What It Is Like to Be

What It Is Like to Be is an anamorphic sculpture made of 144 hand-painted glass strips. The cube-shaped object shows four fragmented images that reassemble with every 90° rotation. The glass strips are cast in a concrete base, which sits in a wooden bowl and is around 30 centimetres long. All fragments were individually painted onto the strips with acrylic paint.

The title is inspired by the essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" by the American philosopher Thomas Nagel. In it, Nagel states that our subjective experience, in other words the experience of what it is like to be, can ultimately only be experienced. Since scientific knowledge must by definition take an external perspective, its description of this quality of consciousness, which characterises our entire reality, would miss the point.