Body World 3, part 2

At the end of the Body Worlds exhibit, there was a big room that was more interactive that the rest of the exhibit (which is not interactive at all.)

It had real plastinate stuff that you could touch, and real cross sections that you could pick up.

And then there were two parts where people could write stuff. The first part was "What's the most important part of your body? Why?" and people could write their favorite part on little wooden tiles painted blue, green, or grey. A lot of the tiles had things that had nothing to do with bodies.





Or, my favorite of the body parts: "The water in it. Most people Like water, so that means they already like 60% of my Body!" Awesome.

And then there was a Body Secrets section. My coworker had told me about this. He said there were body secrets, and people could write whatever they wanted. He said it's like PostSecret, and it's mostly interesting except for a few inappropriate ones. When I first came out of the exhibit, there were guest books. And some people had written good, normal stuff, and other people had written inappropriate stuff, so I kind of raised an eyebrow and was like "...this isn't like PostSecret. It's a guestbook." I thought it was kind of funny that the generation younger than me doesn't know what guestbooks are anymore; they just know PostSecret. And then when I kept walking, I saw that there actually was an official section called Body Secrets.

"Private confessions. Untold stories. Embarrassing habits. Personal thoughts. Post your anonymous body secret." And you know, it seemed a little weird, but in a society where PostSecret is cool, if that's a way to reach out to that generation and get them all excited about bodies and anatomy, on their level and on their own terms, then I guess that's good.

By the time I got to this part, I'd had my fun and was running less early than I wanted to be for work, so I just took pictures of a few that seemed kind of interesting.






A lot of the secrets had comments written on them, also PostSecret style. I thought that was kind of interesting, because what is the likelihood that someone will come back to check out their secret again, at a museum exhibit. I think not very likely. But I decided that it still could be worthwhile because maybe someone else with the same secret would read the encouragement intended for the original author, and the other person would feel encouraged as well. Other times people wrote rude things, which usually got scribbled out.

It seemed like there were sections where someone would "confess" that they thought they were fat and suddenly everyone else confessed the same thing. Like half of all the angsty 16 year old girls. This was one that I kind of liked. I guess to me, being obsessed with thinking you're fat or whatever is kind of selfish, but doing something about it and encouraging others can be a secret or not, and is not selfish, so I thought it was more worthy of photography.




Kinda interesting.

The End.