The giraffe project

In my own practice I have taken to chanting out loud while working, "How does what I am doing apply itself to the materiality of identity in virtual space". Which has the very real side effect of making me look completely deranged. Mostly this is because my artwork seems to be about fluffy animal suits. "You're a furry!" my friend proclaimed after seeing a recent panorama work.

The animals came before I read 'The Human Zoo' by Desmond Morris. The author was recommended to me by my lecturer after seeing a presentation I did in July.
The Human Zoo is a bit dated now. It was published in 1969 and the copy I have feels like its turning 40. It claims to belong to the predecessor of Massey University and has a stamp in the front cover that tells me it was purchased for the Wellington Polytechnic Library on the 20th of August 1971.

Morris's key idea in this book is that the human animal or 'naked ape' evolved over many hundreds of thousands of years to suit an environment that was expansive and a culture that was tribal and isolated. A few thousand years pass, (which in this scale equates to the blink of an eye) and suddenly the human animal is living in built up urban environments.
Morris then seems to lurch a bit between the idea of the basic human animals instincts being reapplied to the 'concrete jungle' and the reapplication of the tribal behavior to a global tribe or "super-tribe" created by the shear mass of people living in small boxes stacked up like a zoo would have looked like in 1969.

"The comparison we must make is not between the city-dweller ad the wild animal, but between the city dweller and the captive animal. The modern human animal is no longer living in conditions natural for his species. Trapped, not by a zoo collector, but by his own brainy brilliance, he has set himself up in a huge restless menagerie where he is in constant danger of cracking under the strain." (D Morris. Page 9, 1969.)

In an attempt to reign in the chaos of having a tribe where you do not know every one's name, and to stop the fracture of a creature that needs to belong to a tribe Morris explains that we have created pseudo-tribes. Tribes that are composed of interest groups, people who have a common interest or purpose, social class, or local identity.

Interestingly Morris identifies television in his chapter on super-tribes as being the centre of a "great deal of debate" (D Morris, pg 36, 1969). When Morris was writing this book he observed that television was contracting the "social surface of the world," (D Morris, pg 36, 1969) and it was thought that this mass-communication technology was going to create a global community, a super tribe or global tribe.

"Unhappily this is a myth, for the single reason that television, unlike personal social intercourse, is a one way system. I can listen to and get to know a tele-speaker, but he cannot listen to and get to know me... it is no substitute for two way relationships of real social contacts." (D Morris, pg 36, 1969).

The Internet provides a mass-media two-way/many-way technology that Morris identified as lacking from television. Our identity is stretched into another space using another technology, but one that has the real ability to facilitate social interaction. A question I find myself pondering now is how we append this space to the menagerie that Desmond Morris identified 40 years ago. Is the Internet making us any more of a global society or simply helping us to identify with more specific pseudo-tribes?

Morris realised that human animals manage their identity with relationships to other human animals and therefore for any identity to exist in this technological augmentation it needs to be activated with two way conversation. The materiality of identity in virtual space is constructed with language, and with identifying with the community around it.

Perhaps a greater need to connect with the creatures in the boxes around me is driving my research, certainly Desmond Morris would have me believe we all live in a profoundly unnatural environment already. Our relationship to virtual reality may slot into our 'physical' reality with even more ease then I previously imagined.