As knowledge becomes a commodity, the living world is threatened by producing these means of storing, accessing, and spreading information. It is paradoxical that now, better than any time before, we are able to catalog the world and make normative claims about how best to take care of it.
This will be a multi-component new media project. It will consist of piles of animal bones replicated from originals as well as fossils, modern day species, and extinct. The prop bone devices will use RFID (small radio transmitters) to communicate with the rest of the exhibit. The viewer will be able to pick up one or more bones and bring it to a pedestal. From this pedestal a holographic display will emerge, showing different creatures – in both skeleton and in flesh – from which this bone may have come. Not only that, it will show different possibilities at once. On the horizontal axis, will be co-arisen and related species. On the vertical, difference species found over time to show differential stages of evolution both confirmed and hypothetical. A horn, for example, would display a Narwhal and a Unicorn; a set of antlers could display a Moose or a Kirin (Chinese Unicorn). The display of the diversity and similarity of species living, extinct, and imaginary, will serve as its own curator.
The take-away message is that knowledge can keep animals, whether they be living, extinct, or mythological from dying out, and show us that animals are more similar than different from each other. Technology’s role in this is crucial, as it decentralizes the task of memory and lets replication be easy. A comparison to the role of the scribe and monk in classical and medieval eras is sufficient to show this point. In the past, replication of knowledge on a physical medium such as tablets or paper, endangered those very sources of knowledge as well as provided a de facto form of constraint and even censorship. When books are expensive and time consuming to produce, it becomes economically sound to ban books. When knowledge becomes a commodity, censorship becomes impossible. Censorship can be broadened to include tragedies such as the destruction of the Library of Alexandria; many great works of the zenith of Greek civilization became instantly unknowable to the cultural heirs to this society.
If animals live and die, as we do, and go extinct, as our projects do, anything possible to catalog what we know and share it is a duty. The use of technology and industry to keep shared conversations alive over generations, between cultures and species, is an unassailable and noble goal – a new bestiary.
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