In the exhibition And Say the Animal Responded? science-y artists and arty scientists ponder interspecies communication. Their co-stars include some of the world’s great brains and hive minds: wolves, cetaceans, apes, pachyderms, colonies of ants and choruses of birds.
The largest family of works is Amalia Pica and Rafael Ortega’s exploration into communication styles of the hominidae: homo sapiens (or more accurately, homo technicus) and their great ape kin. The public spaces of FACT in Liverpool echo with the recorded din of human primatologists mimicking calls of their hominid subjects. In a video, a dancer performs choreography running through the Catalogue of Great Ape Gestures (in Alphabetical Order), his movements now recognisably human, now not. Often they enter a gestural language that is taboo to human adults: extravagant physical displays, sexual, playful or irate.
In Pan Togolodytes Ellioti and Cousins, female chimps – their cheeks hollow and breasts limp from nursing – greet us on a big screen as we enter the main gallery. They have discovered a camera recording them in their forest in Nigeria and inspect it with facial expressions and gestures that appear (to anthropocentric eyes) much like human communication. The watcher is being watched and judged. There’s a neat punchline as you leave the gallery.
Watching is not a neutral activity. Just as the chimps’ respond to something alien in their habitat, the wolves in Demelza Kooij’s Wolves from Above are alert to the drone hovering above them. The film is projected on the floor, so we see the wolves from the drone’s perspective. As a pack, they monitor it constantly. There’s always one clever pointy face turned skywards, but it’s never the same wolf watching the drone for long. They work, silently, as a group while going about their lupine stuff: playing, nipping, nuzzling.
Under other circumstances, Kuai Shen’s Oh!m1gas would be fodder for nightmares. An elegant glass structure houses leafcutter ants and monitors their behaviour to control the movement of a pair of turntables. The vinyl being played carries amplified recordings of ant communication (including sounds known as “scratching” – the DJ set-up is an in-joke for ant nerds.)
In a related video, we see intimate footage of ant migration, the nomadic insects moving in apparently choreographed streams as they transport essentials: eggs, larvae, bits of leaf, legs ripped off other insects. All the ant chatter and interplay hits an uncanny nerve, at once utterly alien and weirdly readable.
The most charismatic of the megafauna contributing to the show participates from beyond the grave. The northern white rhino was pronounced extinct in 2018. Artist and sometime speculative biologist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg wonders why we are so giddy to rush into creating new life forms – or not-quite-life forms, such as artificial intelligences – that we let slip whole species.
Are we so puffed up with delusions of omnipotence that we actually think we’ll be able to bring back what we have destroyed? That a creature is nothing greater than its DNA, alone and isolated, rather than an integral part of a complex system? Clearly Jurassic Park has a lot to answer for. Evoking the miserable reality of the matter, Ginsberg built The Substitute, a 2D northern white rhino controlled by artificial intelligence. It arrives in its screen habitat pixelated, hovers into focus, sighs, huffs and looks unimpressed by its virtual hole in the ground, then glitches away again. A live rhino without the live rhino’s social infrastructure and habitat is not a happy rhino; indeed, he’s not much of a rhino at all.
The exhibition was scheduled to open in March. In the intervening period, we have become brutally aware of the interdependence of our living systems, and the fragility of life on Earth. After a deadly virus from a habitat degraded by human intervention crossed from one species to another, we abruptly stopped motoring around in planes, boats and cars. Subsequently, we’ve been reminded what birdsong sounds like, buffalo appeared on a New Delhi highway and the seagulls of Brighton were forced to fall back on a paleo diet rather than loot bins on the promenade.
Human activity has a huge impact on the habitats and behaviour of what environmental philosopher Timothy Morton calls “non-human people” – that is, lizards, trees, bacteria, all the living stuff. We human people raised on David Attenborough documentaries already knew this, kind of, but it was a shock during lockdown to see the difference made by a few weeks with our collective foot off the gas.
Now that we can go to the pub and seaside again, and leave plastic all over the park, we seem to be losing sight of the bigger picture. It is a good moment for And Say the Animal Responded? Perhaps we will come to it with a new receptivity.
