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

Lisa Jevbratt
Photoshop Interface Mockup, 2008 Lisa Jevbratt
to be created and it will allow for people to make
their own creative projects involving animal vision
simulation. By selecting a species from a pull down
menu in the filter section the current image is
transformed into a simulation of what the selected
species see. Photoshop was chosen because it is
widely used and it is where the concept of image
filters was first made popular. Inserting a menu of
animal names and the corresponding simulations in
its list of filters is intended to function as a
“parasitic”[4] art work, stopping people in their
tracks, asking them to consider the experiences of
non-human animals. However, people will have to
consciously download and install the filters, so the
parasitic effect is somewhat lost, except in multiuser
environments, such as a school where a
system admin might have installed the filters. The
Flickr based online interface is somewhat more
conducive to the parasitic effect. A user can
stumble upon the project in the Flickr “app garden”
while looking for something else, and it is free and
easily accessible. The project hopes to encourage
people to not only use the filters on existing images,
but to take images with the filters in mind,
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asking them to imagine themselves as non-human
animals in the various situations and environments
they find themselves in during the course of their
day.
The iPhone/iPad app filters the camera feed
in real-time, providing a more direct experience of
the animal’s vision, while also providing image and
video capturing. The iPhone/iPad app is truly
ubiquitous; their users carry their devise most of the
time. Experiencing the filters in everyday situations,
at work, in a café, in the library, on the subway, can
help the users imagine the presence of a nonhuman
animal in that location, hinting at a
breakdown of the boundaries between
culture/nature, tame/wild, us/other. Several different
ways of listing the species will be provided:
Alphabetical, Taxonomical, Geographical (with a
“Show Species Near Me” button) and Favorites.[5]
The pull down menus in Photoshop and the Flickr
interface, and the app listings are important in
themselves. While an enormous effort is going into
developing the simulation algorithms, the mere
invitation to imagine the world from the point of
view of another species, embodied in the various