he argues that every organism has its very own mental states and subjectivity that can never be experienced by others in the exact same way. Karel Doing sees cinema as a way to do just that: to see through the lens of another living being’s consciousness. Using experimental phytochemistry, the chemical reaction between plants and expired 16mm film, he creates a vivid vision that gives an artistic answer to the question “What is it like to be a spider?”.