This is a gif of giraffes and graphs. The video projected on the left was documentation taken from the point of view of my camera (my perspective) of the house where my mother lives (and, not coincidentally, the house where I grew up), where she has a prodigious giraffe collection (the current count is 164, which is only 20 short of the population of actual giraffes in Niger) The camera would come into focus when it fell upon a giraffe.

The giraffes at Mom’s are a varied population:

Though I grew up surrounded by representations of these creatures, I rarely related them to the actual animal, but have a strong yet separate fascination with giraffes themselves. The data analysis, the righthand projection in the gif, juxtaposed infographics of giraffes found in the wild, captive giraffes, and mom’s giraffes: average lifespan, subspecies, population densities, etc. I chose to render them in watercolor and pen in an attempt to evoke nostalgia/ the precious.

I think that, as discussed in class, the weakness of this project was tying together the two portions of the diptych in a way that carried a more concrete message. While I did attempt to filter the video so that it resembled disposable film (to echo the watercolors aesthetic), I agree that something broader was missing. I think it takes a long time to sort out the meaning of a project which involves the personal.

Marina suggested that, if the video on the left was to recall a safari (which is what I had, to some degree, intended), I should have dressed up in proper attire and allowed my image to be more present in the video itself. The class responded with an follow-up edit to the aesthetics of the graph portion, so it might reflect something you’d find in a national geographic, for instance. I think that these are excellent suggestions, but would hope to be able to do so while keeping the element of mom’s giraffes’ tender position in my psyche present: I wouldn’t want to purely lampoon.

As I mentioned in class, I hope to expand on this project by investigating other middle age ladies’ animal figure collections. I know they’re out there, and they’re waiting to be explored. In the future, I’d like to try to find out more from the curators of these collections: where did each figurine come from? What percentage where purchased by the collector? This, however, becomes less about the collected animal perhaps, and more about the collector. Which (to be honest) is okay by me, as it seems that these collections often have little to do with any feature of the animal itself.

Donald’s Ostrich

When I was a kid, I loved this cartoon. As I’m watching it again now, I still find a lot of things about it that are lovable. The animation is wonderful, the sound design is rich, and the gags definitely hold up. But it’s also clear that a lot of the sentiments behind the characterization of the ostrich harken back to the gender dynamics of the time. Before the action even starts (and this may have been unintentional, though it’s still interesting), Donald, our star, is using an ostrich feather duster, establishing his position of power of the ostrich. And strangely, even though they’re both birds, Donald can talk (well, sort of), but the ostrich can only coo and squawk. This is a strategy Disney often employs to establish the power dynamic between two characters: think Goofy versus Pluto.

As soon as the ostrich enters the scene, it makes advances at Donald, which makes Donald uncomfortable because Donald assumes he’s a man. So, outright, we experience the homophobia which is common at the time. Although, judging by his feather patterns Donald would be correct in his assumption, we find out shortly after that the Ostrich is in fact female, which quells Donald’s fears, and the ostrich can go about perpetuating the a stereotypical ditziness characterized by the Ostrich’s urge to eat everything in sight. The character design plays with the features of the ostrich that are considered desirable for American women. It’s long legs, long eyelashes, and voluminous caboose all contribute. Yet, the ostrich isn’t sexy. Like many women in the eyes of many men at the time, her clumsiness and lack of common sense makes he nothing more than a flirtatious annoyance.

Joust

Joust is an American video game developed and released in 1982. It features knight riding flying ostriches attempting to defeat knights riding buzzards. My impression is that this game uses ostriches in part specifically for their novelty. Many early games were built on ludicrous premises (Mario? Seriously?) and what more bizarre than a flightless giant that seems almost half camel?

I find two interesting things about the portrayal of the ostrich in joust. First, most obviously, for some reason this ostrich can fly. Wikipedia makes the choice of the ostrich as a flying bird out to be somewhat of an afterthought:

[The developer] felt that the primary protagonist should ride a majestic bird. The first choice was an eagle, but the lack of graceful land mobility dissuaded the designer. Instead, Newcomer chose an ostrich because he thought a flying ostrich was more believable than a running eagle.

It’s description as “majestic” is what is most pronounced to me about the ostrich’s depiction. On the arcade cabinet, the birds neck is posed in such a way to emphasize its long neck and with its head turned slightly upward. This pose is reminiscent of both nobility and snobbishness.

Second, in the gameplay itself, the birds take on a kind of heraldic symbology. While it seems somewhat happenstance that the bird is rendered from side-view due to the common graphic tropes in video games of that time, the medieval world of the game calls for this interpretation.

Inflatable Ostrich Costume

The thing that makes me cringe about this costume is really the look on the ostrich’s face, and its posture in this picture in particular. It’s looking up with its big cartoony yellow eyes at the douchebag on top of it, begging for the humiliation to end. Its legs are bent looking like its about to collapse under the weight of the rider, and its reign is basically a choker, in the literal sense.

That isn’t to say that I don’t find the costume *kind of* funny. I like that it plays with what is already odd about riding an ostrich (which, I guess is a mildly common practice?): the ostrich legs and the human legs seamlessly meld together. It’s almost believable, if you kind of squint your eyes, that when a human rides an ostrich that the human becomes a sort of weird, ostrich-penised bird-centaur. Here, that image is actualized.

These anthills are the subjects of a study at the metaphysic neurobiology research laboratory, formicidae division. The researchers at the lab are near certain that by using a cutting edge technique, anthropomorphic projection, they will gain new and profound insights on these superorganisms that will be not only analogous, but eventually completely transferable to human social structures, including political models and gender dynamics.

When Marina said to spend not too much time deliberating on which animal, I decided to do exactly the opposite.

First, while trying to make a school of fish self portrait, I gave up and doodled giraffe-self in the corner:

Giraffes have a strange significance for me, because the house I grew up in was overrun. But painting myself as a giraffe is basically painting myself as my mother, which is complicated?

For a time I contemplated lemurs, otters, various sea creatures, and in the end just began painting a selfie to see what animal it felt like to me as I was painting it.

Which was no animal. But the next day I thought of a sheep, which my old friend Alex always says that I smell like (?). I thought, yes, I can turn this into sheep self, and it will be a little wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Sheep get anxious when alone.

This still wasn’t quite right…

In the end, I felt a little mumbo jumbo and decided to disavow finding a special animal just for me blah blah Marxism blah blah blah and wanted to acknowledge that not only is the body an entity made up of microbes and cells in internal systems, but that we are also functioning together as a superorganism (esp new york, it feels, lol/blahblahblah).

so:

and finally:

An interesting fact, from wikipedia:

Many animals can learn behaviours by imitation, but ants may be the only group apart from mammals where interactive teaching has been observed. A knowledgeable forager of Temnothorax albipennis will lead a naive nest-mate to newly discovered food by the process of tandem running. The follower obtains knowledge through its leading tutor. The leader is acutely sensitive to the progress of the follower and slows down when the follower lags and speeds up when the follower gets too close.