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A potential medium for this project…

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another potential medium

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The NSA and surveillance ... made simple - animation

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Bird watching goes both ways…

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Birds Aren’t Real? How a Conspiracy Takes Flight | Peter McIndoe | TED

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The Rise of Surveillance Capitalism | Mark Weinstein | TEDxIVC

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The collection and commodification of residual data by corporations.

Used to create predictive and personalised advertisements and generally make big organisations more profit through the analysis of our personal experiences and uses of the online world.

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Shoshana Zuboff on surveillance capitalism | VPRO Documentary

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Pigeon camera invented 1907 by Julius Neubronner

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Barthes semiotic codes:

Symbolic codes- visual elements with symbolic meaning, e.g an hourglass symbolising time

Semantic codes- additional or connotative meaning e.g a suit connoting wealth

Proairetic codes/ Action codes- indicate something is going to happen, eg a fun suggesting a violent act

Hermeneutic codes/Enigma codes- elements of mystery, audiences make their own interpretations

Cultural codes- understood through audiences’ shared cultural and contextual knowledge

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Media Studies - Roland Barthes' Semiotic Theory - Simple Guide for Students And Teachers

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The dust storms that ravaged the Southern Great Plains of the United States during the 1930s created an environmental catastrophe that would affect the lives of thousands. Artists from around the country both during and after the storms traveled to the region to capture the devastation, making the Dust Bowl a significant chapter of 20th-century American art.

American Art During The Wheat Boom

As wheat farming became more and more widespread throughout the Southern Plains during the 1920s, modest small-scale wheat farming as shown in Jones' painting was replaced by large-scale operations.

Advancements in farming machinery, like improvements of the plow and tractor, contributed to more wheat being planted across the region than ever before. Farmers were planting more crops and making more money than they ever could have envisioned. With no environmental government oversight or regulation, they had no reason to stop planting.

As this wheat was planted across the region, the natural grasses that held the soil down were gradually torn out. The constant plowing of the soils also created topsoil that was of chalky consistency. With no natural vegetation to provide resistance to heavy winds and hold the chalky topsoil down, dust storms began to become more frequent throughout the region.

The wheat frenzy of the 1910s and '20s created startling amounts of wealth for many Plains wheat farmers, but it also laid the groundwork for a catastrophe that would rob the region's population of its livelihood for nearly a decade.

The Dust Storms

Mike Sevick's painting captures the horror of an incoming storm in the Dust Bowl. When the storms first began to spread across the region during the early 1930s, many thought they were apocalyptic, divine punishment from God. Anyone caught outside would be blinded and hit by the piercing waves of wind and dust.

Prominent folk singer Woody Guthrie, who was in the region during the storms, sums up the feeling of people experiencing the first dust storms in "The Great Dust Storm:"

From Oklahoma City to the Arizona line

Dakota and Nebraska to the lazy Rio Grande

It fell across our city like a curtain of black rolled down

We thought it was our judgment, we thought it was our doom

Drought In The Plains

James E. Allen was a prominent figure in the Social Realist American Art movement during the Great Depression era. Allen captures the plight of the Plains farmer in Prayer for Rain .

The lack of rainfall only made the increasingly more common dust storms throughout the decade worse, as the already depleted topsoil's consistency was made even drier and dustier. Rain became a daily prayer for those living on the plains, though the region would not see anything close to above-average annual rainfall until 1941.

The Devastation Of The Region

Mervin Jules was an American artist who sought to capture the plights of people across the country during the Great Depression. Jules' painting captures an abandoned plains farm, an all-too-common scene in the region during the 1930s.

Jules was known especially for his use of ironic satire and social commentary throughout his art. The tractor in the foreground of the painting shows the irony of the mechanization of wheat farming in the plains. Something that was supposed to bring so much wealth to its owners now laid covered in dust with no fields left to plow. The plains environment was pushed past its limits, and now had nothing left to give the people who depended on it.

The Dust Bowl Household

As the storms became more intense and frequent, dust became an inescapable part of living in a Dust Bowl household. Dust would find its way through every doorway, window, and crevice. Silverware, dishes, and tables would be covered, with many waking up after a storm to their pillow being the only thing in their house not caked with dust.

The dust became more than a continual routine of seeking shelter from incoming storms, it became an inescapable part of daily life.

Leaving The Dust Bowl

Unfortunately for these migrants, the rest of the country also found itself in the hardship of the Great Depression, and there was very little employment available. There was widespread discrimination and prejudice against the influx of Dust Bowlers, with many of them spending the rest of the decade in migrant camps with horrid conditions.

Those Who Stayed

In Clyfford Still captures the agony of those who stayed in the Plains. Throughout the 1930s communities began to unravel as people left in hope for a better future elsewhere. The combination of storms, the lack of crop yields, and the absence of economic opportunity created a hopeless, destitute situation for those living in the plains. Those that stayed felt their livelihoods were constantly being destroyed and withered down by all sides of the deteriorating conditions of the region.

While some communities became increasingly isolated, many communities became even more tight-knit. The bond between many of the Dust Bowlers who stayed in the region became stronger as community members increasingly relied on each other to survive and remain level-headed amongst all the hardship of the decade.

The New Deal

Alexandre Hogue is widely considered the quintessential American artist of the Dust Bowl. In Drouth Survivors Hogue sought to capture the devastation of the drought in the plains. This painting caused controversy throughout the American art community, as some people of the region were offended by this grim depiction of the plains.

Instead of only looking for short-term solutions to the Dust Bowl, President Roosevelt sought to fundamentally change the practices of the region. His administration not only lessened the severity of dust storms and provided aid to poverty-stricken communities; it created a breadth of research that would be used to prevent potential future Dust Bowls.

Great Plains Optimism

This painting by Hogue captures the unraveling of the American homestead. The man-made fences that once represented the American conquering of the untouched Great Plains wilderness, now appear withered away by the superior forces of nature. Both human footsteps and vehicle tracks are seen in the foreground, signifying an exodus from the farm.

While Hogue depicts a gloomy, apocalyptic scene, the sun shining on top of the clouds of dust perhaps symbolizes the hope the people of the plains clung to. It represents the optimism and positivity the plains people were able to find within themselves during a time when there was none to be found around them. Hogue's foreground of desolation and destruction is outshined by the background of a brighter future, a better life when the storms and drought would finally leave the plains.

The Dust Bowl And Its Legacy In American Art

The artists who captured the Dust Bowl region both during the 1930s and afterward captured a chapter of American history that is too often lost underneath the Great Depression and other events of the period. Instead of vilifying the people and farming practices of the region, the artists instead focused on showing the scope of the devastation that those living in the Dust Bowl faced in their everyday lives.

This American art made people realize the reality of what was happening in the plains. They helped shift the rhetoric of the Dust Bowl from blame to empathy, not just by showing devastated landscapes, but also by showing the extraordinary strength of the people who were somehow surviving amongst all the devastation.

The dust storms of the 1930s were not only the greatest American environmental catastrophe of the 20 th century, but they were also a testament to the extraordinary strength and resilience of ordinary American people. While the Dust Bowl catastrophe should undoubtedly be used as a warning against using the environment as a limitless resource in the pursuit of profit, the prolific work of the Dust Bowl artists also helps ensure that both the strength and suffering of those who lived in the region won't be lost to history.

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The dust storms that ravaged the Southern Great Plains of the United States during the 1930s created an environmental catastrophe that would affect the lives of thousands. Artists from around the country both during and after the storms traveled to the region to capture the devastation, making the Dust Bowl a significant chapter of 20th-century American art.

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Spooky Art: Witching Hour by Andrew Wyeth (Interpretation and Analysis)

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Wyeth is perhaps one of the greatest painters in American history. His work is iconic, forming an indelible image of American life and cultu

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I really love the charm behind these characters, I think it’s in the eyes. They look so lifelike, and the realism to the texture of the fur really takes them beyond the level of ‘cutesy’ animal character. I really like this dry-brush texture and would like to experiment with it within my owl character design.

I also love her use of an earthy colour palette, it adds to that sense of realism while it still being a stylised silly character, its a really fun contrast.

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One hundred years ago, Sigmund Freud wrote his paper on 'The Uncanny' (Das Unheimliche). His theory was rooted in everyday experiences and the aesthetics of popular culture, related to what is frightening, repulsive and distressing.

The paper tackles the horrific concepts of inanimate figures coming to life, severed limbs, ghosts, the image of the double figure (doppelgaengers) and lends itself to art, literature and cinema.

Essay In Two Parts

Freud's essay is written in two parts. The first part explores the etymology of the words 'heimlich' and 'unheimlich' (or 'homely' and 'unhomely', as it directly translates into English), their uses in the German dictionary and how these words are used in other languages. This must have been an unimaginable challenge for the translator!

In the second part, Freud begins to tackle people, things, self-expressions, experiences and situations that best represent the uncanny feeling.

Freud's paradigm example is the short story of E.T.A. Hoffmann's 'The Sandman', a tale that parents would tell their children to encourage them to go to sleep. The story goes that the child must be asleep for the Sandman to put sand in the child's eyes - if they are not asleep, the Sandman will take out their eyes. The protagonist is a boy named Nathaniel whose fate eventually does fall to the Sandman, losing not only his sight but his sanity, then his life. Freud asserts that the removal of the eyes alludes to an infantile fear of castration, but the castration complex is masked by a fear of losing a different sensitive organ: the eyes. This same theme is present in the tragedy of Oedipus.

Doppelgaenger

Freud also touches upon the notion of 'the double' or, as it is better known, the doppelgaenger, first explored in the psychoanalytic literature by Otto Rank in 1914. Freud writes that doppelgaengers can be found in:

Mirrors, shadows, guardian spirits, with the belief in the soul and the fear of death. The idea of the eternal soul allows us an energetic denial of the power of death. This was the first double of the body. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death. (p. 235)

"Uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression."Sigmund Freud

One only needs to think of Stanley Kubrick's cinematic horror adaptation of Stephen King's 'The Shining'. An eerie mansion, haunted by people known to have died, whose mutilated figures still appear in the grounds where they were murdered. These are doubles, other versions of themselves. We see them moving, but are they alive or dead? Many people experience the uncanny to its highest degree with death, dead bodies and the return of the dead. This fear stems from the fact that nobody can truly grasp their own mortality.

Freud writes:

We can understand why linguistic usage has extended das Heimliche into its opposite, das Unheimliche; for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression. (p. 241, SE XVII)

Through this process, we can see that the nature of the uncanny is entirely subjective, based upon our own experiences but haunts each of us to varying degrees.
By Jamie Ruers, Freud Museum Researcher
Buy The Uncanny by Sigmund Freud from the museum shop now.

Examples of the Uncanny

Examples of situations that can provoke an uncanny feeling include inanimate objects coming alive, thoughts appearing to have an effect in the real world, seeing your double (the doppelgänger effect), representations of death such as ghosts or spirits, and involuntary repetitions. The uncanny arises when childhood beliefs we have grown out of suddenly seem real. Freud called it 'the return of the repressed'.

The Uncanny in Art

Waxwork dolls, automata, doubles, ghosts, mirrors, the home and its secrets, madness and severed limbs are mentioned throughout The Uncanny, influencing painters and sculptors to explore these themes and blur the boundaries between animate and inanimate, human and non-human, life and death.

Podcast: Freud in Focus 2

Listen to the Second Series of our podcast 'Freud in Focus '. We discuss Freud's fascinating foray into the field of Aesthetics, 'The Uncanny'. The series is presented by Tom DeRose and Jamie Ruers.

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The Uncanny. Sigmund Freud wrote his paper on 'The Uncanny', a theory rooted in the everyday, related to what is frightening

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The term was first used by German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch in his essay On the Psychology of the Uncanny, 1906. Jentsch describes the uncanny - in German 'unheimlich' (unhomely) - as something new and unknown that can often be seen as negative at first.

Sigmund Freud's essay The Uncanny (1919) however repositioned the idea as the instance when something can be familiar and yet alien at the same time. He suggested that 'unheimlich' was specifically in opposition to 'heimlich', which can mean homely and familiar but also secret and concealed or private. 'Unheimlich' therefore was not just unknown, but also, he argued, bringing out something that was hidden or repressed. He called it 'that class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.'

Artists, including some associated with the surrealist movement drew on this description and made artworks that combined familiar things in unexpected ways to create uncanny feelings.

Now, the term 'uncanny valley' is also applied to artworks and animation or video games that that reproduce places and people so closely that they create a similar eerie feeling.

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Tate glossary definition for the uncanny: A Freudian concept which describes the strange and anxious feeling individuals might sometimes experience with familiar objects

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One of the 20th centuries most iconic and controversial painters I’ve noticed that various artists, movements or periods will sometimes become a part of my visual thinking the same way music gets s…

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I love the medium of paper-cut, it’s so child-like, like a child’s drawn world coming to life. I also like the tactile aspect of having physical moving parts to the animation even though they are still drawn, I don't feel confident with clay so this feels like the best of both worlds in terms of it being slightly 3D but still watercolour.

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Paper cut stop motion animation. Watercolour style. - Knikni Studio

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Paper cut stop motion animation. Watercolour style.

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Watercolour GIFs

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Agathe Bray-Bourret’s illustrations are “filled with clumsy nonchalant, soft characters”

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The illustrator’s playful and profoundly silly fantasy worlds are “barely subjected to perspective or gravity”.

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So, whether you are out bird watching or watching out for birds, keep in mind that bird may be out watching you!"
-Marcus Morton, U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory Service Release, 2021

Inrecentyears, the popular satirical conspiracy movement Birds Aren't Real has gained traction among left-leaning Millennials and Gen Z for their bold claim that birds do not exist and all birds that you see are actually government drones spying on you and other civilians. Birds Aren't Real pokes fun at the far-fetched, far-right paranoid conspiracies that amass cult-like public followings, such as QAnon or "the Illuminati."

Ironically, however, the group was founded in 2017, just a few years after drone designers, particularly military contractors, began to develop drones that resemble, but more importantly, mimic birds and their movements. While yes, birds are certainly real, Birds Aren't Real draws our attention to the ways that the United States government, or really any government structured upon settler colonialism and white supremacy, views the "non-human" world as not real-that is not as living, breathing creatures but as resources ripe for the taking, using, and destroying.

A 2022 report shared that, in the U.S. alone, 259 bird species are in decline. That is more than half of all species in the country. Compounding that, a 2019 study found that bird populations have decreased by almost 3 billion since 1970 in the U.S. and Canada. These concerning numbers are largely the result of habitat loss and human-induced environmental degradation.

Satirical conspiracies aside, there is an obvious link between this massive loss in biodiversity, droned birds, and state power: the U.S. military is one of the biggest environmental threats and destroyers of ecosystems in the world. Bird populations in Guam have greatly declined due to an invasive species, the brown tree snake that is suspected to have been introduced by the U.S. military. Due to the rapid loss of bird biodiversity, the forests of Guam have suffered from the lack of seed distribution typically carried out by native birds. Take another example, as of 2021, the U.S. Navy was developing drones with the sole purpose of destroying bird eggs near their airfields,

The appeal of the droned bird should be considered alongside settler colonial fantasies of dewilding-a process of control via mimicry by which life is refused its autonomy to benefit the settler colonial military state. Settler colonialism must be accounted for in discussions about the military's destructive impact on the environment. Militarized force enables the materialization of white settler colonial ideology that views all land, and by extension its Indigenous human and non-human inhabitants, as property. This ideology is what Indigenous feminist Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls "white possessive."

Whereas birds often embody the freedom of movement, the biology of birds is captured and copied for the benefit of surveillance and commercial gain. To the settler military state, dewilding birds via droned birds is critical to reproducing the white possessive ideology upon the more-than-human world, particularly at a time when actual birds are pushed into endangerment and extinction.

Drone Vision: Seeing Like a Settler

To understand what I call droned birds and their implications, we must understand that drone vision operates in two interconnected modalities: one of actual technical capacity and one of fantasy for the beholder. Drone vision is oft described as operating like a "bird's eye view," where the ground below is entirely visible yet distant. Drones are equipped with sensors that allow for different kinds of seeing and data collection beyond optical sight and a strictly horizontal aerial view, such as thermal imaging, picking up noises, and detecting various types of movements around the drone.

The technical capacity of drones is frequently overshadowed by the fantasy of drone vision-that is, the psychic experience it offers drone operators and consumers. Via the drone, users can inhabit a god-like perspective where they can see everything at once, but nobody can ever see them. This perspective "ultimately renders accountability invisible" by keeping drone operators hidden, without faces or voices, projecting power through the drone.

The fantasy of drone vision is deeply intertwined with the Euro-American colonial obsession with claiming power by occupying the aerial, an obsession most famously marked by the advent of military airfare and cartography. With its military origins, drone vision "conjugate[s] vision with annihilation," or at least its potential, as military perception and drone expert Antione Bousquet has put it.

Drone vision is a prime example of what Nicholas Mirzoeff calls " white sight." As a process of visualization and an ongoing event, white sight first eliminates or evacuates the innate characteristics and uniqueness of whatever it chooses-animals, land, peoples, etc. Next, it projects its own associations onto the missing space it created. Mirzoeff directly links the "event" of white sight to the colonizing acts of Europe and plantation slavery where land-and all its inhabitants-is erased of its Indigenous associations and turned into property alongside enslaved peoples.

A tangible example of the links between white sight, drone vision, and birds comes from Heba Amin's expansive work into the ways that Western aerial surveillance has generated paranoia and distrust around actual birds in the Middle East. Alongside Amin's project, Anthony Downey traced how inventions such as pigeon photography (the attaching of cameras to pigeons; turning pigeons into tools) can be considered precursors to aerial visualizing technologies such as drones.

Further, just a few years ago, marine biologists and fisheries in France and New Zealand came together to test a method to identify illegal fishing boats: albatrosses fitted with radar detection devices. One of the marine biologists involved in the design described these birds harnessed for policing as follows: "They're like drones, only intelligent." These "albatross cops," as one journalist called them, reflect the impulse of white sight that projects its desires and needs onto the human and more-than-human world for projects of securing and policing social order.

Droned bird models have become available directly to individual consumers. The French company BionicBird offers two biomimetic models: the MetaFly and the MetaBird. On their product pages, the BionicBird website attempts to captivate consumers' purchasing desire with taglines like "Take control of a flying creature!" and "Rediscover the sensation of flying!". Given the multifaceted, ambivalent moral stature of these droned birds, it is of little surprise that the rhetoric of taglines-"take control of flying creature"-captures an ethos similar to settler fantasies of control and extraction of the natural world for personal gain, including pleasure.

I propose that we consider droned birds as a method of dewilding wherein white sight blurs the distinction between drone and bird in the settler military imaginary. The result is the image of a bird that not only can be made docile and therefore controllable, but that is seen as inherently docile and controllable. This threat is evident in cases where droned birds are key to "managing" wildlife by driving birds out of their natural habitats for the benefit of commerce and producing neater boundaries between human and more-than-human.

The Dutch technology company "The Drone Bird" has pioneered the use of bird-inspired drone models to be used in wildlife management, including conservation and what they call bird monitoring in "airports, in the oil & gas industry, and in agriculture." The Droned Bird sells two hyper realistic-looking droned bird models directly to consumers: the Falcon and the Larus, each resembling the shape and flapping wing function of the birds of their respective namesake.

The company website boasts about how the newer AVES Larus model is "virtually undetectable and indistinguishable from the real thing, for both humans and animals." The website says similar things about the Falcon model, which, in their words, makes it "one of the most safe, humane, effective forms of bird control." The bird control in question typically includes using the bird drones to scare off other birds that are marked as pests or threats to human activities. There seems to be little question about whether such bird "control" should occur at all. In such uses, the droned bird is used to dewild bird habitats and therefore manufacture the spatialization of the imagined human and nonhuman binary.

The company sells these exact same models for the purposes of what they call "unobtrusive surveillance" in "border control, police, defense, and special forces"-exactly the kinds of uses the Bird Aren't Reals movement satirizes-as well as "special productions" like movies and television. The diversity of applications here is alarming because mundane and even entertaining sights of droned birds may distract from the settler ways of seeing-and acting-that they promote and enable.

Biomimicry and the Roboticization of Life

The droned birds these companies market are the product of biomimetic design, which emulates "nature's forms, processes, and ecosystems," per the RISD Nature Lab.

Biomimetics is a polarizing field. It brings together designers, roboticists, biologists, and more, all with the shared belief that the natural world may help us humans to solve pressing scientific issues and design a more nature-attuned world. But critics accuse the field of reducing non-humans to a set of parts, valued for their functionality and utility, and taking biomimetic designs out of the original context by which they were inspired. Despite its promises and many biomimetic designers' intentions to produce technologies that do not disturb the environment, the actual applications and impacts of biomimicry differ greatly. It is difficult to see how biomimicry, when paired with a technology with violent associations like the drone, is anything more than another instance of "weaponizing of nature," as Shoshana Magnet has said.

Even the notion of imitating life is suspect due to the ways that imitation and mimicry are key strategies for reproducing white supremacy and settler colonial dominance. It is unsurprising, then, that the field has come to play a significant role in military robotics and weapons development. The National Science Foundation has recently, though not for the first time, funded projects to study bird flight with the goal of developing drones more capable of moving in complex aerial environments. University engineering programs also frequently support military technology by examining the flight mechanisms of animals and insects that hold the most promise for military purposes. These uptakes of biomimetics indicate its appeal to the settler military state and its desired ends.

The difference between imitating and literally robotizing nature has been lost in some recent developments in the world of dronifying birds. A research team at the New Mexico Institute of Mining found a way to utilize parts of taxidermized birds. To avoid harming live birds, the team partners with local taxidermy artists to repurpose dead birds for their drone models, attaching feathers and other body parts to motors and mechanical wings.

What we see here is perhaps the most direct, and visually disturbing, example of the appropriation of the more-than-human world for explicitly human ends, which here, once again, is wildlife management. Since typical drones are rather loud and appear quite foreign to wildlife, quieter and more "natural" looking drones are thought to alleviate those points of tension, making them superior replacements to existing drone models used in wildlife surveillance and management. The research team also noted that these models, while primarily designed for wildlife monitoring, could one day be useful for military use.

Naturalizing Animal-Machines

Shoshana Magnet has aptly referred to biomimetic inventions as "animal-machines," which, in my reading, allows us to grasp how the skill, intelligence, and images of animals are captured by humans and transposed into machines. Or, in the case of taxidermied droned birds, literally captured and turned into machines. Animal-machines are tethered to the Western robotic imagination that sees machines as mere tools to aid human superiority and domination. I refer to drones designed to look like and mimic birds as "droned birds" as a way to emphasize "drone" as a technology and a process of inflicting passiveness: the roboticization and therefore dewilding of life.

Feminist political geographer Anna Jackman has observed that droned birds are part of a larger trend in drone design, especially in the defense industry, to " normalize " the drone by associating it with visual connotations of nature and the natural world. Jackman is right to ask what is naturalized when the drone is naturalized. Some bird-inspired drone models are so realistic looking that it might even be difficult for an unknowing person to tell bird from drone, raising the specter of surveillance, as well as apprehensions about the appropriation of ideas of natural and nature.

Along with the "naturalization"of drone surveillance, there are also questions about how public imaginaries of birds and the rest of the more-than-human world may change by producing animal-machines. We can glean indications of these changes by, as I've argued here, situating the droned birds within the longer histories of white sight and settler military colonialism.

The combination of drones' and biomimetics' focus on the utility of the more-than-human world paints a dark picture where birds are hierarchically classified based on use-value as well as the desires and needs of the military-industrial complex and the settler colonial state. In addition to their multifaceted applications from policing to leisure, droned birds imply a particularly concerning future for transparency in drone applications. Whereas typical drones already pose numerous threats to privacy, airspace regulation, and security, droned birds might be even more sinister. They obscure human intervention via mimicry and, in the process, pose serious questions about the ethics of human-animal relations and the future of settler colonialism.

Featured Image: A billboard sponsored by the Birds Aren't Real movement that reads, "Birds Aren't Real," in bold text. A cluster of birds is perched on top of the sign. Photo by Andrewj0131, 2019.
Dr. Amy Gaeta is a Research Associate at the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. She uses feminist theory and critical disability studies to analyze the emotional, aesthetic, and political dimensions of human-tech relations, especially those concerning consumer drones. Gaeta's research is deeply concerned with how semi-autonomous technologies impact the formation of subjecthood and ideas of humanness. Contact.

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It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's a droned bird! - Edge Effects

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Drones designed to mimic birds raise the alarm not just about unwanted surveillance but the appropriation of more-than-human life.

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Paper cut animation

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I really like the use of textures within this zine, there’s a softness to the coloured pencil texture. It feels nostalgic.

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Verk by Iris Erlings | Village. Leeds, UK

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Verk is an Icelandic word with triple meaning; the act of work, the creation from working and composition. These ten meticulously detailed drawings by Iris Erlings stem from digital collages from a plethora of natural and classical elements.

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The layout/ composition of each page is really inspiring, I like the full spread full bleed pages and also the almost random scattering of text and single images. It creates a nice variety.

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Ecofeminism and ecology are Sarah Salomé Delétain’s calls to publishing

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The French graphic designer’s eco-conscious editorial work revolves around local and rural practices, advocating for environmental initiatives and taking care of nature.

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Probably the most influential reference for this project, I really like the black and white limitation, the screen printed texture to the photographs and the composition is so well considered it looks incredibly professional. Seeing this zine really made me think about how to organise my images and also that less is more.

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HISTORYValley Gardens was developed as an attractive walk for visitors to the Spa town of Harrogate, part of their health regime between taking the waters, and as a means of access to the mineral springs of Bogs Field. The waterside walk with flowers and trees became a place for promenading, socialising and taking exercise.HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHSPhotographs of the gardens in the early 20th century testify to their enormous popularity with crowds around the tea room, boating lake and bandstand. Please visit our Historical Image Galleries to view these and more photographs.You can read the Byelaws from 1875 here.

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Valley Garden entrance with a view of the Royal Pump Room 1931

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On the last Sunday of November, among the ruins of the Phra Prang Sam Yot temple in Lopburi, Thailand, a bountiful banquet awaits the guests of honor, none of whom are human. This feast is held in celebration of Lopburi's thousands of macaques, thought to bring good luck to the area and its people.

The Monkey Buffet Festival kicks off with an opening ceremony that includes performances by dancers in monkey costumes. When the monkeys arrive, hosts remove sheets from the banquet tables, revealing decorative spreads of vibrantly hued fruits and vegetables. The macaques jump across tables and climb towering pyramids of watermelon, durian, lettuce, pineapple, and more, indulging in the nearly two tons of offerings.

Respect for monkeys traces back at least 2,000 years to the epic tale of Rama, a divine prince, and his struggle to rescue his wife, Sita, from the clutches of a demon lord. According to the tale, the monkey king Hanuman and his army helped rescue Sita. Since that time, monkeys have been appreciated as a sign of good luck and prosperity. Lopburi's annual buffet is one way people mark their appreciation.

While tourists and townspeople may want to rub monkey elbows directly at the table, vendors and food stalls provide sustenance for human attendees.

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The Festival That Honors Monkeys With an Epic Banquet

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On the last Sunday of November, among the ruins of the Phra Prang Sam Yot temple in Lopburi, Thailand, a bountiful banquet awaits the guests of honor, none of whom are human. This feast is held in celebration of Lopburi's thousands of macaques, thought to bring good luck to the area and its people.

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Amongst the important food festivals around the world, the Monkey Buffet Festival from Lopburi, Thailand, is one of the most popular. The festival is a significant example of human-animal relationships.

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A bronze figure from 13th century Thailand “Lopburi style” which is where and when the festival temple site originated.

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A bronze figure of Uma , THAILAND, LOPBURI STYLE, 13TH CENTURY | Christie’s

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In researching what artistic imagery there was in 13th century Thailand it seems to mostly revolve around Buddhism with many bronze sculptures depicting either the head or full body of The Buddha.

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Seated Buddha in “Marajivaya” | The Walters Art Museum

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Bronze statue of monkey god Hanuman

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Antique Thai Style Bronze Hindu God Hanuman Statue - Avatar of Shiva - 18cm/7

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Antique Thai Style Bronze Hindu God Hanuman Statue - Avatar of Shiva - 18cm/7″ Tall Measures - (Height) 18cm/7″ An antique Thai Style bronze Hanuman statue. Beautiful design and patina. Hanuman is a god and an ardent devotee of the god Rama and an avatar of the god Shiva. The monkey god, is a beloved figure in Hindu my

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The Hanuman is a very famous image in Thailand that symbolises strength and victory. He is the son of the wind god and one of the leading characters in the Thai Ramakian story which is one of the most famous pieces of Thai literature and plays an integral role in Thai culture. Amulets and tattoos of Hanuman are very popular as he is renowned for his devotion, strength, and victory. The symbol of Hanuman illustrates one’s internal struggle to overcome weakness and emotion whilst externally battli

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I am sure you know about the "Dinosaur" of Ta Prohm, the apparent ancient carving of a Stegosaurus by people who would have never known that such existed. Or did they? At the end of this article I'll explain exactly where to find it and what you need to know about the Ta Prohm Dinosaur, but first, let's dive in a take a broader look at these mysterious motif carvings because there are many more.

Across most, but not all, Angkorian era temples of the Khmer Empire you'll find an array of these hidden motifs that are truly fascinating. Sometimes called roundels or medallions, they are unlike the prominent and well-researched carvings that are seen on pediments and lintels and could actually reflect the daily life of the time rather than Hindu/Buddhist narratives and the lives of the gods.

These motifs are often hidden within the generic foliated scroll used vertically on pilasters and walls, horizontally along eaves, sometimes horizontally around the basement supporting the temple and terraces. In some places, the motifs are quite prevalent such as in the pilasters near some doorways, in other places they appear randomly within generic floral patterns. Let's look at a couple of examples that are quite prominent

Are they depicting religious narratives, the life of the elite, or the life of general folk, or are they simply generic? There are lots of animals that would likely be found at that time, activities that are well known to the era such as Khmer boxing and archery, along with others. Let's take a look at a selection of the different motifs from a range of temples

That's just a selection, there are many more variants to be found and sadly many have also been lost to time and erosion too.

A good place to start is to ask whether these motifs and roundels are also found on Indian temples? The answer is yes. While the Khmer style of foliage scroll seems quite unique it was certainly a concept that came along with the knowledge transfer from India at that time. This style of motif can be found in India at Mukteshwara Temple, Chennakeshava temple, Belur Chennakeshava Temple, quite elaborately at Hoysaleshwara Temple, and likely many more. They are also found on temples in the old city of Bagan, Myanmar, and no doubt across other temples of Indian influence.

It's difficult to know whether they are symbolic of Khmer life at the time, generic heroic figures, or even individual creativity by the stone craftsmen of the time. Some Indian notes also mention these architectural elements having deeper symbolism in the context of the human spirit, life, and the universe and part of the symbolic need for beauty and ornateness as a means to repel evil. Other Indian notes mention them briefly as representing the culture of the community that the temple supports. So, there is probably more to know by taking a deep dive down the rabbit hole into ancient Indian texts although it doesn't mean that the Khmer of the time applied them in the same way. It's also worth noting that some of the characters are seen at multiple temples, so, at least some were generic figures.

Which temples in Angkor feature these motifs? They can be found at most Angkor era temples (9th - 14th century) in particular the sandstone temples from the 12th-13th century, regardless of the denomination as Hindu or Buddhist. The floral decoration that commonly surrounds these motifs appears on faux pilasters of early Angkor-era brick temples such as Thma Dap atop Kulen mountain and in the stucco of Preah Ko, to name two, although motifs within that decoration did not appear until much later. Some examples of sites with motifs are Angkor Wat (around the base of the third level and large versions on higher pediments on the western gopura), Angkor Thom (at several sites generally around the base), and they are very prominent at Preah Khan, Banteay Kdei, Chau Say Tevoda (features some of the most exquisite), and Ta Prohm.

Ta Prohm is perhaps where they feature more prominently seen on pilasters and walls with many different characters and animals, and also with much larger versions. Some of the roundels here had the motif removed which is believed to have taken place post the religious change from Buddhism back to Hinduism.

And then there's the dinosaur of Ta Prohm. To find it from the western entrance, head through the first gopura, follow the trail, cross the moat and through another gopura, keep walking straight and through the next gopura, then, turn right and immediately turn around and head into the corner of the wall and gopura. Here it is on a google map.

Is it really a Stegosaurus that existed around 150 million years earlier or just a local Hog Badger with a leaf background (that's commonly seen in these motifs and on those that are just above it)? If not the latter then we should start looking for the time portal!
PS: Shout on when you find Stay Puft Marshmallow Man at Angkor Wat!

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The Mysterious Motifs of the Angkor Era | Hello Angkor

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I am sure you know about the "Dinosaur" of Ta Prohm, the apparent ancient carving of a Stegosaurus by people who would have never known that such existed. Or did they?

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I found these rock carved textures really inspiring, I felt they’d make a good print texture.

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I really like the red brick archway, could make a nice badge border 