How far would you go to join a social network? When you signed up for Facebook you might have spent a fair amount of time filling in fascinating information about yourself, where you went to school, the bands you like or the places you’ve worked.
Opening a Twitter account probably entailed several minutes’ deliberation over your username, and Flickr requires you to sit and upload or tag all your photos, which can admittedly take some time.
But would you go as far as having your membership information tattooed on your body? That’s what the arts organisation Ultimate Holding Company is asking of one hundred volunteers to do for a new exhibition at Chapel Street in Salford.
On the face of it, Ext-Inked is simply an exhibition of drawings illustrating the one hundred most endangered species in the British Isles. The drawings, which feature everything from a red squirrel to an ‘erratic ant’, went on display at Unit 108, Chapel Street, Salford, M3 5DW on 12th November, and will be on show 10am – 6pm every day until 1st December.
But between 26th and 29th November, the exhibition takes a twist, and becomes a groundbreaking social experiment. With help from expert tattooists from Ink & Steel, the drawings will be converted into tattoos, and a hundred ‘ambassadors’ will volunteer to have the designs etched onto their skin for posterity – to form a very exclusive social network of representatives for the endangered species.
Tattooing will happen live at Chapel Street over the weekend of 26th-29th November, beginning at 7:30pm on the 26th. Volunteers can sign up at any time during the exhibition’s run, but the species are being assigned on a first-come, first-served basis, so if you’ve got a particular fondness for a fungus, or a long-held wish to be tattooed with the likeness of a lizard, you’d better move fast…
JOIN THE EXT-INKED FACEBOOK GROUP
