Bestiary

We’ll be showing Bestiary during an evening of “Extended Cinemas” at Exploratorium After Dark on May 5th. There will be lots of intriguing work by other folks, too:

Miwa Matreyek

Tracey Snelling

Nate Boyce

Paul Clipson

The Three-Minute Picture Show

5000 Dogs in the Clone Lab

I chose to revisit the Animal as Object assignment for my final project in Animals, People and Those in Between. Instead of really focusing on Mira this time, however, I decided I wanted to convey how overwhelmed I was by the number of dogs supposedly used in the lab that cloned the first dog: 5000. I’m imagining this as a sketch for wallpaper, ideally flocked, although I also really like the pixelation of the dogs when I zoom in. Click on the image to see a small version of it, or open this link in a new tab for the full size.

During the crit, I got some really helpful suggestions– at this point it makes sense to let go of Mira as the dog in silhouette, and replace her with a dog that shares a silhouette with the beagles. Also, I’m going to try to either connect the beagles paw-to-paw or as a tesselation. I don’t like the black outline around the “empty” dog silhouette, but with the beagles as they are it needs to be there. I’m hoping that with tesselation or connected lines and a recognizable silhouette, I won’t need that outline anymore.

Following on our Animal as Object assignment for Animals, People, and Those In Between, we were asked to create another piece adopting the point of view of our chosen animal. Here’s the project brief:

5. Animal Subject
Due date: Mar 24
Format: pdf or other form (paper, film, web site) AND character model sheet (pdf)

You will take your “Animal Object” character, and flip the script by investigating the subjective point of view of the animal you chose.

What is it like being inside this animal? What is its view point? How does it see– or experience –its environment? What – or how – is he/she reacting to the events surrounding him/her? How do those events appear, in terms of scale, form, size, sharpness, color, time?

Drawing on the writings of Üexkull (the idea of umwelt), and the readings on research into animal minds, and / or projected first-person narration (Haskell’s short story, Coe’s “Pitt’s Letter”), you may chose to be anthropomorphic, or you may NOT be, as you see fit.

The purpose of this assignment, coupled with the last one, is to explore how character is made from different points of view, and how your crafting of that character expresses your point of view.

Format:
First-person point of view (the “I” form)
Format can be comic, drawings, video, sound, etc.

Over the past few weeks I’ve spent lots of time learning about cloning and reading about how like Missy Mira is. When it comes down to it, though, Mira is still just a dog; she couldn’t care less that she’s a clone.

Postmortem:

I showed the video in class, and got a few laughs. I agree with Marina’s critique, though: I got my point point across, and Mira’s subjectivity comes across (especially in oposition to the object piece), but the movie plays a little flatly. We brainstormed on ways to vary the levels of the video, and I gathered a few ideas of how to improve it. Part of the problem is the quality of the original video– if it were a little clearer and the audio were a little less muffled the subtitles might pop a bit more. A closer analysis of the human language, and a closer look into Mira’s body language could help, too. The most successful moment in the video is the exclamation and recognition when Mira’s name is mentioned– I’d like to bring that even further forward. We talked about the idea of adding extra audio or cutting in other footage, but what I like about the piece is its simplicity. The deadpan delivery of the plain subtitles is the video’s strength, but maybe if I framed the movie with more genre-specific credits the contrast between the cloning talk and the dog language would be a bit more intense.

Hueg

Bryan Lence and I developed a creature-maker for our Programming A to Z midterm. We based the program on a simple context-free grammar defining our animal structures, and applied that grammar to a Processing sketch based on Adam Parrish’s ContextFilter. Each click of the mouse while the sketch is running assembles a new animal assembled from parts of a horse, a stag, and a blue jay that we created using Photoshop and Illustrator.

There is very little information available about Mira that describes her without mentioning Missy in the same breath. Often, Mira is simply referred to as “Missy’s clone.” This lack of information is understandable, given that Mira’s genetic relationship to Missy is the only newsworthy thing about her. However, so much information is available about Missy– her personality, her looks, and her behavior have been written about at length– that the disparity between the two seems strange. Although Mira is a family’s pet dog, she will always be described according to another dog’s traits. Descriptions of Mira will continually be based on the dogs who came before her and who, whether through tissue donation or as part of the experiments that led to the success of the Missyplicity project, contributed to her existence.

Sources:

Aldhous, P. Interview: It’s a dog’s life…again. New Scientist, July 19, 2008. 199:2665, Pg. 44.

BioArts International. Best Friends Again: Cloning Missy. Retrieved March 3, 2009 from http://bestfriendsagain.com/missyplicity/index.html.

Konigsburg, E. Beloved Pets Everlasting? The New York Times, January 1, 2009. Section D; Pg. 1.

Mira

For Animals<>People we were asked to create a piece looking at a specific animal as an object. Here’s the project brief:

4. Animal Object
Due date: Mar 3
Format: pdf or other form (paper, film, web site) AND character model sheet (pdf)

This assignment is a combination of research, character development and implmentation of a documentary form.
You are going to make a piece about an animal as an object, depicted in the 3rd person.
The assignment is a combination of research and storytelling, with the goal of making a portrait.

You will:
a. Research a real animal
b. Do character studies (a character model sheet) and write backstory
c. create a storyboard or a short piece about the character

some sample subjects:
the real story of Bessie the Cow or Le Vache Qui Ris; a piece about Coco the gorilla; whatever happened to Willard (the rat)?

I chose to research and portray Mira, one of the first clones of a pet dog. As I was reading about Mira, I realized that almost all of the information about her was actually about Missy (the dog she was cloned from) or the cloning process. Any information about Mira was tied to comparisons to Missy or other cloned animals. There was almost no information describing Mira as an individual dog. So, I tried to convey that in the piece. I fell quite short of my goal. I think this is mostly due to getting so submerged in my own viewpoint and knowledge of the subject that I forgot to look at it with fresh eyes. Each part of the image was so packed woth meaning for me, that I couldn’t see it without assuming that knowledge.

Marina had some good suggestions for me, mostly based on trying to push the image more toward an infographic. The image reads in a circular way right now, so it’s hard to decipher the narrative, and the anonymous dogs don’t read as the multitude of dogs I’d like them to stand in for. I want the cloning process to be highlighted in the story, but right now it’s the centerpiece. My favorite thing about the piece is the handdrawn watercolor applied to the clone template (despite the crummy paper quality). I particularly like the detail on Mira, but my classmates had a good suggestion: since I’m trying to convey the lack of information about Mira, it makes sense for her to be the blank dog, while the rest of the image is meticulously detailed.

Character Study Sketches

For Animals, People, and Those In Between this week we were asked to create a character study for the animal we sketched last week. I’m happier with the idea of Ole as a silhouette, but trying out the Wacom tablet and creating a few line drawings in Illustrator was a fun challenge. Here are a few details on Ole, the Great Horned Owl:

Character Name:
Ole

Species:
Great Horned Owl (Bubo Virginianus)

Age:
Unknown. Not young.

Appearance:
Enormous (as big as a house, a mountain, a sofa, a cloud).
Speckled brown feathers, white at throat and chest.
Yellow eyes.
Large black claws on tawny feathered feet.
Dark, curved, sharp beak.
Large ear tufts.

Distinctive Traits:
So enormous he is liable to be mistaken for part of the scenery.
Never speaks, rarely hoots.
Extremely intelligent.
Very protective of friends.
Apparently capable of horrific violence, although his presence is so intimidating that he rarely needs to lift a wing.
Smells like Douglass Fir, hay, pepper, mushrooms, and dirt.
Stoic.
Fickle.
Fastidious, but often dusty.
Secretly enjoys a good cuddle or ear scratch.
Hums to himself when no one is listening.
Excellent organizational skills as evidenced by his ornate arrangements of pebble mandalas.
Sometimes perceived as a shadow.
Disappears for months at a time.
Terribly mysterious.

Family Background:
Uncertain. Supposedly hatched from the nut of a gingko tree in the middle of winter.

Possessions:
None. But he knows where there is an old kettle he can use if he needs to make some tea.

Residence:
Unknown. Frequently seen flying from the direction of Red Hook.
Also sighted near Anacortes, Washington, and outside of Gstaad, Switzerland.

Why do I love this image so much?