Marketing Animals - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

Morrisjones & Company
Unique Partnership, 2006 Morrisjones & Company
original. Digital manipulation ensures
improvement and flawlessness.
The representation of this newly
constructed image, can also be interpreted as
providing a symptomatic example of “image
anxiety” (Mitchel 2005:12) pointing to an
uncertainty regarding the future – including the
possible extinction of species. Here, the potency
of the cloned image becomes a central concern
, because it exemplifies the uncertainty of the
future while fulfilling the dream of creating living
forms which lead to living images - a viable
simulacrum of a living organism (Mitchel 2005:12-
13).
In conclusion, the representation of the
animal is central to the history of animals –
“because that history is fully shaped by human
documents” (Fudge 2004).The repercussions of
this plethora of documentation, which includes
design, are central also to ethical debate
focusing on the question of the animal. As
Mitchell states (2005:178-179):
59
natural organisms are not just
entities in themselves but a system
of natural signs , living images, a
natural language of zoographia
or ‘animal writing’ that, from
ancient bestiaries to DNA and the
new book of Life, continually
reintroduces religion – and
animation - into things and their
images.”
Current Posthumanist discourse does indeed
challenge the tenets of 500 years of Humanist
thinking. Instead of adopting a position supportive
of an idea that can be used to attempt to
illustrate the evolutionary development of the
animal as sign in design, I - by contrast - prefer
the notion of a rhizomatous change as
expounded by Deleuze and Guattari (2004:12) -
stemming from a cultural matrix which embraces
diversity, collaboration and multivocality in order
to represent that which can never be adequately
represented.