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The Hokey-Pokey is just a Body Part Rebus

Michelangelo David Statue

Web Watch hasn’t had a NSFW entry in a while, so we thought we’d throw one in today just because we can.

Have you ever wondered about how much our body parts play into our senses (besides the obvious “smell” and “taste”, of course)?  LOOK, TOUCH, and LISTEN are three parts of an art project called FLESHMAP done by Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg.

In each of these three studies, FLESHMAP highlights how and where our bodies are mentioned in song, how they look in abstract, and how we feel when we touch each other — all in unique graphical displays.

In LOOK, Fernanda and Martin took dozens of photos of male and female breasts and turned them into abstract art images that accentuate the similarities and differences that exist amongst us all.  It’s art, it’s abstract.  What’s not to like?

In TOUCH, they surveyed hundreds of men and women about how they like to be touched, and where they look to touch their partners.  The resulting heat maps of these 707 different body areas come from over 33,000 different answers.  The images graphically indicate where the most desired caressed areas of each other’s bodies are. 

The flip side of TOUCH is that they also show you the level of desired touching in body part form, with the model photo broken out and sorted into the chosen order of areas that are most wanted to touch or be touched.  Yes, they are naked models – hence the NSFW mention at the top of this post. 

Finally, in LISTEN, the Fleshmap site breaks down music into how body parts are referenced in song.  Under GENRE,  they indicate how often body parts are named in different styles of music.  The eye is most popular across all genres, followed closely by the hand or the face.  No suprise, however, is that the butt is most often sung about in hip hop music. 

Also in the LISTEN section are how specific songs mention body parts, and how those songs could be broken down into body part rebuses.  The Hokey-Pokey, if you really think about it, is a song that is solely about different body parts with nary a connector word in sight.  It’s not obvious until you’ve seen it written down with images instead of lyrics.