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Micro-Landscapes of the Anthropocene

Animal Worlds: Photo essay

an organism containing a mixture of genetically different tissues, formed by processes such as fusion of early embryos, grafting, or mutation.

from the Oxford English Dictionary.

A hybrid organism containing animal and non-animal cells becomes an unrecognisable beast living amongst the natural order. This new generation enables bio-medical research to advance investigations, and transform them into existence through the creation of chimeras.

Photo essay

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‘Koko manifested a degree of self-consciousness and rationality, and a considerable understanding social awareness based on her surroundings. If Koko had the capacity to obtain this extraordinary functioning, why then do humans interfere with non-human animal’s ability to live this potentially desirable life?’ Why does Koko’s life without this human interference only become something ‘potentially desirable’ after it has been established that Koko ‘manifested a degree of self-consciousness and rationality, and a considerable social understanding awareness based on her surroundings’? The language used here suggests that Koko’s life can only be conceived of as ‘desirable’ when it fulfills human standards of cognitive value. Why can’t Koko’s life be ‘desirable’ simply because Koko has autonomy and freedom to act in a world that adequately sustains them without a human controlling and monitoring their every movement? Why does Koko’s existence first have to display cognitive attributes that are perceived to mimic a human’s before it can be conceived of as ‘desirable’? Here the kind of empathy at work seems anthropocentric. Why does Koko have to display what a human deems ‘extraordinary functioning’ to deserve a life free from human manipulation? Whether we think Koko’s functioning is ‘extraordinary’ or not, Koko deserves to live a life without the constant harassment of a human forcing them to participate in tedious, frustrating or useless activities that pander to the human’s desire only.
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1. Animal Worlds: Photo essay "chimera"
  an organism containing a mixture of genetically different tissues, formed by processes such as fusion of early embryos, grafting, or mutation.
  from the Oxford English Dictionary.
  
  A hybrid organism containing animal and non-animal cells becomes an unrecognisable beast living amongst the natural order. This new generation enables bio-medical research to advance investigations, and transform them into existence through the creation of chimeras.
  Photo essay

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Tension and Hybridity - An Eco-Complex Investigation - By Eva Caley

When reading through the living book, the first real connection I made was between the marginal world’s close reading of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and the plant world's video, by Simon and Natalie, about plant blindness. There seemed a similar impulse in the two of them to investigate what it might be to consider the ecosphere in a holistic way. In the video, Simon and Natalie are urging us to see cherry blossom trees in all their complex symbolism to humanity. They discuss how cherry blossoms have historically been used in both love songs and war songs, to represent Japan as a country as its national flower, and to represent Japanese patriotism. The mode of representation even flips when they discuss how, instead of using the cherry blossom as a symbol to represent something, the sakura sakura song is used to represent the blooming of cherry blossoms in spring. There is, therefore, a complexity to the cherry blossom’s position within human discourse.

The Marginal Worlds group’s close reading is, essentially, expanding on the Plant World's deconstructionist idea of plant-blindness to include non-living things. By investigating the furniture in To the Lighthouse, they engage in how the ecosphere around humanity can play a role in structuring an ecosystem dynamically, rather than passively as the standard narrative of environment says. They also introduce an idea of a discourse, or a tension, here. The same tension, of blossoms representing themselves and other things, and being represented by man-made things, seems to occur in To the Lighthouse. The key difference however, is that rather than acting as passive symbols, as the cherry blossom does in Simon and Natalie’s video, Woolf works to allow furniture “to structure and restructure humanity’s place in the ecosphere”. The furniture in the work is made by things derived from natural materials, and they are man-made, but they act as an element of the environment to evoke disintegration and hold emotion, particularly when the country is at war. What they call “the material mirroring and mimicking human emotion” is a two way dynamic, and occurs in Simon and Natalie’s video too.

This interplay between human and non-human, living and non-living, reminded me of the hybridity evoked by the animal worlds cluster, in their photo-essay on the chimera. At first this seems a bit of an odd leap, but there seemed an interesting power dynamic at play that mirrored these tensions between human, plant and non-living environmental elements. The tensions in the chimera photo essay, however, seemed to result not in a mutual shaping of action and identity as occurs in relationships between plants and non-living things and humans; instead, is results in a merging of human and non-human, or a merging of animals.

At what point does one call the hybrid mouse-rats a new thing? The same question can be applied to the pig heart (is it a human heart if it’s grown inside a pig?) and the Piccinini sculpture (this must, surely, be called a new thing). It seems that when the boarders between things are less able to be delineated, such as between animals, the tensions result in an uncanny blurring of existence, a hybrid being and a new being all in one.

This tension between boundaries seems to reach its peak in the striking images from Amelia and Bridget’s film, where they have taken ice in the shape of hands and placed them in nature to let them melt. This work recalls a local artist from my hometown, Townsville, who made sculptures out of ice and then placed them outside in the North Queensland heat. As they melted they made new shapes, and their form changed like the hands in the video. At what point to we delineate between these things as a sculpture, or as a hand? As ice? As water? At what point does it stop being a man-made thing, and simply become a thing in the landscape. The hybridity of the previous examples makes me wonder if these attributes are mutually exclusive.

Therefore, my last link takes us back to the work Ella and I produced over the first 9 weeks of semester. We developed the term eco-complex in order to discuss exactly these tensions between representation and actuality, and between all elements of the ecosphere, not just humanity and nature. There is an emphasis in eco-complex work on understanding nature symbols in human narratives, something I have focused on in my major creative work, and also an attempt to understand nature’s ability to exist beyond the binary, in a way that allows everything to be both things, all things, and one thing simultaneously.

This page references:

Battling Extinction though the Chimera
Hermaphroditic Animals and Hybridity
Patricia Piccinini, 'The Young Family' Patricia Piccinini is a contemporary Australian artist that is concerned with the relationships of new technologies to human and animal bodies. She raises ethical distresses by exploring these technological developments that transform organisms into hybrid creatures through the possibility of cloning and transplants. Foreshadowing the issues that blanket our society she emphasizes the unexpected emotional connections that arise when we recognize that we see the world the same way as non-human animals. The dark dilemma then, is the lack in morality when we use non-human animals to generate human replacement organs which cannot be overlooked. Her transhumanist art calls for a reconsideration of human and animal relationships. In 2014 she said, ‘nature is such a wonderful thing, we're just here to witness it, it's not here for us – genetic engineering, changing the body.’ Pictured: Patricia Piccinini, ‘The Young Family’ 2002. Silicone, leather, plywood, human hair.
Tension and Hybridity - An Eco-Complex Investigation
Mice/Rat Chimeras
Human/Pig Emybro Human / Pig Hybrid created at Salk Institute, pictured. The dramatic organ shortage of transplantation has paved way for the atypical construction of interspecies chimeras. The future endeavour of stem cell research has engineered that these chimeras will be a host to growing human organs which will be utilised for organ transplants. Human stem cells are injected into pig ‘hosts’ and the two develop together. Ethical concerns of creating cognizant, sophisticated chimeras have been raised as the prospect of human cells migrating through the host body is a real possibility. Using non-human animals as incubators for human organs largely raises critical concerns to the violation of human and non-human dignity and the natural order. Although human lives can be saved through this new technology, this may seem irrelevant as the cost outweighs the result.
Genetic Scientists Now Creating Human Animal Hybrids ~ "Chimeras" ...Ban Lifted
The Border of Rationality
Koko the Talking Gorilla Ronald Cohn, National Geographic Creative. Patterson and Koko converse using American Sign Language. Koko used more than 500 signs regularly and knows an additional 500. To tell Patterson that she wanted a cat, she pulled two fingers across her cheeks in the manner of whiskers. As the most infamous product of human – animal research, Koko became critical evidence that animals perceive and communicate emotions and knowledge much like the humans around them. This non-human primate combines interesting aspects of human and non-human features and reminds us that they are a mark of our ancestors through human evolution. Koko manifested a degree of self-consciousness and rationality, and a considerable understanding social awareness based on her surroundings. If Koko had the capacity to obtain this extraordinary functioning, why then do humans interfere with non-human animal’s ability to live this potentially desirable life?
Freed lab rats Recent scientific studies have revealed that all individuality exists in all animals. For mice, social environment is a major factor in shaping this. Rachele Totaro photographs recently rescued lab rats and mice during their first moments of being freed from cages and being outdoors. The rats’ sense of joy and curiosity reminds us that humans and animals are much more biologically and socially close than we recognise. Totaro’s photography calls for an ethical reconsideration of how we treat the ‘other’, particularly through the lens of empathy and seeing nature as existing with us, not for us