Ilona Huss Walin – What if I was a Rat?

Ilona Huss Walin – What if I was a Rat?
Ilona Huss Walin had an alter ego in a video project. She called herself the Everyday Star and as her she recorded herself singing, not with a very good voice but very loud, different pop songs. To the simple lyrics about love she threw stones, big ones, into the river, walked around in a forest and made strange things. It was a little bit embarrassing to hear and see her but I was impressed by the courage she showed. Also Huss Walin has an extraordinary ability to work from new circumstances and act according to the context and always prepared her pieces very careful.

Of course she made a most fantastic piece for nonTVTVstation. I think for once everybody at Splintermind agreed on this thing, What if I was a rat? was an incredible project. Huss Walin told me she had a lot of problems finding the right idea for the piece and she was talking to her grandmother describing that we waned her to have a video stream running for one month live and that she just couldn’t stay in front of the camera for the whole period. “Well” said her grandmother “I guess you will film the rats dancing on the tables”. This is an old saying that when the cat is out the rats dance on the table. What an incredible good idea thought Huss Walin and started to build a exact model of an apartment with one room and a kitchen. Everything was in rat scale, the bed, photos on the wall, the clock in the kitchen, cupboards, tables and chairs. It even had a functional TV-set. In the model she also built in eight security cameras before she let four rats move into it. It was the perfect Big Brother for rats!

What could one expect from the rats, living in the apartment for five weeks? Well, they acted very similar to how other Big Brother participants do. They ate, had sex, slept and fought. They just forgot about the cameras after a while.