2019, installation, light-boxes, sound
Courtesy the artists

The question “What is it like to be another animal?” has often been rhetorically leveled against insinuations that we could know what the world might feel like for an other animal. One cannot help but get the impression that it circumvents the more uncomfortable question what it is like to be another animal in captivity?
Our visit begins from above. The view reveals a fragile borderland. For octopuses the map seems inverted. Where there should be water there is land, the aquarium as the ocean’s messenger. A reference, maybe, to the octopuses’s occupation of a transit zone between ocean and land, but also to the intimacy between alienness and familiarity, as the bird’s eye view and the familiar topography of roads and places accustoms us with the unknown location through we will never really command, and the fragility and bitterness of their captivity. So close remains their home behind that harbor wall.
Hörner/Antlfinger peel away the distance that appears to separate us from the octopus. They narrow in on him by palpating the environment. “Wildness” has become the shorthand for authenticity. Who, then, is that octopus in this artificial environment? Through careful observation and externalizations of their own experience, we are led in ever closer spirals to the octopus’s perspective. By following the trail from the familiarity of intersubjective recognition to the assumingly impenetrable, all the sudden, to know what it is like to be that octopus actually appears quite imaginable. As the transition proves smooth, effortless, unnoticeable, what if our perspectives seamlessly connect?

Ute Hörner and Mathias Antlfinger joined the Academy of Media Arts Cologne as professors for “Transmedial Spaces/Media Art” in 2009. Their installations, videos and sculptures deal with the relationships between humans, animals and machines and provide both: critical perspectives on changeable social constructs as well as utopian visions of fair interactions between these parties. Together with the grey parrots Clara and Karl they have been working as Interspecies Collaboration CMUK since 2014. Their works have been shown at international exhibitions and festivals, including CCA Tbilisi, ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Shedhalle Zuerich, NMFA Taiwan, Ars Electronica Linz, Werkleitz Biennale Halle, Museum Ludwig Cologne, KAC Istanbul, and transmediale Berlin. — www.h--a.org