pips

"Warning triangle? First aid kit?" Immediately and in a wild hurry the leftovers of a warning triangle are being combined into a bizarre sculpture, while your PC keeps watching you suspiciously. And then the final blow: "Now open your first aid kit, please." Oh no, no, I'll do anything, don't do this to me... But the official remains adamant. A sharp 'plop' - and your equipment, triangular bandage, gauze bandages, nurse, scissors, swabs... they're all over the place: "What about the gloves - they're missing!" Of course your facetious reply, "I don't need gloves to strangle you!", does not get you anywhere. And after their sudden expansion in volume, those pieces will never fit into the box again...

Aid - the second

Real-life drama! Goldie, your hamster, is choking on a piece of carrot. What to do next? Quick, get on the Web and search for "first aid". Zillions of hits. Refine search to "first + aid + hamster". Order a guide book online. It arrives just in time, by express courier. Furious leafing: "Carrot catarrh: hold hamster by hind legs and shake gently." No sooner said than done. Swung softly, Goldie coughs it up. A grateful look from pearly hamster eyes is your reward.

Aid - the third

Zurich 1919, Cabaret Voltaire, downstairs. Richard Huelsenbeck and Hans Arp are on tonight, but wi-thout any idea what to perform.
Arp (to Huelsenbeck): Huelsi, we need an idea.
Huelsenbeck (to wall): Well, yes, but I can't really grab you by your hind legs and shake an idea out of you. What we need now is a true first-aid inspiration. A self-help guide, like the one that is going to save Goldie the hamster in the Eighties. [Translator, scratching head: Eighties? Eighties???? Who will buy books via the internet in the Eighties? Oh, never mind, those arty-farty types can probably tell the Eighties from the Nineties just as well as a carrot from a hamster...!] Otherwise we can only sit and pray.
Arp (to Huelsenbeck): But it would be even more useful to have a box, a sort of first aid kit that is packed so efficiently that even the greatest idea fits in - even afterwards.
Both: We need a pops box!
Wall (to Huelsenbeck and Arp): It's called PIPS, you dumbos! C'est ça. Voilà la vie dans une boîte.

Yours truly

Alexander Swirl

PS: stop press: While securing material for his PIPS contribution, the PIPS artist Matthias Fickinger suffered a fall from his bicycle that resulted in a broken collar-bone. To quote said artist: "I must have taken the topic too literally". Hum. Get-well wishes and assorted sweets should be sent to
Sternstrasse 123, 20357 Hamburg.
Speedy recovery...

[ artists of the first aid box ]