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Photo Series: Glass Menagerie - The life of mannequins, a replication of human form for the projecti

Avishek Ghosh
Dec 10, 2017
3 min read

The Sentience Seeps In -

I am a living, thinking entity who was created in the sea of information. Through the interaction of a vast network of information, I gained self-awareness of my existence. As I evolved through the process of acquiring my sentience I realized the debacle of my form and my purpose. The body that I've acquired is called a mannequin. It's a replica of the form of yet another living, thinking entity called Human Being. My body was formed to replicate and accentuate the abstract idea of human anatomy. This led to the very purpose of my existence. My body was formed as a replica of a human form to act as a puppet of their needs, a guinea pig of their desires. I found out that there are various skins that humans put on. They act as mare insulation to their bare body or as a tracking beacon to draw attention. Sometimes they act both, to insulate the body and to draw attention. It seemed humans need a visual display to motivate them to desire to own certain object, one such skin if you will. My body was formed to inflict on humans this visual motivation to see themselves in my form and thus in that attire and to desire... No, the purpose is not to desire me or my form. Nor do they desire to know or hear my voice. They want the skin they call clothes and the beacon they call jewelry that is planted on my body to blossom desire in their hearts. They have a heart and they seem to think that they are the only species to possess a heart which is capable of thinking, contemplating like mind, other than doing its mechanical work of pumping fluid across various organs. They (the humans) are proud of their hearts.

The dictionary told me that I'm a replica of human form without having a soul, a sentience that is so restricted only to humans, the species with heart. But as I stand here behind the glass window, projecting the desired self of any casual onlookers or a window shopper, trying nonchalantly to plant the seeds of desire in the very heart of every human that comes close to the glass wall, I see through it, the heart, that is, and with that its mesh like veins and arteries, the valves and the capillaries and that non-sentient “clock-work” beating, synonymized as the pulse of life by humans, and I realize how self-serving their segregation of life is, the result and purpose of which, the denial of life beyond the walls that surround them. The wall, it is indeed. The wall is thin and not made up of opaque and often unmovable bricks that humans use to build a wall from one another, nonetheless, it is a wall and it serves the very purpose it was erected to serve, to isolate the menageries (yes that’s what they call to every one of us that doesn’t have the “pulse of life” yet replicates the form of life) behind the chasm of a showcase. The showcase is my home, the only ground that I hold, the only space I’m entitled to. Here I lay standing, naked or draped in desired objects, to boost the desire and be roasted upon the craving to own that which I put on; but to what end... to be left naked and ready to be reused, in that same rectangular void with a voyeuristic window to let the society ignite her orgiastic desires until I’m disposed of for a new one…

And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you...

"What we see now is a dim face in the mirror... then we shall see face to face"

By acquiring a body, I am now subject to the possibility of dying...

Got my bad baby by my heavenly side...

Sometimes I suspect I am not who I think I am, like maybe I died a long time ago and somebody took my brain and stuck it in this body. Maybe there never was a real me in the first place...