Concepción Cortés Zulueta
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Reference: Cortés Zulueta, Concepción. “How Does a Snail See the World? Imagining
Non-Human Animals’ Visual Umwelten”. Meta- and Inter-Images in Contemporary
Visual Art and Culture. (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2013): 263-79.
How Does a Snail See the World? Imagining Non-Human Animals’ Visual
Umwelten
How does a snail see the world? Is it different from the way I see it? Is it similar to it? It is
common to ask oneself questions about one’s own visual perception compared to that of
others, be they people or non-human animals, especially when young, as this kind of
memories seem to be, according to both scientists and artists, quite usual in childhood
(Dawkins: ix; Ramachandran, 2008: 15; Weintraub: 238-239). In fact, this imaginative
perspective-taking is related to what is considered to be a very human capacity: empathy, that
is to say the ability to put oneself in the place of another, to posit the existence of other minds
and to be able to feel like others. This capacity is nowadays studied in non-human animals
too.
As acknowledged by W. J .T. Mitchell, non-human animals have been associated for
long not only with the sensory, but specifically with images. If ‘man’ is the ‘speaking animal’,
the image would have to be the medium of the subhuman, the savage, the child, the woman,
the masses and, last but not least, the ‘dumb’ animal which lacks language (24). We imagine
non-human animals as living in a sensory world, a world of sniffs, growls, scratches and,
above all images, maybe because sight is the sense that we consider our most important one.
In his seminal paper about consciousness and the mind-body problem, philosopher Thomas
Nagel rejected almost completely the possibility that we, humans, could in any way imagine
how it would be like to be a bat, feel like a bat, hear, see or echolocate like a bat (435-450).
Rejecting Nagel’s own rejection, several artists have been trying hard to think and show
otherwise in the past fifteen years. They explore the above mentioned close relationship
between animals and the visual, as well as animals’ perceptions and mental images, through a
variety of sources of knowledge (ethology, folk traditions, psychology, cohabitation,
metaphors) and using a number of means, among them video, photography, or the physical
presence of animals in artistic spaces such as galleries or museums. Behind these works of art
lies and aesthethic and maybe even utopian attempt at getting closer to animals, at rethinking
our relationship with them and even at improving it through a better understanding of their
perceptual worlds.
Consciously or not these artists follow the path opened by biologist and philosopher
Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944), who verbally described and visually illustrated animals’
worlds or Umwelten (1957: 5-80). Uexküll described the Umwelt as the subjective
environment surrounding every living being, made of both their respective perceptions and
the effects caused by them to that environment. Uexküll envisioned the universe as full of a
multiplicity of Umwelten, each one similar to a closed but permeable lens through which a
subject perceived and operated. In “A Stroll through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A
Picture Book of Invisible Worlds”, in which he offered an excursion into these unfamiliar
worlds, Uexküll wrote:
The best time to set out on such an adventure is on a sunny day. The place, a flowerstrewn meadow, humming with insects, fluttering with butterflies. Here we may
glimpse the worlds of the lowly dwellers of the meadow. To do so, we must first blow,
in fancy, a soap bubble around each creature to represent its own world, filled with the
perceptions which it alone knows. When we ourselves then step into one of these
bubbles, the familiar meadow is transformed. Many of its colorful features disappear,
others no longer belong together but appear in new relationships. A new world comes
into being. Through the bubble we see the world of the burrowing worm, of the
butterfly, or of the field mouse; the world as it appears to the animals themselves, not
as it appears to us (1957: 5).
Uexküll does not regard animals as “mere machines”, like Cartesianism and mechanistic
theories did, but “as subjects whose essential activity consists of perceiving and acting”
(1957: 6). Note also that for him “all animals, from the simplest to the most complex, are
fitted into their unique worlds with equal completeness” (1957: 11). Uexküll often referred to
the simple worlds of simple animals, such as ticks, mussels, flies or snails, since they were
both easier to outline and more appealing due to their remoteness. But he also addressed more
complex and well-articulated Umwelten, such as that of dogs, uncovering the enthralling in
the familiar. After picturing that myriad of bubble lenses, Uexküll went on to address and
compare one by one different facets of the sensory reality of several animals, inclusive of
humans, from the visual depth of field to the tactile space (as he named it) or the perception of
movement.
Apart from words, Uexküll drew on illustrations by Georg Kriszat to try to convey the
wonder and the strangeness of the manifold animal environments or Umwelten. Moreover, he
believed that art could be useful to biologists. Even when he expressed his dissatisfaction with
the painters of his time, he recognised some utility in their work. As he complained about the
reduction of a motive to just three red, green and yellow winding lines, we can speculate that
he was debunking mainly abstract painting, perhaps expressionism too. Due to what he
thought to be an excessive simplification and the resulting impoverishment of the whole, he
considered that the efforts of those artists matched what was within reach of the perceptual
capacities of a sea urchin (1922: 73). But precisely for this reason, he suggested that biologists
could learn a lot about the simpler Umwelten of sea urchins and other uncomplicated animals,
by paying attention to the perceptual implications of these pictures. Art, then, could act as a
bridge to other perceptual worlds.
In light of these considerations, it made perfect sense that Uexküll relied on Kriszat’s
illustrations to support his theories. For instance, when dealing with the differences between
animals as regards what he calls their ‘visual space’, Uexküll focuses on what we could relate
to visual acuity, “as the world as seen through the eyes of a fly must appear considerably
cruder than it does to the human eye” (1957: 20). He then proceeds to explain a visual and
practical method that will help us to approach the degree of detail or “place-mosaic” which
characterises the vision of other animals:
Since any image can be transformed into a place-mosaic by superimposing a fine mesh
or lattice on it, this method makes it possible to render the differences between the
place-mosaics of various animals eyes. By diminishing a picture more and more,
photographing it again with the same lattice, and then re-enlarging it, we shall obtain a
progressively coarser mosaic (1957: 21).
Uexküll and Kriszat put this method into practice in four consecutive images of a village
street: a photograph, the same picture seen through a lattice, and two watercolour
reproductions as seen by a fly and a mollusc, maybe a mussel or a snail. The amount of detail
corresponded to the scientific data available at that time. The whole process sounds like an
algorithm, and it is not surprising that nowadays, instead of lattices and analogic processes,
computers and software are tools employed to the same effect.
A telling example is ZooMorph, a project by artist Lisa Jevbratt, consisting of a set of
plug-in filters for video, imaging software and smart-phones which simulate how animals see.
After years of work, the artist plans to release the project in October 2012 through the
website zoomorph.org (personal communication, September 17, 2012). Seeing an activist
potential in the work, Jevbratt states:
ZooMorph aims to create a vicarious experience of the vision of an animal and, at the
very least, encourage an intellectual identification with that animal in hopes of making
its users acutely aware and respectful of the ever-presence of a multitude of parallel
experiences of the world (or Umwelten as described by Jakob von Uexküll) (78).
Also appropriating Uexküll’s legacy, artist Toni Crabb tried to come closer to the perception
of a snail. Besides reproducing a shell as seen by a snail, in a pixellated fashion, she made a
three-screen video (Snail, 2009) where she struggled either to replicate the snail’s way of
seeing or to herself adopt a foreign balance sensory receptor, a statocyst, in the form of a glass
bubble attached to her foot [Figure 1].
As stressed by both Crabb’s humorous contrast and Jevbratt’s remarks (77), there are
many issues at stake in trying to approach human and non-human animal sight in this manner.
We should be aware that the attempts to faithfully convey a certain species' way of seeing
through a photograph or a video (the internet being full of amateur examples) will always be
somewhat akin to those deceitful commercials that sell you a new TV set by resorting to
colourful and seductive images you are already watching on your old one. For the time being,
the only way for us, humans, to see the world is through our own eyes (and brain). Interposing
a lattice, like Uexküll and Kriszat did, is just a simplified version of the many filters that
Jevbratt merges into one image, in order to depict simultaneously different aspects of vision
(such as acuity, colour differentiation, light sensitivity, field of view and/or motion
perception), particular to each single species. But, as it should not be necessary to point out
and Jevbratt acknowledges, this sophistication does not make the resulting image a true
depiction of non-human animal vision, just like neither a photograph nor a video can be
considered a faithful rendition of how a human being actually sees.
Having reached this point, we should be aware that these efforts which strive to get
closer to non-human animal visual perception by altering videos or photographs, take for
granted that there exists something somewhere, which can be visualised and/or reproduced. If
we understand these visual works as meta-pictures, an essential question we must ask is what
kind of virtual images are the ones being replicated.
One approach is to contemplate the possibility that there is one grounding assumption
upon which everything else is built. Namely, that in visual processes there is somewhere a
screen on which images are projected, these being the very images that some artists or
scientists like Uexküll would like to recreate. In the past this screen was identified with the
retina, but the 'reading' of the visual information does not occur there. The said screen is not in
the brain either, even though this is a popular belief (Ramachandran and Blakeslee: 98). This
leaves these recreated images dangerously close to the widespread fallacy that explains vision
through a homunculus argument (Gregory: 52-53). According to this argument, humans and
other animals have a little creature inside their head who looks at and interprets the pictures
projected on the screen ‘up there’, which means that this homunculus would have to have a
screen and a smaller homunculus in its own head too, thus repeating the pattern to infinite
regress. However, in spite of being related to the homunculus argument, this ‘screen
paradigm’ is useful to give our explorations a frame that simplifies the one thousand and one
angles that would have to be dealt with otherwise. Also, following this paradigm, when
confronted with one image whose aim is to depict a certain kind of non-human animal vision,
we would just have to virtually ‘slip it in’, by replacing the former picture projected on our
screen. It would be like a brand-new slide that would help us to adopt a non-human animal
perspective of the world. Thinking of these images as such ‘slides’, though problematic,
makes them easier to grasp. This is a risk worth taking in exchange of the knowledge they can
provide.
Using other approach, we could consider the kind of artistic, scientific and amateur
pictures described above as seeking to reproduce a subjective sensory experience and not a
physical reality, like a projection on a screen would be. These images would be hence
understood as if they attempted to show how someone imagines and represents a subjective
experience of another being, underpinned by the use of scientific findings. In this light, the
shortcomings of the screen paradigm become apparent, as it reveals itself too ‘flat’. Every
experience, inclusive of visual ones, has more density to it than the images corresponding to
the mechanistic ‘screen’ approach, which tend to have been stripped off emotion. At the same
time, this approach treats all the elements in such images as having equal meaning and
relevance, though research has shown that brains do not react the same way to different items,
such as faces, other animals in general or snakes in particular (Shibasaki & Kawai).
Altogether it is as if, in exchange for their claim of being carriers of a certain scientific
knowledge, these kinds of artworks have been submitted to a sort of Cartesian regime, in spite
of the fact that they do acknowledge subjectivity and a point of view to non-human animals.
Vision being considered as the most rational sense, it should not be surprising that images
aspiring to portrait vision respond to rationality. This leads to the tendency of avoiding
references to feelings, to the differential treatment of visual information or to the other senses.
It is somewhat as if those images had fallen from the sky, instead of being bodily perceived.
But some artists, as we will see, do react in their works to the flatness of the screen paradigm
and its implicit Cartesian regime.i
Nevertheless the works that attempt to reproduce non-human animal visual perception
do seem to open new paths that give access or facilitate a certain knowledge. For this reason it
is relevant to keep in mind the constraints discussed above, so that artworks which represent
non-human Umwelten do not turn into straitjackets but rather behave as crutches to support
our imagination and our thinking beyond them. Obviously, the fact that these works use
scientific data does not mean that they are not, to a greater or lesser extent, subjective
interpretations hereof..
A story told by the expert in animal behaviour Temple Grandin can help us appreciate
the value of this kind of images aside from their aesthetic appeal, proving how they can
facilitate knowledge if used in a n informed and cautious manner. While a graduate student,
Grandin decided to use a camera and black-and-white film as media to take pictures from a
cow’s point of view. Combined with her expertise in the peculiarities of cows' visual
perception, these devices worked as technological means or filters in order to get a better idea
of how those bovines saw a cattle chute. Thanks to aspects such as the greater contrast shown
in the photographs, Grandin discovered that certain items and shadows were the things that
prevented those animals from going into the enclosure (Grandin and Johnson: 19). From this
perspective, cameras, computers, software and all the technologies that make it easier to
manipulate images provide the same advantages for understanding foreign visual Umwelten as
a box of crayons provides for conceptualising colours. The artifice of taking cows’ viewpoint
worked for Grandin and using this and other observations she became a well-known designer
of fit animal facilities that addressed the needs of the cattle. In the case of Grandin’s blackand-white photographs she herself was the one imitating the point of view and situation of
cows. But artists like Sam Easterson attach instead small cameras to wild animals as a means
to make long videos which record in a more direct fashion the wanderings of their bearers.ii
Pursuing the path of signalling the value of this kind of images, a value both
epistemological (they improve our understanding of animals) and practical (they bring
changes to the way we relate with animals), we want to acknowledge one of Grandin’s
theories. Grandin has suggested that some animals, though lacking language, may be able to
think, but in pictures, the same way that she – a highly functioning autistic – does too.
Grandin’s statement defies the position of Cartesian dualism, which requires the presence of
language to grant the existence of reason (Allen: §4.1). From here we could draw a useful
parallel between this pictorial way of thinking and the kind of knowledge we obtain from the
images that seek to ‘translate’ non-human animal perception so as to make it more accessible
to us, humans. In her writings, Grandin opposes verbal and pictorial thinking, language and
images. She grounds that opposition in scientific research and in her own experience as an
autistic person that has been successful in deciphering non-human animal behaviour. She
explains how she is able to visualise complex diagrams, mechanical and engineering
processes from beginning to end, but not a single sentence crosses her mind (Grandin and
Johnson: 17-18). What she does instead is to ‘translate’ her visual conclusions into words, but
only once the ‘tape’ that was playing in her head has stopped (note here the ‘screen
paradigm’). This makes it difficult for Grandin to grasp abstract fields that do not allow the
possibility of visualisation. She claims that thinking in animals other than humans might work
in a similar way. Grandin also proposes that animals and autists have a good memory for
specific visual details, while regular humans tend to generalise both in their thinking and in
their sensory perceptions; thus ‘abstractified’, they lose touch with the particular (Grandin and
Johnson: 30).
Conversely, verbal explanations about how non-human animals perceive can be
interesting, but they are also quite difficult to internalise. And the laboriousness of the task
grows exponentially with the number of visual features that we wish to include. Looking at
the features displayed in a picture provides a more direct understanding of non-human
Umwelten, especially if we make use of the slide paradigm and in our imagination we fade-towhite for a while our own virtual screen to adopt an alien view, without losing sight of the
limitations that this entails. Moreover, there also are a number of artists who aim at conveying
other dimensions of animal visual experience that complement the flatness and asepsis of the
screen paradigm, offering a ‘fleshier’ approach while they channel their efforts through visual
means. I shall discuss and illustrate below some of these other dimensions.
Firstly, there is the bodily experience. Like all the other dimensions I shall address, this
one too is very complex and rich, so that I cannot deal with it exhaustively, but only highlight
a few aspects and works of art. It was at the end of the 1960s that artists started to introduce
the presence of non-human animals in both art galleries and in their works. As noted already,
one of the reasons behind this move was a resistance on the side of the artists to the ideology
that defined the gallery space as a white cube, absolutely neutral and sterilised (O’Doherty:
97-99), a space devoid of any material connection, inclusive of the peculiarities of the human
body and perception. However, it becomes difficult to maintain such a position when inside
that supposedly unpolluted space one encounters the contrasting shock of a live coyote
behaving like a coyote, perceiving the environment around him through coyote’s senses, and
generating thus his own Umwelt. The reader may have recognised in this description Joseph
Beuys’s performance I Like America and America Likes Me (1974), during which the artist
cohabited several days with the coyote Little John in a New York gallery. This performance
has often been understood as an epic feat, being the dangerous coyote a metaphor of the Wild
West. But the performance had other lesser explored sides too, such as the almost playful
interaction between artist and coyote (Williams: 98-103). Beuys watched carefully the
movements and reactions of Little John, adjusting his behaviour to them, just like the coyote
did in his turn. In the end both were able to spend time together near the window, bodily
trusting each other, in a sort of contemporary re-enactment of the foundation of the bond that
ties humans and dogs. This performance proved to be a means to introduce some kind of non–
verbal, bodily communication between human and non-human animals in the artistic context.
Recently, other artists have addressed this same issue. Nicolas Primat, for instance,
spent many years living close to and observing several species of apes and monkeys (baboons,
bonobos, squirrel monkeys), who were kept in research centres, institutes and zoos. Having
grown up in a rural area, he developed an early attachment to farm animals, favouring a sort
of intuitive communication with them. Later on he incorporated the skills acquired this way in
his artistic practice (La Frenais, 2010a: 55). Primat chose to work with primates because of
their evolutionary closeness to humans, which facilitated the task of generating and
maintaining a dialogue through gestures and other forms of body language.iii He also
happened to be interested in issues such as the nature/culture dichotomy, promoting respect
towards other creatures, and questioning humans’ self-awarded position at the top of creation,
for which he drew inspiration from Joseph Beuys’ career.
Primat employed a strategy that recalls the techniques cultivated by primatologists
doing field work among their subjects, which were inspired in their turn by the conventions of
orthodox anthropology. Primat was surely familiar with these techniques through his
conversations with those primatologists, or through the primatology meetings he attended (La
Frenais, 2010b: 67). In any case, the artist described himself in a filmed interview as a
traveller in a foreign country, who ignored the culture and language of its inhabitants (see
Munck and Primat). Thus, he ventured into the simians’ enclosures and by interacting with
them, generally in a playful manner, he learnt how to communicate with them, adopting their
gestures and customs. Apparently he did this with such talent and patience that he managed to
be accepted in their ‘tribes’, either as another member of the ‘family’ or even as a potential
partner.
Primat worked a few years with baboons as a resident artist at CNRS Marseille.iv From
the beginning he decided to wear a spotted loincloth, both as a dash of humour and as a
reference to Tarzan, Burroughs’ famous feral child and archetypal mediator between humans
and nature. This turned out to be very important. The all-observant Primat noticed that
baboons reacted with curiosity to his feet, and he concluded that it was the first time that they
had been able to see bare human feet. Probably his near-nakedness meant that they were more
inclined to recognise hum as one of their own, in the same way that we feel more inclined to
identify with other primates when we watch their hands, feet and faces. Primat’s was a good
intuition, because most of the time we do not think twice about how strange other animals
may find clothed humans. For us, clothed or not, a human being is still a human being. But for
monkeys and apes a clothed human is maybe more akin to an alien, while a naked one may be
more like just another ape.
The result of Primat’s explorations was condensed in various videos. In one of them,
Les Petits Hommes Verts (Primat & Munck, 2007) the artist/s created a parody of a sci-fi
movie with an entire cast of squirrel monkeys travelling to Mars in a space rocket. An
interesting feature of the project is that it was accompanied by a Making of video that
presented Primat and Munck surrounded all the time by the squirrel monkeys. For Primat this
Making of demonstrated the relationship of trust established between the cast and the
filmmakers. Another video, exhibited as Portrait de famille (Primat & Munck, 2004)
displayed the upper half body of an imperturbable Primat exposing himself (for a change) to
the exploration of another group of squirrel monkeys, with a chroma blue screen in the
background that contributed to isolate the scene. The artist is first clothed and then naked,
while the monkeys show their curiosity about Primat’s clothes (sleeves, zipper, hood cords)
and nakedness (body hair and nipples), as well as about the camera itself. They seem trusting
and relaxed, and they only flee when Primat cannot hold back a sneeze.
Primat’s videos emphasize the intuitive process supporting them. This process allows
non-verbal communication and interaction, through close mutual observation, between the
artist and the other animals involved. These works are much more than simple, funny videos
of a man and monkeys. If what makes a difference seems for some so subtle that it almost
goes unnoticed, it is because most of us are not yet trained to easily distinguish the difference
between a video showing someone that is actively engaged with the apes appearing in it, and
someone that just shares the filmic frame with them, without establishing a meaningful
interaction. This means we are not able to read the body movements of those apes and
monkeys. In the end, it is no coincidence that Primat considered himself as forming part of a
certain post-Cartesianism, relying always, as he did, more on his intuition than on his reason.
Following the thread of analysing works that address dimensions of bodily expression,
Dawn Chorus (2007) by Marcus Coates offers another valuable insight. Coates is concerned
with the possibility of being or becoming another animal. He seemingly attempts time and
again to defy Thomas Nagel’s position, with his efforts, for instance, to see through the eyes
of a hawk looking for prey, perched at the top of a pine tree (Goshawk, 1999) or to reproduce
the footprints of a stoat by walking with specially carved stilt-clogs (Mustela Erminea, 1999).
Nonetheless, the absurdity and comicality of these very same efforts give the impression of
reinforcing Nagel’s words, thus working against what seems to be Coates’s original intention.
The multi-screen video installation Dawn Chorus, in spite of sharing in some of the
same absurdity, brings something rather unexpected into view. It recreates a dawn chorus
through a group of humans who mimic the calls of several birds, with one human assigned to
each bird song. The humans do indeed sing like birds; they even move a bit like birds. Each 4minute video secures its effect because it concentrates an hour of footage. Coates made each
of the 19 actors/actresses listen to a slowed down version of the bird songs he had recorded
during a specific dawn, with the help of the wildlife sound expert Geof Sample. This made it
easier for the participants to reproduce the sounds while they were being filmed. Each
resulting video piece was then speeded up again, and displayed in a complex installation with
each screen occupying the same position in the gallery as the original bird occupied in the
forest. The overall arrangement proposes a combination of contrasts and parallelism, with
each person seated in rooms or cars in their respective environments, like strange big birds
perched on their own branches.
The videos of Dawn Chorus are so compelling because they make the viewer realise,
in a heterodox yet effective manner, the different perception of time that some passerine birds
may have. Accelerating humans, we discover a bird-like quality in them. They are able not
only to mimic bird song convincingly, but they also move like birds, which makes them seem
more fragile, nervous and delicate. Time perception is an aspect that Uexküll analysed as well.
He described an odd experiment in which a snail kept trying to climb up a stick if it touched
its mantle four times or more in a second, believing it was stationary because it was fooled by
its perception (1957: 30), just like we are fooled by our own when it tells us that films are
continuous and not a discrete succession of images. Thanks to Dawn Chorus we are able to
feel something like birds’ very different perception of time, almost through our skin and flesh.
Watching and listening to the people in the videos bridges to a certain extent the gap that
separates us from those songbirds, as we identify with their human bodies and movements.
Seeing them, we feel them, and through them we also see, feel and understand the bodies and
movements of the birds in a new fashion. Thus a whole new space opens up to our
imagination, for us to wonder about and attempt to grasp how other species experience time.
This allows us to counteract some of the flatness derived from the ‘screen paradigm’.
All the artworks that we have discussed so far instigate knowledge through ways that
are not merely scientific. Coates uses not only humour, but also points to sources such as
shamanism and revelations. Similarly, Lisa Jevbratt’s ZooMorph has an entire section devoted
to para-scientific knowledge, for which she sought the advice of shamans, shape-shifters and
animal communicators (84-90), a challenging endeavour due to the obscurantism and
ambiguity associated with those areas. In any case, what could lie behind these efforts is an
intuition regarding the incompleteness and ‘asepticism’ of the scientific approach, a view
which triggers an impulse to look for other fields of knowledge and experience to complement
it, even if these other fields are ‘slippery’ and thus risk to be treated as unserious.
Another piece that reflects on this junction between science, art, animals and
consciousness is What It Is Like To Be What You Are Not (1993) by Rosemarie Trockel. Its
title clearly refers to Nagel’s paper. Trockel found some photographs that pictured several
distorted spider webs. The photographs documented an experiment in which the spiders were
given drugs, and one of the results of this invasive action was that they were not able to weave
straight webs. This work is concerned, among other issues, with the self-awareness of these
arthropods, and how it is affected by drugs. Since drugs also affect our consciousness, humans
do not seem to be very different from spiders in this particular respect, although it is still a
very controversial issue to assign consciousness to invertebrates in spite of the complex
behaviour of ants or the language of bees, explored by artists such as Yanagi Yukinori,
Aganetha Dyck and Diana Thater.
As mentioned before, works like the ones by Beuys, Primat or Coates supplement the
flatness, the lack of dimensions of the meta-images that are trying to reproduce what animals
are supposedly seeing on screens inside their heads. These pieces do so by emphasizing
aspects such as bodily interactions, biological links or parallelisms, or non-verbal
communication. They rely partially on intuition either to be created or to secure its effect on
the audience, invited to 'feel' them. In this fashion they try to offer alternatives to the methods
of obtaining knowledge provided by hard science, or 'pure' reason, thus recovering emotions,
physicality or the other senses. We also find this search for alternatives in Jevbrat's parascientific venture, while Trockel titled the visual results of an experiment so as to question
science perspective on non-human animals consciousness.
All of these elements are echoed in a very complex piece by Rachel Mayeri. Mayeri
started a few years ago Primate Cinema, a project composed of several works. Among them
are Primate Cinema: Baboons as Friends (2007), which tried to ‘translate’ a sequence of
baboon behaviour by using the cinematographic genre of film noir as a frame; Primate
Cinema: How To Act Like An Animal (2008), which included a workshop and the resulting
video of participants who are re-enacting a clip from a wildlife documentary about Jane
Goodall’s chimp research; Baboon Cinema and Saimiri Cinema, projects that experiment with
videos especially conceived for baboons and squirrel monkeys; and last but not least, Primate
Cinema: Apes as Family (2011). Mayeri’s series resembles the work of Primat, as it reflects
on similar topics. In fact, Mayeri and Primat got to know each other through The Arts
Catalyst, an organisation that commissions art that engages with science, having both
participated in one of its exhibitions (Interspecies, 2009), which aimed at investigating the
possibility of human artists collaborating with other animals.
The main goal of Primate Cinema: Apes as Family was to make a movie for captive
chimpanzees, addressing their perception and specific preferences. The project was inspired
by the fact that watching television is a common form of entertainment for captive
chimpanzees, as Mayeri was amazed to discover through stories aired in the media, about
chimps who enjoyed hospital dramas or cartoons (Mayeri). To create the work Mayeri started
a collaboration with comparative psychologist Dr Sarah-Jane Vick in order to establish chimp
preferences and encapsulate them in one film. This was not the first time that the idea of
making art for non-human animals came about (se Fuller: 5), but it is one of the most serious
attempts in this direction to date. In the initial stage, Mayeri and Vick showed to apes a
selection of different kinds of clips and studied their reactions. The apes’ preferences were
unsurprising, as Mayeri described them in the Making of: sex, food, violence and a few other
things like drumming, or social and political chimp interactions (for instance hierarchy issues
as described in de Waal’s Chimpanzee Politics). Preferences also included fake chimps, that is
to say people dressed up as chimps who later will take off their masks, revealing their
humanness. Dr Vick related this latter chimp interest to the ‘uncanny valley’ hypothesis: the
bewilderment associated with something that looks almost like your kind but not quite like it,
a characteristic shared by humans too.
The next challenge was to integrate all those fragments into a coherent narrative that
addressed chimps’ taste. The finally chosen story-line had as its main conflict the encounter
between the main character, an acculturated female chimp, and a group of ‘chimpier’
conspecifics. This main character – raised as a human child, used to live in a house, watch TV
and grab food from the refrigerator – was played by an actress in a very elaborate costume,
aided by two puppeteers who controlled a motorised mask. By contrast, the group that
suddenly entered her home was comprised of some not so realistic-looking apes, with masks
and a cloth of hairy patches enveloping their bodies. This choice made it possible to insert
other clips in the work, as the main character zaps between channels: cartoons about chimps
in labs, experiments with robots or an excerpt of a wildlife documentary containing grooming.
After the 22-minute movie was finished, it premiered at the Edinburgh Zoo.v The
chimps’ reactions were carefully recorded and the result was yet another film, this time a 22minute documentary. The final video installation of Primate Cinema: Apes as Family for
human viewers included two screens: Mayeri’s movie for chimps was shown on the right
screen and the documentary with the reactions of the chimpanzees was shown simultaneously
on the left screen. The project as a whole combined elements present in Mayeri’s other works
from the Primate Cinema series. Its aim was at least threefold: to show a video to the
primates, to ‘translate’ chimps to humans and conversely via the integrated clips which used
various film genres, and to train the actors and actresses to act as chimps, to take a chimp
point of view on the world.
Mayeri devised the piece as a means to bridge humans and chimps, as close
evolutionary relatives. She opted for film as media because of the common interest in
watching TV, verified in both humans and captive chimpanzees. But the project also
highlighted intriguing differences that offered insights into the specifics of our own perception
and that of chimpanzees, while at the same time contributing to mitigate that flatness we
associated before with the screen paradigm. Although the way we see is very similar to the
way other great apes do, there were palpable asymmetries between our respective behaviours
when watching TV. Chimps were curious, but never sat absorbed in front of the screen for
long periods of time. They paid attention, often from a distance or within hearing range, but
with their backs turned to the source of the moving images, looking at it only now and then
out of the corner of their eyes.
Another noteworthy fact is that the chimps responded to the movie and TV set in a
physical manner. They explored the screen and the equipment, they touched and hit the TV
set, as an acknowledgment of what they were seeing on it, which resulted in the partial
obscuring of its window-like screen by the grease of their skin [Figure 2]. They displayed
towards this 'window', reacting emotionally to bits of the story. Rather than immersing
themselves in the virtual world that the movie offered, chimpanzees treated the TV set as a
new element physically present in their social landscape, one among many. They did not try to
substitute the alleged ‘film’ projected on the presumable ‘screen’ in their heads with Mayeri’s
film; the flat and aseptic virtuality of the screen paradigm made no sense to them.
The gallery installation included not one, but two side by side projections. Two
screens, or two windows, one for absent chimps, one with and about chimps, and an ensemble
arrangement for humans, including yet another TV set showing the project’s Making of in an
adjacent room full of books related to the work; a complex multi-screened piece for a multiscreened human mind. Mayeri herself admits that the final result was not as ‘chimpcentric’ as
she had imagined (La Frenais, 2012: 12). Maybe one of the reasons lies in what incited the
creation of the work in the first place: a need for empathy, 'empathy' being understood here as
an impulse to take anothers’ viewpoint and look around as if through their minds, as if through
a window onto other worlds.vi This aspect is clearly present and emphasised in the installation.
Conceived for humans to watch on TV chimps being recorded watching TV, the installation
recalls a mise en abyme not only because of its structure and configuration but also because of
its content. It shows fake chimps taking off their masks in front of a mirror and an
acculturated female chimp watching cartoons with humans and apes watching together, again,
wildlife documentaries [Figure 3]. And it is us, humans, who are the ones able to either follow
through or lose ourselves irremediably in this meta-labyrinth of images.
It is us, humans, who seek refuge in such complexity. We are animals using
expressions such as theory of mind, thoughts about thoughts, higher-order cognitive
relationships or recursion in an attempt to define ourselves, spiralling out of the reach of the
simple feats by other animals. Besides and beyond animals making tools, humans are
portrayed as animals able to create tools in order to make other tools. As Temple Grandin
reminds us, we are too ‘abstractified’ to acknowledge the density of images, their wealth of
details, the corporeality and the non-verbal communication that they mobilise. In order to be
able to acknowledge all this we need to go beyond the screen paradigm, although it is not
necessary to renounce it when it proves to be convenient. Mayeri’s work, as well as Coates’s
attempts to ‘translate’ non-human animals and Primat’s explorations of body-to-body
communication with our evolutionary relatives address other dimensions than the merely
visual, but in the end they inevitably betray their human manufacture. These pieces emphasise
what is thought to be an ‘archetypically’ human disposition: the capacity for empathy, the
impulse towards perspective-taking. Primate Cinema: Apes as Family is a neat example of
that, with its multiple windows (the screens physically present in the installation and the ones
seen in the films) and unfathomable mise en abyme. A mise en abyme of perspective-taking
humans striving to imagine what chimpanzees like to watch on TV, what they think or even
dream, craving to see through them, as if their minds were just another set of screens, another
phase of the screen paradigm. Even wondering if other apes are able or not to navigate
through so many windows, and to what extent.
In the end, what Mayeri’s installation reflects is this human drive to put on someone
else's shoes, someone else's mind, someone else's 'slides'. So what was an attempt at getting
closer to chimps, to non-human animals, simultaneously offers an insight on humans, in a
boomerang-like trajectory.
However, this does not necessarily mean that no change is possible which will further
dissolve the walls of our bubble lenses to bring us even closer to non-human animals’
Umwelten. After all, the efforts described in this contribution facilitate, despite Nagel’s
assertions, a certain knowledge of what he thought as being out of our grasp and they do pave
the way for new knowledge about non-human animals, their consciousness, their emotions,
and even their imagination. Maybe recent developments that give more direct insight into
those animal minds – derived from new technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging and
others that inform us about rats that dream with mazes (Louie and Wilson: 145-156) or
dolphins that sing like whales during their sleep (Kremers, Jaramillo, Böye, Lemasson &
Hausberger) will lead the way into the future.
Reference: Cortés Zulueta, Concepción. “How Does a Snail See the World?
Imagining Non-Human Animals’ Visual Umwelten”. Meta- and Inter-Images in
Contemporary Visual Art and Culture. (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2013):
263-79.
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Endnotes
i
There seems to be a double hierarchy at work here. As W. J .T. Mitchell points out
(24), animals are often linked to the visual as they lack language, which is conceived as the
top of the intellectual ladder. On the other side, among the senses vision is considered to be
the most rational one, so images are sometimes submitted to the said Cartesian regime, and
non-human animals are often 'relegated' to the other senses.
ii
This device, known as crittercam, is widely used in wildlife documentaries, but often
favouring short and opportunistic shots which instead of allowing us to peek inside animal
worlds as animals wander around, contribute to build a more exciting narrative intended to be
consumed by the audience, as Donna Haraway has pointed out (249-263).
iii
The homophony Primat – primates is just a coincidence.
iv
These baboons were the subjects of neuroscience research, which adds an ethical layer
to Primat's work that I am not addressing here (La Frenais, 2010a: 55).
v
Mayeri intended this piece as a movie, which was also reflected in the kind of
narrative employed to unfold the story.
vi
Empathy is a contested term that I am using here in the sense of 'cognitive empathy' or
'perspective taking' as defined by Preston & de Waal.