Literally meaning
decay, "Forfall" is a social experiment
slash public stunt from
Norwegian comedian
Kristopher Schau. The comedian is already famous for
good humour, being on the
XLTV show and the radio show
Karate.
For one week, starting on the 2. of November 2001, he will live in a shopping window in the main street of Oslo. While living there, he will attempt to live as non-healthy as possible, thus accelerating his body's decay. This is not without danger. He will live in a totally un-hygenic enviroment, with a large risk of contracting the 24-hour stomach flu. He will eat junk food, and nothing else. He won't shower for a week, nor will he perform any beautifying actions on his body such as cutting the mails or removing earwax. His body will be on display all the time, at all moments for all people to watch uncensored. And yes, he will go to the toilet while being in the window.
The main purpose of this project is to see how much a person can decay in a week.
The whole thing will be web cast live. There will be TV programs broadcast on NRK, the single sponsor of this project. There will be a two hour show each day on the national radio channel Petre, an NRK channel. The audience will have a way to influence the whole project in many ways. They can send SMS messages to propose some awful thing for Kristopher to do, and they can vote on other people's suggestions. Kristopher will do anything the public demands. There will also be chat with Kristopher, and continous updates on the webpages of the Forfall project. The procject is monitored by a doctor, and all of the bodily functions will be put on the web. Pulse, breathing, blood pressure and weight of feces. Everything.
The project website is located here: http://www.nrk.no/magasin/upunkt/forfall/
The adress of the display window is: Karl Johans gate 12, Oslo, Norway
Here's a list of what Kristopher will have in the display window. He won't be allowed to bring anything more (except for food) after this list is complete:
- Hospital bed, large, steel
- Bedcover, feather, medium soft
- Pillow, hard, flat
- Linen, sterile, starched
- Night table, respatex
- Wheelchair, steel, fake leather
- Hospital weight, large
- Cover screen, green
- Enema, orange
- Misc. kitchen appliances, cups, pots
- TV, colour
- TV table, /w wheels
- IV holder, /w four hooks
- Biological toilet, /w wheight Note on toilet: It is a specially designed biological toilet, made by the Ås agricultural college. The weight is the special feature.
- Small cooking facility, /w two hotplates
- Cellular phone, /w battery
- Fat percent gauge, steel
- Plastic scoop
- Playstation 2, /w joystick
- Spectrum, slightly used
- Commodore 64, used
- Blender, elecric
- Toaster, /w heating plate
- Kitchen scale
- Frying pot, steel, five litre
- Body weight
- Literature, Vigdis Hjort and more
- Liquid nutrition, tasteless
- Car, Toyota Hiace, white (For logistics support)
Well, the experiment is now over. Mr. Schau tested a lot of... ...interesting food, like deep-fried candy and human mole. He downed one litre of cream in a couple of minutes, drank 20 litres of Coke (He never drinks Coke, only water) in one week. The 14 films he watched was extremly bad, but left him little time to read trash literature. His cholesterol level set a world record, by gaining two points in one day after eating deep-fried candy, drinking the cream and eating three deep-fried pizzas. The project doctor wanted him to take x-ray pictures of his abdomen, because he got a really bad constipation. Most of the suggestions from the audience were voted down. One the first day, he was given lice, then the suggestion was to introduce twenty rats, but that was voted down. The only other suggestion that was accepted was to cut his hair really, really badly.
During this week, he gained 7 kilograms in pure body fat. The white clothes he was wearing were extremely dirty and the odor was not optimal. He went directly from the experiment to a TV talkshow, where the other guests were Liv Ullmann and Per Christian Foss, the financial minister of Norway. Mr. Scahu is very tall (Over two meters), so when he sat down in the chair oposite to the financial minister, his feet were almost under the minister's chair. Even though the minister insisted that the smell wasn't so bad, the look on his face said something else... The socks were almost black from dirt.