They’re called sock creatures, and so far I’ve made three.

I bought the book Stupid Sock Creatures, borrowed a sewing machine, bought some polyester stuffing and off I went. You can buy ugly and delightfully colourful socks at the mall for 99 cents in the stores for tweens, the ones that sell all sorts of sparkly jewelry and hair clips, where they give you a little plastic basket to put all the useless pieces of plastic you can carry.

It’s pretty satisfying to put something like that together, to cut it up and attach the limbs and turn it inside out and have something entirely yours.

That’s probably what Gunther von Hagens feels like when he’s finished a plastinated body, after he’s taken it apart and placed everything just right to make a dead person playing football or soccer or fencing or diving.

Body Worlds is Gunther von Hagens’s travelling biological peep show, a version of which was in Toronto until last month. There’s a lot to say about it and most of it has already been said. There are a lot of things that stick out.

There are also problems with the presentation. The exhibition is essentially an art show masquerading as a science project. In the first hallway, you’re eased into the whole excercise with smaller body parts — limbs, joints, brains, etc — along with thin slices on slides that look more like paintings than biological samples. As you walk through the carefully chosen path beside the full-size bodies in various situations, you are provided with the wisdom of the great thinkers of our time, with Gunther even including a personal quote among Nietze and the like.

And next to each full body, there is a signiture of the man that made it happen.

But it’s in a science centre and we’re asked to view it in that context. It’s innocent. It’s objective. It’s science.

Beyond that, it was an interesting exhibit and I’m glad I saw it, walking around surrounded by gradeschool students expressing disguist at, to no one’s surprise, the plastinated genetalia. Maybe the art-as-science (science-as-art?) motif says more about our culture than Gunther. After all, the “Exploding Man” is nothing if not artistic:

And, here are two more photos:

And click here for some more