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. Works Quoted Allen, Colin. "Animal Consciousness". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2011 Edition). Edward N. Zalta (ed.), 2011. Avalaible here: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2011/entries/consciousness-animal/ (last consulted 12/15/2012) Dawkins, Marian Stamp. Through Our Eyes Only? The Search for Animal Consciousness. Oxford: W. H. Freeman, 1993. de Waal, Frans. Chimpanzee Politics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Fuller, Matthew. Trans-Species Goggle-Box. On Rachel Mayeri’s Primate Cinema: Apes as Family. London: The Arts Catalyst, 2012. 3-5. Grandin, Temple. Thinking In Pictures: and Other Reports from My Life with Autism. New York: Doubleday, 1995. Grandin, Temple and Catherine Johnson. Animals in Translation. The Woman Who Thinks like a Cow. London: Bloomsbury, 2006. Gregory, Richard L. Eye and Brain. The Psychology of Seeing. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997. Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Jevbratt, Lisa. “With the Eyes of Another”. Antennae. The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture 21 (2012): 77-93. Kremers, Dorothee; Jaramillo, Margarita Briseño; Böye, Martin; Lemasson, Alban; and Hausberger, Martin. “Do dolphins rehearse show-stimuli when at rest? Delayed matching of auditory memory”. Front. Psychology 2:386, 2011. La Frenais, Rob. “Nicolas Primat: An Artist Between Species”. Antennae. The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture 13 (2010a): 54-57. La Frenais, Rob. “Wildchild”. Antennae. The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture 13 (2010a): 66-69. La Frenais, Rob. Should We Be Talking to the Chimpanzees? London: The Arts Catalyst, 2012. 9-13. Mayeri. Rachel. The Making of Primate Cinema: Apes and Family (2011) Available here: http://vimeo.com/34073861 (last consulted 27/09/2012) Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory. Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Munck, Patrick and Primat, Nicolas. 28-minute interview. 2008. Available here: http://vimeo.com/31837478 (last consulted 27/09/2012). Nagel, Thomas. “What Is It like to Be a Bat?”. The Philosophical Review LXXXIII. 4 (1974): 435-450. O’Doherty, Brian. Inside the White Cube. The Ideology of the Gallery Space. San Francisco: University of California Press, 1999. Preston, Stephanie D. and de Waal, Frans B.M. (2002). “Empathy: Its ultimate and proximate bases”. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 25 (2002): 1–72. Ramachandran, V. S. and Sandra Blakeslee. Fantasmas en el Cerebro. Los Misterios de la Mente al Descubierto. Madrid: Debate, 1999. Ramachandran,V. S. Los Laberintos del Cerebro. Barcelona: La Liebre de Marzo, 2008. Shibasaki, M. and N. Kawai. “Rapid Detection of Snakes by Japanese Monkeys (Macaca fuscata): An Evolutionarily Predisposed Visual System”. Journal of Comparative Psychology 123. 2 (2009): 131-135. Von Uexküll, Jakob and Georg Kriszat. “A Stroll through the Worlds of Animals and Men. A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds”. Instinctive Behavior. The Development of a Modern Concept. New York: International University Press, 1957. 5-80. Von Uexküll, Jakob. Ideas para una Concepción Biológica del Mundo. Madrid: Calpe, 1922. Weintraub, Linda. In the Making. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2003. Williams, David. “Inappropriate/d Others or The Difficulty of Being a Dog”. TDR: The Drama Review 51. 1 (2007): 93-118. 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.