Categoriearchief: Zootomy

The study of Animal anatomy or animal dissection.

Homo Stupidus Stupidus; The Missing Meme

missing link

Ida – Researchers from the University of Oslo have suggested the specimen, which was found 95 per cent complete, may be the root of anthropoid evolution, when primates were first developing the features that would evolve into our own.

Discovered in Germany, Ida is so well preserved that even the outline of its fur can be seen. An incredible 95 percent complete fossil of a 47-million-year-old human ancestor has been discovered and, after two years of secret study, an international team of scientists has revealed it to the world. The fossil’s remarkable state of preservation allows an unprecedented glimpse into early human evolution. Discovered in Messel Pit, Germany, it represents the moment before anthropoid primates–the group that would later evolve into humans, apes and monkeys–began to split from lemurs and other prosimian primates. This groundbreaking discovery fills in a critical gap in human and primate evolution.

www.history.com

Maarten Vanden Eynde
Homo Stupidus Stupidus, 2009 A.D.

homo stupidus stupidus

homo stupidus stupidus

Richard Dawkins
The Ancestor’s Tale: A pergrimage to the dawn of Life
, 2005

Just as we trace our personal family trees from parents to grandparents and so on back in time, so in The Ancestor’s Tale Richard Dawkins traces the ancestry of life. As he is at pains to point out, this is very much our human tale, our ancestry. The Ancestor’s Tale takes us from our immediate human ancestors back through what he calls ‘concestors,’ those shared with the apes, monkeys and other mammals and other vertebrates and beyond to the dim and distant microbial beginnings of life some 4 billion years ago. It is a remarkable story which is still very much in the process of being uncovered. And, of course from a scientist of Dawkins stature and reputation we get an insider’s knowledge of the most up-to-date science and many of those involved in the research. And, as we have come to expect of Dawkins, it is told with a passionate commitment to scientific veracity and a nose for a good story. Dawkins’s knowledge of the vast and wonderful sweep of life’s diversity is admirable. Not only does it encompass the most interesting living representatives of so many groups of organisms but also the important and informative fossil ones, many of which have only been found in recent years.

Dawkins sees his journey with its reverse chronology as ‘cast in the form of an epic pilgrimage from the present to the past [and] all roads lead to the origin of life.’ It is, to my mind, a sensible and perfectly acceptable approach although some might complain about going against the grain of evolution. The great benefit for the general reader is that it begins with the more familiar present and the animals nearest and dearest to us?our immediate human ancestors. And then it delves back into the more remote and less familiar past with its droves of lesser known and extinct fossil forms. The whole pilgrimage is divided into 40 tales, each based around a group of organisms and discusses their role in the overall story.

– Douglas Palmer –

meme

Meme

Richard Dawkins first introduced the word in The Selfish Gene (1976) to discuss evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. He gave as examples melodies, catch-phrases, and beliefs (notably religious belief), clothing/fashion, and the technology of building arches.

Meme-theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection (in a manner similar to that of biological evolution) through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an individual entity’s reproductive success. Memes spread through the behaviors that they generate in their hosts. Memes that propagate less prolifically may become extinct, while others may survive, spread, and (for better or for worse) mutate. Theorists point out that memes which replicate the most effectively spread best, and some memes may replicate effectively even when they prove detrimental to the welfare of their hosts.

A field of study called memetics arose in the 1990s to explore the concepts and transmission of memes in terms of an evolutionary model. Criticism from a variety of fronts has challenged the notion that scholarship can examine memes empirically. Some commentators question the idea that one can meaningfully categorize culture in terms of discrete units.

WHAT’S UP DOC?

Hyungkoo Lee 
Lepus Animatus, 2005–2006
Resin, aluminum sticks, stainless steel wires, springs and oil paint
111 x 60 x 70 cm

Hyungkoo Lee

WHAT’S UP DOC? LEE HYUNGKOO AND THE ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES
By Howard Rutkowski

The Punch Line

A black room frames the installation, which is dramatically spot-lit. A presentation of two skeletons, not unlike what one might see in a museum of natural history; a predator chasing its prey. Then the dawning – it’s Wile E. Coyote and The Roadrunner! Reduced to a science exhibit! Brilliant, clever and very, very funny.
Once the laughter subsides, something very interesting begins to emerge. The work is not merely clever or amusing in the way that Cattelan’s taxidermy animals are. There’s a whole new bit of forensic activity at work and the viewer is drawn into an exploration of the process behind this reductio ad absurdum. First of all, cartoon characters are not real; they are two-dimensional exaggerations of human behaviour. Yet, over time, they have entered the pantheon of global popular culture and are more recognisable than the real personalities that shape our world (Just consider the multi-national empire that is Disney). Our own predisposition to anthropomorphise furry (and feathered) creatures allows us to endow them with personalities that reflect our own and to place them in situations that mirror the trials and tribulations of our daily lives. So, if these cartoon figures can represent us in a simplified, yet extreme form, it follows that this form can be deconstructed and analysed.
Lee Hyungkoo’s approach eschews the pop psychological approach to deconstruction. What he is doing is actually physical deconstruction – more pop palaeontology – and it is detailed, thorough and completely worked through.

‘Familiar Tree’

This was Lee’s original idea for the title of the exhibition. As a play on ‘family tree,’ he was looking to describe the evolution of his creations and to evoke the empathy we all have with these animated characters. This new body of work began with Homo Animatus of 2002–2004. This was an homunculus – Latin for ‘little man’ – a cartoon exaggeration of human form (think of Elmer Fudd as a skeleton). The original homunculus was a creature with magic powers that medieval alchemists claimed to have created. Considering that Lee’s studio looks more like a laboratory than a typical artist’s atelier, the connection is even more easily drawn. Plus cartoon characters do possess incredible strength, resilience and resourcefulness: how many times has the Coyote fell off a cliff, only to rebound fully-intact in the next frame?
Homo Animatus was an extension of a series of earlier pieces where the artist physically sought to alter – to reduce to cartoon simplicity – his own anatomy. Using plastic forms, enlarging and reducing lenses, Lee created a variety of body costumes that altered both one’s appearance and one’s vision of the real world at the same time. Homo Animatus is, for Lee, the ‘Origin of the Species;’ in a peculiar and devolutionary way, of course, and in keeping with how animated creatures serve as stand-ins for their human counterparts. Canis Latrans Animatus (Wile E. Coyote) and Geococcyx Animatus (Roadrunner) followed and are now joined by Lepus Animatus (Bugs Bunny), Felis Catus Animatus (Tom), Mus Animatus (Jerry), Anas Animatus (Donald Duck) and his three nephews, Animatus H, D and L (Huey, Dewey and Louie).
‘Familiar Tree’ remains an appropriate description for this body of work. These are the ‘skeletons’ of characters/personalities that are as close to us and as instantly recognisable as our own inner frames.

Hyungkoo Lee

The Process

Stories of any kind usually require a build-up before offering the denouement. The joke involves a narrative before providing the punch line. Lee Hyungkoo works backwards. Merely seeing the work gives no clues to the complexity of its creation. Visually, the work can strike a chord and delight, amuse or bewilder, but examining its origins and development frames it properly.
Lee’s studio is a laboratory and could not be further removed from a scruffy artist’s garret. With a white-coated, masked team of technicians working in ‘clean rooms,’ the space is unlike any other. Bones of real animals sit on shelves alongside those of the works in progress. Clay constructions of skulls of imaginary characters provide a reference to those reconstructions of our fossilised ancestors. The walls are adorned with drawings of the anatomies of both real animals and their animated renditions. The tools and working methods are more akin to the procedures seen on the Nature Channel than the usual brush and paint-pot strewn environments one usually associates with the creation of contemporary works of art.
The adoption of Latin names to describe the individual creations underscores the faux-scientific approach, utilising the classifications associated with ‘kingdom, phylum, genus, species’ that categorise every living thing on the planet. Fans of the Roadrunner cartoons will recall that schoolboy Latin was often used to describe the characters, e.g. ‘Coyotus imbicilus.’

The Sources

The work itself, while sublime, delightful and amusing, requires an in-depth understanding of how all of this came to be in order to be fully appreciated. Observing the creation of this various works does provide the modus operandi behind Lee’s work, but where does the origin of the Origin of the Species lie?
Lee has cited Rodin and Giacometti as sculptural artists to whom he has responded within the development of his own work. Rodin was a breakthrough artist who sought to imbue the natural human form – warts and all – with a heroic sense of space, rejecting along the way the idealisation of the body that was previously the hallmark of Western sculpture. Rodin changed the way one could look at the human figure much in the same way that Lee’s optical helmets and body-distorting devices create alternative physical realities.
Giacometti’s own work passed through a number of critical stages – representational, cubist and surrealist – until he reached his apogee in Post-War Europe and sought to render the human form in all its existential angst. Giacometti found the inner reality of man.
Lee has spoken about the ability of these two artists to create a new sense of sculptural space. ‘Space’ is a concept that all artists working in three-dimensions must come to terms with. With this new body of work Lee has gone from the virtual space defined by his Objectuals series and has made the virtual a reality.

Anas Animatus L; Anas Animatus H, 2006
Resin, aluminum sticks, stainless steel wires, springs and oil paint
49.5 x 31 x 33 cm; 52 x 28 x 34.5 cm

Hyungkoo Lee

Animalis Universalis

Joan Fontcuberta & Pere Formiguera
Felix Penatus, 1987

Joan Fontcuberta

Joan Fontcuberta´s and Pere Formiguera´s work Fauna is the Natural History of imagination. It consists of an Archive of impossible but possibly existing animals – hybrids and meta creatures.
The collector of the Archive is Dr. Ameisenhaufen, the Alter Ego of the artists. These pictures are a part of a series of Fauna consisting of dozens of different animals. All the animals have been originally “reconstructed” in their natural size.

Solenoglypha Polipodida, 1987

Joan Fontcuberta

Phylum: Chordata
Subphylum: Vertebrata
Class: Reptilia-Ratidae

Sighting: Found in a deciduous forest in the federal state of Tamil Nadu in southern India,
thanks to informant G-16, who was attacked while looking for truffles. Observation and capture lasted for a period of 30 days, during which it proved impossible to locate any othe} specimen. Survived in captivity until it was killed by artificial means to allow study of its internal structure.

Date of Capture: 30 April 1941.

Main Traits: Osseous internal skeleton. Pulmonary respiration. Typical vertebrate nervous system. It has not been possible to observe its reproductive system, but everything would indicate that it is oviparous with division of the sexes. The captured specimen is an adult male measuring 133cm in length.

Morphology: Corresponds to a mixture of reptile and non-flying bird. Although it has no wings now, it is quite possible that more primitive forms did have them. The morphological characteristics correspond completely to those of report 21 on the postRellic fauna of Mobolk, provided by Dr. Ray’s liaison. It would thus correspond to suborder 8 of the current New Zoology.

Habits: Extremely aggressive and venomous, it hunts for food and also for the pleasure of killing. It is quite rapid and moves forward in a curious and very rapid run, thanks to the strong musculature of its 12 paws and the supplementary impulse which it obtains by undulating all of its body in a strange aerial reptation. When facing its prey it becomes completely immobile and emits a very sharp whistle which paralyzes its enemy. It maintains this immobility for as long as the predator needs to secrete the gastric juices required to digest its prey, which can vary between two minutes and three hours, as determined by the size of the victim. At the end of the whistling phase, Solenoglypha launches itself rapidly at its immobile prey and bites the nape of its neck, causing instantaneous death. Immediately afterwards, if it wishes to eat its victim, the beast vomits part of the gastric juices all over the animal and waits for this highly acidic matter to begin to take effect, while it circles around the dead animal uttering the characteristic murmur of “Globe-toe,” with a 3-pause-1 cadence. Unlike known reptiles, Solenoglypha never rests after eating. Quite the contrary, it sets off on a wild chase which is only interrupted for the purpose of defecation.

Cercopithecus Icarocornu, 1987

Joan Fontcuberta

Phylum: Chordata
Subphylum: Vertebrata
Class: Mammalia

Sighting: Found in the Amazon jungle (Brazil) with the aid of the eminent anthropologist Dr. Edson Nelinho, who discovered it while carrying out studies on the Nygala-Tebo tribe. Once in Brazil, accompanied by Dr. Nelinho, whom the primitive tribes consider to be semi-divine, and my assistant Hans, I lived among the NygalaTebo for 12 days, observing the curious behavior of this extraordinary animal.

Dates of Observation: 28 February to 11 March 1944.

Main Traits and Morphology: It is a long-tailed simian with large wings which turn it into an animal eminently suited for flying. Its morphology apparently corresponds completely to that of a mammal and has nothing to do with a bird’s. At any rate, the close vigilance to which the natives subjected us prevented me from carrying out any detailed observation of the animal. From what I could observe, it is omnivorous with an indiscriminate diet of insects, fruit and small animals which it hunts in full flight with its long and resilient barley sugar horn. It would correspond to suborder 6 of the current New Zoology.

Habits: Cercopithecus Icarocornu is the sacred animal of the indigenous Nygala-Tebo tribes, for whom it represents the reincarnation of Ahzran (he who came from heaven). The females give birth inside a large cabin in the village to which only the great shaman has access. The baby animals remain inside the cabin until they have completely developed their ability to fly, at which point the tribe celebrates a lavish ceremony during which Cercopithecus undergoes an operation in which it is grafted with the skin of the silver fish of the Amazon, which covers all of the pectoral and abdominal zone. Once this has been done, the animal is set free, although it never strays very far away from the village, and participates by its presence in all of the sacred festivals of the NygalaTebo. During these festivals the animal is given a spirituous beverage which it drinks eagerly, sinking into a state of complete inebriety, at which point it begins to flap its wings so madly that it hovers in mid-air with its body immobile, singing like one possessed. Its song is strangely husky and deep, given its small size, and it articulates a series of sounds which constitute a kind of psalmody which the natives seem to understand and to which they listen with great attention. The sexual act occurs inside the cabin, which is also the place where the elderly take refuge when they feel that death is near.

F****d up Frog

Garnet Hertz
Experiments in Galvanism, 2003/2004

Garnet Hertz

Garnet Hertz2

Clicking on “LEFT LEG” or “RIGHT LEG” activates motors inside of the frog’s body. These motors make the frog’s legs physically move in the gallery space. After clicking the leg activation links, a “LEFT LEG ACTIVATED” or “RIGHT LEG ACTIVATED” screen is displayed for about two seconds while the specimen’s legs are in motion.

‘Garnet Hertz has implanted a miniature webserver in the body of a frog specimen, which is suspended in a clear glass container of mineral oil, an inert liquid that does not conduct electricity. The frog is viewable on the Internet, and on the computer monitor across the room, through a webcam placed on the wall of the gallery. Through an Ethernet cable connected to the embedded webserver, remote viewers can trigger movement in either the right or left leg of the frog, thereby updating Luigi Galvani’s original 1786 experiment causing the legs of a dead frog to twitch simply by touching muscles and nerves with metal.

Experiments in Galvanism is both a reference to the origins of electricity, one of the earliest new media, and, through Galvani’s discovery that bioelectric forces exist within living tissue, a nod to what many theorists and practitioners consider to be the new new media: bio(tech) art’.

– Sarah Cook and Steve Dietz

Garnet Hertz3
Garnet Hertz at work…, 2005
(photo by Steve Dietz)

Animal Liberation Front
http://animalliberationfront.com

The Turning Point of Life

Damien Hirst
Mother and Child, Devided, 1993

Damien Hirst

The impulses driving Damien Hirst’s work stem from dilemmas inherent in human life: ‘I am aware of mental contradictions in everything, like: I am going to die and I want to live for ever. I can’t escape the fact and I can’t let go of the desire’. The materials he uses often shock, but he says he ‘uses shock almost as a formal element . not so much to thrust his work in the public eye . but rather to make aspects of life and death visible’.

Fritjof Capra
The Systems View of Life, 1982
Chapter 8 of the “Turning Point”

As the notion of an independent physical entity has become problematic in subatomic physics, so has the notion of an independent organism in biology. Living organisms, being open systems, keep themselves alive and functioning through intense transactions with their environment, which itself consists partially of organisms. Thus the whole biosphere – our planetary ecosystem – is a dynamic and highly integrated web of living and nonliving forms. Although this web is multilevel, transactions and interdependencies exist among all its levels.

Most organisms are not only embedded in ecosystems but are complex ecosystems themselves, containing a host of smaller organisms that have considerable autonomy and yet integrate themselves harmoniously into the functioning of the whole. The smallest of these living components show an astonishing uniformity, resembling one another quite closely throughout the living world, as vividly described by Lewis Thomas.

Damien hirst
Damien Hirst I Want You Because I Can’t Have You, 1992

There they are, moving about in my cytoplasm…..They are much less closely related to me than to each other and to the free-living bacteria out under the hill. They feel like strangers, but the thought comes that the same creatures, precisely the same, are out there in the cells of seagulls, and whales, and dune grass, and seaweed, and hermit crabs, and further inland in the leaves of the beech in my backyard, and in the family of skunks beneath the back fence, and even in that fly on the window. Through them, I am connected: I have close relatives, once removed, all over the place.

Although all living organisms exhibit conspicuous individuality and are relatively autonomous in their functioning, the boundaries between organism and environment are often difficult to ascertain. Some organisms can be considered alive only when they are in a certain environment; others belong to larger systems that behave more like an autonomous organism than its individual members; still other collaborate to build large structures which become ecosystems supporting hundreds of species.
Lees verder

Ichthyosaurus

Mark Dion
Ichthyosaurus, 2003

dion-

(pronounced IK-thee-oh-SAWR-us) Ichthyosaurus was an ichthyosaur, a marine reptile; it was not a dinosaur. This sleek animal could perhaps swim at speeds up to 25 mph (40 kph). Ichthyosaurus lived from the early Jurassic period until the early Cretaceous period, roughly 206 to 140 million years ago.
Anatomy: Ichthyosaurus was about 6.5 feet (2 m) long and ay have weighed about 200 pounds (90 kg). It had a tall dorsal fin, a half-moon-shaped tail, paddle-like flippers, and smooth skin. The nostrils were near the eyes on the top of the head. It had massive ear bones and large eyes, probably indicating that it had acute hearing and keen eyesight. These marine reptiles gave birth to live young.

Diet: Ichthyosaurus’ diet was mostly fish, but may have also included cephalopods (like straight-shelled belemnites).

Fossils: Hundreds of Ichthyosaurus fossils have been found in England, Germany, Greenland, and Alberta, Canada. Even fossilized dung (called coprolites) and fossilized skin impressions have been found. Ichthyosaurus, which means “fish lizard,” was named by Charles Koenig in 1818.

Ichthyosaurus