You know what’s really cute? Seeing a giant cockroach pilot a three-legged robot. Seriously.
What’s really endearing is that the roaches have names pasted to their exoskeletons-names like Bill and Ernest.
Welcome to ZOO, the technological, entomological show on now at InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre. Just a few steps north of Queen, behind windows covered to keep out the sunlight, ZOO presents a multimedia experiment created by three artists: Ingrid Bachmann, Garnet Hertz, and Amy Youngs. Together, they have combined three different pieces to “raise the question of what happens when we encounter animals in and through the mediation of technology.” This assembly of work puts nature in a distinctly manmade setting, creating what the artists call “post-modern animals.”
Amy Youngs’ Holodeck for House Crickets is an environmental “bubble” for crickets to exist in. Not only has Youngs provided a habitat for the crickets, but she has also integrated a projector that provides the crickets with pleasing images to look at in their glass enclosure. Changing in response to the cricket’s chirping, the images induce a virtual ecosystem. House crickets are normally raised to feed reptiles, but in Young’s setup, they’re livin’ in high style with food, flicks, and a predator-free pad. In their reversal of fortune, the crickets are weirdly beautiful-perched on rocks with their antennae waving.
Next was Garnet Hertz’s Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot #3, a funny, Kafkaesque fusion of a Madagascan cockroach that maneuvers a big robot with a trackball. The ball senses the motion of the bug, moving the ‘bot accordingly. In footage, it was hilarious to see the bug given this kind of control. The roach-borg wheeled around the room, bumping into tables and bearing down on bystanders. It was made funnier by the metallic drone of the robot’s mechanism. Besides the robotics, I was also given the opportunity to observe the insects up close-and question my own petty human revulsion. Bill the cybernetic cockroach was actually pretty charismatic, for a thumb-sized bug.
The final composition, Ingrid Bachmann’s Digital Crustaceans v.0.4: Homesteading on the Web, was my favourite. Positioning a motion sensor over a terrarium containing several hermit crabs, Bachmann’s setup tracked their movements on the internet, representing them as the actions of an avatar in an interactive game. At times, other players would approach the crab-manned avatar, not realizing its crustacean identity. On the other side of the terrarium, an old printer tapped out pictographs of the crab’s movements, whirring to life every so often. Bachmann said she selected the hermit crab as a way of connecting human displacement to that of animals, since hermit crabs live as nomads in the abandoned shells of snails and other hard-shelled creatures.
In reinterpreting the zoo, Bachmann, Hertz and Youngs have shed light on the marginalization of animals as well as humans. Technologies that artfully conjoin humans and animals point to the connections between the two realms.
One more surprise occurred during my visit, which was not officially part of the ZOO exhibition but nonetheless supported the ideas within it. It turned out to be bath day for the hermit crabs, and I got to watch as one emerged from its shell to go into the water. The crabs, which rarely come out when anyone is present, were fantastic to see out-of-shell. All of us laughed, because it was so wonderfully simple to watch a crab be itself. Bachmann, Hertz and Youngs have fashioned it a zoo of fantasy and reality that is both funny and thought-provoking.
ZOO runs at InterAccess until Saturday March 17. They’re open Wednesday to Saturday from 12:00-5:00. For more information, visit www.interaccess.org.
