No Body is an Island is a virtual world created inside Animal Crossing. The piece reclaims the ‘island getaway’ central to the game as an anatomy diagram at land art scale. The player, themself a smaller version of the larger body, can climb inside their own skull, walk along their own spine, and investigate their own organs. But this isn’t the culturally privileged and idolized bodies laid out in Grey’s Anatomy. This body is broken and repaired, disabled and healing, transgender, fat and black. This is a marginalized body. But so too is the small self, the avatar which navigates the space. There is no outsider here. There is only self exploration of body/landscape.
The title, No Body is an Island, is taken from John Donne’s 1624 poem 'No Man is an Island' which begins (updated from the Olde English): “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main” and ends saying “any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
Each texture (on the square floor tiles and stacked umbrellas that make up the body) was drawn pixel by pixel in Animal Crossing’s in-game drawing app.
Anyone can visit the piece in Animal Crossings by using the dream code: DA-2449-0971-7638.
