Animal Influence I - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

I am inviting you to imagine the world through the
eyes of another species: your cat; or a crow; or why
not a more exotic species - maybe a mantis
shrimp? For some, a clear picture might appear,
depending on your belief systems, either reflecting
your pre-conceived notions about what the
selected species sees, or the actual experience of
the animal. Some might cringe at the very thought:
“It is not possible!” Is it presumptuous of us to believe
that we can? Is it “anthropomorphizing?” Or is it
rather arrogant to believe that we are so utterly
different?
I have been teaching a class I call
“Interspecies Collaboration”[1] at University of
California Santa Barbara (UCSB) for a few years. In
the class students are asked to work collaboratively
with individuals of other species on art projects.
While I encourage students to explore and devise
non-explicit forms of collaboration that offer ways of
working together with others without understanding
them or knowing their intention, it has become
obvious that some degree of insight into the
fundamental sensory experiences of our
collaborators are helpful. Students repeatedly ask
how this or that animal sees. I started to look at the
animals around me, wondering the same thing.
After googling things such as “animal vision
simulator” for a couple of hours I realized that there
was no such thing (at least accessible for
laypeople). I decided to take what I believed to be
77
WITH THE EYES OF
ANOTHER
Lisa Jevbratt discusses the research for and the functionality and implications of Zoomorph – a distributed software
art project currently in development. Zoomorph consists of image and video filters generating simulations of how a
large selection of non-human animals see, helping us experience the world with the eyes of another species. The full
title of this paper is: With the Eyes of Another: Zoomorph—Exploring (the Perception of) Visual Perception of Non-
Human Animals.
Text by Lisa Jevbratt
readily available scientific data and write software
that would simulate some species’ vision over the
weekend. Of course, as soon as I thought about the
problem a little longer, I realized that it is a much
more extensive task, one that I still, several years
later, am deeply immersed in.
I started to research what is known and what
can be known about animal vision from a scientific
perspective, and talking to some of the leading
scientists in the field of animal vision, I later added a
para-scientific[2] perspective as well. These two
paradigms represent widely diverse views on the
possibility of understanding the visual perception (as
well as consciousness) of other species, and the
investigation of these differences is highlighting
issues of anthropomorphism, anthropodenial, and
anthropocentrism. The goal with the project, called
Zoomorph,[3] is to produce software filters that
generate simulations of how a large selection of
non-human animals sees. The filtering algorithms
change an image’s hue, sharpness, brightness,
contrast and other aspects, to provide an
estimation of what a selected species sees. The
algorithms are currently being developed and will
eventually be available as Photoshop plugins, an
online Flickr based interface, and as an
augmented reality iPhone/iPad app. The
iPhone/iPad app is the furthest developed at this
point, a very limited, version of it, Zoomorph Alpha
Release, is available as an app.