Why Did We Just Watch This Artist Give Birth To A Dolphin?

Artists are fucking weird; if they’re not spending their time taking photos of people saturated in honey, they’re probably either recreating flags from around the world using actual human hair or nailing their testicles to the ground and cutting their ears off in public. Although they partake in some really odd activities that the majority of us would never dream of doing, what they get up to keeps us properly amused so props to them.

Recently we came across this fairly horrendous video created by designer Ai Hasegawa that’s titled “I Wanna Deliver A Dolphin…”, where she pretty much does exactly that. For a while you see her serenely splashing about to some piano music in a swimming pool and then about a minute in a tail starts to protrude from her reproductive regions followed by a cloud of blood and pregnancy juice or whatever it’s called.

If merely watching this poor girl birth an aquatic mammal wasn’t bad enough, the idea behind it is definitely going to put you off your dinner. The concept is that women would give birth and raise these endangered species in order to replenish the rapidly depleting numbers of these animals whilst also creating a sustainable food source, meaning that her newborn sea-child was ultimately created for the sole purpose of being eaten.

After carrying out a case study, the Maui dolphin was chosen as the example for the project as they’re highly intelligent, roughly the same size as a human baby and are also the most rare species of dolphin that became critically endangered as a direct consequence of fishing. For a woman to successfully gestate such a creature, Hasegawa suggests that the placenta should be modified so that antibodies wouldn’t attack any foreign non-human cells and the foetus would be kept safe. To build the human-birthed dolphin’s immune system, it must be fed a synthetic gel formula that would be biologically similar to what a mother dolphin’s milk is naturally like.

As well as prompting a chorus of “what the fucks”, the project would also raise questions surrounding the ethics of killing your own food and whether it would be possible to dine on something that you’ve raised after you’ve nurtured it. It’s also made us question a few things, such as: “how would a dolphin go to school?”, “isn’t it about time cannibalism made a comeback?” and, more simply, “why?”

Hasegawa’s odd little project also gives us a slightly unwanted insight into what it would be like if NASA employee Margaret Howe Lovatt somehow managed to procreate with that dolphin she used to jerk off before he (yes, the dolphin) killed himself from heartbreak after their separation.