The rules that make you safe.

An interactive installation that explains Anorexia as a ruled-based Eating Disorder.

Understand ‘’rules’’ as the routine that thousands of anorexics are living everyday for years, where those rules are a scape from the hard reality that their minds created to them.

Understand as well, that anorexia is not just ‘‘girls that don’t want to eat because they want to be skinny’’. It’s not about that. It’s not about the food at all.

Anorexics love food, but their minds create some sort of logic where the way to be successful requires being confident. And due to the beauty standards stablished, being thin and pretty could make life simpler.

When anorexia hits deep inside you, you start personalizing the illness. And actually anorexia has a name on the internet, Ana. If you google a little, you will easily find a letter where Ana talks to you in a friendly but harsh way, calling you to be her friend.

Why? Why would someone chose to starve? Because Ana will make your life easier. Ana is your safety blanket, she will make your way. But you have to behave, you have to follow her rules.

In this installation you can interact with Ana, who is inside this structure, repeating you the rules that will help you to be successful whenever you push the big green button, while making you see the mirror distorted in different ways.

Depending on how much pressure you put, the projections will change.

With this project I want to show that anorexia is not just about being skinny, but a fully mind-control produced by the desire to finally be confident.

When Ana is deep inside you, your reality and emotions are distorted and you start losing your values and taking hers, even she is just in your head.

Video of the installation: 

https://www.behance.net/gallery/64193113/The-rules-that-make-you-safe

Studio 02 – Augmented Gastronomy
Made with Arduino and Max/Msp.
By Martina Solés Caldés.