Thomas Thwaites is an all-conquering, leaping, bounding, mountaingoat-bausman who pretty much accomplished his dream of figuring out what it feels like to be an animal. Thwaites didn’t achieve his goal without supple help from an agency, The Wellcome Trust, which financed his exploits and provided him the means to put together the necessary prosthetics, and straight up ship out to a goat farm where he spent a few days being one with the goats. Dude, is that not the sickest thing you’ve ever heard of? You gotta’ commend the man’s ability to leave it all out there, and go for it all the way. Even if that means shacking up alongside furry shitstained, grass-coated goats in a farm for a hellcation.
Of his time spent living amongst his goat brethren, Thwaites says:
“It was a very, I don’t know, a very special kind of time. The thing is, it became an investigation into how close we can come to fulfilling this ancient human dream because I did a bit of research and you quickly find cave paintings, of half human-half beasts and in fact this shows up in the earliest piece of figurative art, a statuette.”
And Thwaites continued by breaking down the rationale behind what seems to be unadulterated ridiculousness, full-fledged madness, telling Motherboard:
“To be a nonhuman animal? So much calmer and simpler!” Thwaites wrote to me in another email. He wanted to explore what it would be like to live as a creature immune to the worries and frustrations—the “existential terror”—of everyday life, and to do so as authentically as possible with the technology that exists today. “And then the biomedical charity the Wellcome Trust said, ‘go on then,’ and gave me a small arts award,” he wrote.
Let this be a lesson to us all my fellow dudes, that when the going gets weird the weird turn pro (thanks for that lil sentiment of wisdom Dr. Gonzo); but some people manage to take that even further, and damn if that’s some kind of art. Here’s to the weird ones mad and crazy enough to push the outer limits.
[H/T:UPROXX]