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

When the need for minerals to generate electronics, thoroughly clean energy and the infrastructures that assist them is skyrocketing, it is acquiring increasingly complicated, environmentally harmful and strength-intense to extract some of these mineral things.

On the other hand, the human system is made up of minerals in the kind of kidney stones, crystals formed in urine and iron in the blood.

Could our systems be sourced from within our very own dwelling bodies? Could mineral extraction no for a longer period be dependent on scarce and now polluted environmental resources? This is exactly where Little Mining comes in.

Tiny Mining is an open neighborhood of chemists, geologists, artists and practitioners of crops and steel magics and alternative medicine. Their key targets are:
– to take a look at and exploit the residing human overall body for much more than 20 valuable and uncommon earth minerals
– to share assets and assist for the Do-it-yourself exploration of interior prospects via community sweatshops, documentation and video clip tutorials.

We believe that the earth ought to remain as pristine and untouched mother nature we have no want to carry on extracting means from a depleted planet, polluting and laying waste to the landscape. Saving the planet is now a make any difference of starting to be delicate to our very own geological staying.

Whilst transhumanists and biohackers look for to update and swap the flesh with metallic and technologies, associates of the Little Mining local community ambition to turn out to be mineral and purge by themselves of the metal and the mineral.

Martin Howse at the Meta.Morf 2022 – Ecophilia conference. Photo: Juliane Schütz / Meta.Morf 2022

A few of months ago, programmer, performer, artists and explorer Martin Howse gave a interesting communicate at the Meta.Morf 2022 – Ecophilia meeting organised by TEKS in Trondheim. According to Howse, “the body is and has often been geological” and he set up to explain to us how the human physique could turn into an exploitable ore reserve but he also explored the perception programs that can be associated with this exploitation of the residing human overall body in the desire of planetary and human wellbeing.

https://www.youtube.com/observe?v=Z8dwXvDL1V8
Mine Oneself: A tutorial for Small Mining

The tutorial over explains Little Mining neophytes that the mining method starts off with a food plan loaded in oysters, darkish chocolate, citrus fruits, uncooked fish or sashimi, beetroot, green veggies, shiitake mushrooms, etc. There are variations in this diet program depending on the metals you want to mine. For the process of interior crystallisation, you then have to ingest starfruit, magnesium oxide supplements and far more beetroot. The up coming vital phase of Little Mining is chelation which freezes up the metals from the tissues enabling them to flow into and then be extracted in sweat and in urine. The chelating approach is facilitated by normal chelating brokers these kinds of as onions, garlic, coriander, spirulina, chlorella and vitamin C. Or by ingesting Argotine products and other supplements.

Later on, checks consider the success of the approach and identify the best time for extraction.

Impression from a Very small Mining sweatshop: Antimony – sweat assortment

Graphic from a Very small Mining sweatshop: Capillary Dynamolysis scanning

Impression from a Small Mining sweatshop: Chelation smoothie

Graphic from a Small Mining sweatshop: Significant steel screen check “measures the elimination (extraction ed.) of cost-free zinc, copper and lead ions in the urine. Mercury, cadmium, nickel, cobalt and manganese ions are also detected”

The Anthropocene, Howse stated, has initiated a new cycle in which we practically breathe in and consume our individual anthropogenic indicators (the isotopes from nuclear testing, the metal dust from global extractions, etcetera.) The Anthropocene is now an inside story prepared inside internal geologies and in the deep time of ingestion and digestion.

There are historic parallels of this duality of incorporation and extraction. Chinese alchemists, for illustration, would extract mercury and arsenic from the earth and then integrate these harmful materials back again into the physique in the sort of an elixir of immortality. An adept of Japan’s “self-mummification” practices adjusted his eating plan in direction of the conclusion of his daily life. He would go to the mountain and take in what he could forage there. Largely chestnuts, buds, pine tree bark and roots from trees. He would be buried alive just right before his demise. Afterwards, his body was dried over charcoal fires and smoked with the fumes of incense until finally completely desiccated. At last, the physique was lacquered or utilized as a foundation for a statue of dried clay or plaster.

What is up coming for Tiny Mining?

Very first of all, a V2_ e-publication titled Small MINING, A Handbook for Internal Extraction has just been released. The TM community is also functioning with a Beijing pharmaceutical company on the open resource growth and manufacturing of Argotine, an agent to facilitate mineral extraction.

In November, an exhibition identified as Turning out to be Geological at V2_ in Rotterdam will give a wider reflection on this new way of residing and dying.

The Meta.Morf 2022 – Ecophilia conference was curated by Zane Cerpina and organised by TEKS in Trondheim, Norway. The pageant continues until eventually 14 August throughout the town.