Animal Patterning Project

Animalia

—Feral

Animal Patterning Project

Animal Patterning addresses genetics, environmental displacement, co-existence through urbanization, and the rise of infectious cross-species diseases such as COVID-19.

World hunger is a pandemic within a pandemic with viable food sources in short supply. While the lists of endangered plant, animal, and insect species continue to grow due to deforestation, the global wildlife trade, and hunting, these activities also lead to the rise of infectious diseases transmitted from other-animals to humans such as COVID-19. It is profoundly meaningful that other-animals sought to reclaim our empty streets when they were temporarily devoid of humans during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, further demonstrating this imbalance and the need for its correction.

Animal Patterning Project is a cross-disciplinary multi-faceted project that explores our sometimes-exploitative relationship with other-animals. It includes the historical practice of taxidermy, our unique ability to genetically manipulate their bodies and skins for our own purposes, and the dilemma of displaced indigenous other-animals that urban development creates.

This dilemma includes human attempts at rewilding through cloning, de-extinction, and preservation techniques, such as the animal crossing overpass bridges that were erected over twenty years ago at Banff National Park (while Trans-Canada wildlife mortalities decreased substantially, many other-animals continue to die while attempting to cut through the park via the Canadian Pacific Railway).

Animal Patterning Project performance is an ephemeral dance about our complex relationship with other-animals and simulates their return by projecting their likeness onto the urban environment they once inhabited. We have a very complicated relationship with other-animals. We use them for science research and as a food source. We admire them while simultaneously wanting to genetically alter them, we destroy their habitats to build condos and then make feeble attempts at preservation and conservation. In the past, we preserved other-animal specimens in jars, stuffed and displayed them in museum dioramas of their ‘natural’ habitats. Now we tag them with GPS devices and leave them in the ‘wild.’ We also capture them to study and emulate their nature, energy and movements, and the way they design their natural structures.

All these concepts serve as catalyst for the performative dance. Animated other-animal patterns simulating synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, and genetic mutations (from the effects of our interventions, genetic and otherwise) were created from photographs of taxidermied other-animals from the American Museum of Natural History and converted from bitmap to vector. The images are then animated and projected interactively onto dancers using motion tracking, simulating the return of the undomesticated other-animal. Each group of dancers create a new unique performance in the spirit of the other-animal/animal. Dancers are free to interpret the approximately 10-minute score, New Chimes, an 8-note composition consisting of wind chimes that form a graphic other-animal-like pattern relating to Feng Shui and the Four Celestial Animals pointing East, South, North, and West.

Debra Swack
New Media Artist, Fulbright and Education Specialist SUNY, Buffalo State
—Manhattan, New York, USA

Animal Patterning Project ©Debra Swack

Animal Patterning Project is currently featured in Leonardo’s (MIT) Doomscroll Pavilion at the Wrong Biennale #5.
Attend the Doomscroll Pavilion here.