Two Species Art

- Posted: 08.Jul.2007.




At the few pages Google Books has from Zoontologies, a collection of philosophical essays in that dreaded French style, I find this image of the French Artist Tessarolo painting together with the chimp Kunda. It is included as part of a Derida essay (talking about nonsense) who qoutes beforementioned Thierry Lenain:

During the Sessions in which they both painted, he left the initiative to Kunda and then completed her clusters of lines by the addition of figurative elements... Tessarolo says that at times, Kunda would accept his additions with enthusiasm, at other she would rub them out and wait for him to draw something else. Once the pictures were finished they were signed by both artists, the painting putting his name on one side and Kunda a handprint on the other.

I am looking for more on this.

The Real Story on Chimpanzees and Sign Language.

- Posted: 04.Sep.2007.




Much needed real information on language ability in primates is contained in 'Chimpanzees’ Use of Sign Language' (Fouts and Fouts). It shows that signing language is passed from adult to infant chimp without human intervention, that it is used for more than to beg for food, that it is used to 'talk' about things not present, that it is used in private, that it is used between the chimps themselves. It is even used by chimps to 'rhyme' (the origin of literature?):

Imagination is another of those special mental behaviours that some people have considered unique to the human species. Some of our species' more impressive accomplishments have been attributed to imagination. For example, we might never have gone to the moon had we not imagined that it could be done. In the private signing study, imagination was defined as an utterance that is 'sung' or is word play, or represents a transformation of real objects or events, whether present or not: we found that 5 per cent of the utterances were imaginary. For example, rhythmic movements of signs or form alliteration of signs would be considered comparable to vocal singing. These were such events as Loulis playing with a block of wood by placing it on his head and then referring to it as a hat. Another instance was when Moja produced an alliteration by 'rhyming' signs that all used the same initial hand configuration.

Found in the Animal Rights Library a very impressive collection of serious texts about primate rights. The Picture is a hypothetical computer-generated image of what an intermediate between a human and a chimpanzee face might look like. (After Nancy Burston and David Kramlich, from C. A. Pickover, Computers and the Imagination: Visual Adventures Beyond the Edge

The First Chimpanzee outperforms the Third Chimpanzee!

- Posted: 06.Dec.2007.




Japanese primatology is the best in the world and their less strict reductionism is believed to be key. That is to say: a western scientist is prohibited by method to symphatize with its subject while the Japanese scientist has no such qualms. At least that is what I understand of it. The same Kyoto lab that made headlines with its research that showed chimpanzee's to have better short term memory than university students, also hosts animal art. A dearly loved topic. Explore it Crystalpunks.







In an interview with Wired head scientist Tetsuro Matsuzawa shared his manifesto:

I simply say the fact:

Young chimpanzes are better than adult humans in a memory task.

The fact clearly tells that the human-animal dichotomy is wrong.

Human is a member of animal kingdom.

Even more, the dichotomy of human vs nature may be wrong.

Human is a part of nature.

We are connected to all the other creatures.

Please let people know the above site. See the 153 MB video clips. This is truth.

Reverse Feral Ape Gua

- Posted: 18.Jan.2008.




Chimp Gua was temporarily raised in a human home, paired with a human baby Donald. The reason for this experiment is fascinating:

The idea for the study emerged in 1927 when Kellogg was still a graduate student at Columbia University. Kellogg and Kellogg give us that date for the idea but not its source. However, our guess is that it was stimulated by an article on the "wolf children" of India which was published that year in the American Journal of Psychology. Similar to Itard's "wild boy of Aveyron," the wolf children were two young girls found in a cave inhabited by wolves. These children behaved as though they were wolves, eating and drinking like those animals and making no use of their hands except to crawl around on all fours, which was their method of locomotion. Eventually the girls learned to walk upright, although they could never run. One acquired speech, at least a vocabulary of approximately 100 words, but the other continued only to make grunting noises. Howling noises at night were never extinguished, nor were their human teachers able to break them of the rather distasteful habit of "pouncing upon and devouring small birds and mammals". Both girls died at an early age. Like other feral children, the wolf children were judged to be sub-normal in intelligence and it was assumed that their intellectual deficits prevented them from being able to adapt to their new surroundings. This interpretation was common in explaining the problems of adjustment in feral children and was, in fact, the explanation offered by Squires. Kellogg disagreed with that interpretation, and in two replies published in the American Journal of Psychology, he argued that the wolf children, and others like them, were probably born of normal intelligence. Indeed, it was unlikely that they would otherwise have been capable of survival. From his environmentalistic perspective he contended that these children learned to be wild animals because that was exactly what their environment demanded of them. He believed in the strong impact of early experience and the existence of critical periods in development, and he maintained that the problem with civilizing feral children was the difficulty of overturning the habits learned early in life.

Sarah Talks like Oscar Wilde

- Posted: 18.Jan.2008.




Sarah (chimpanzee, 1962, 130 words) was trained using Premack plastic tokens varied in shape, size, texture, and colour, representing words. Sentences were formed by placing the tokens in a vertical line (an orientation which Sarah favoured). The earliest words named "various interesting fruits, so that Sarah ... could both solve her problem and eat it". Sarah exhibited displacement, the ability to think of something (in the following case, chocolate) when it is not immediately present. Presented with the sentence "Brown color of chocolate" without any chocolate present, and later presented with "Take brown," Sarah took a brown object. When a trainer put a question on Sarah's board and walked away, Sarah showed little interest in answering it--"in somewhat the way a conversation falters when one person ceases to pay attention to the other". Sentences include "sarah jam bread take" and "No Sarah honey cracker take".

I Want to Hold

- Posted: 18.Apr.2008.


(Click for full size)

Probably Nim in PrimatePoetic action.

A link to the Best Overview of Language use in primates

- Posted: 01.Jun.2007.




Machiavellian Monkeys & Shakespearean Apes: The Question of Primate Language by Alex Hawes and also this

Although getting Koko to use her knowledge of sign-language has proven difficult at times, her stubborness has also provided insight into her grasp of Ameslan. Once when Patterson was drilling Koko on anatomical terminology, the gorilla signed, "Think eye ear eye nose boring." One undoubtedly thinks of human schoolchildren when reading that statement.

Like Washoe, Koko has created new terms for unnamed objects: "elephant baby" for a Pinnochio doll; "bottle match" for a cigarette lighter; and "eye hat" for a mask, to name a few. Koko has displayed her comprehension of the representative nature of words additionally through "overgeneralizations"--a term for when one learned sign takes on new meanings. Patterson notes that, having learned "straw," Koko applied this sign as a name for plastic tubes, hoses, and even cigarettes. "Tree" similarly came to signify asparagus and scallions.

Responding to spoken English as well as Ameslan, Koko also can understand the relationship between spoken and signed words. This link is most evident in her interest in rhyme. Patterson reports that Koko can use Ameslan signs to "rhyme" words that would rhyme if spoken aloud in English. She once signed "flower stink fruit pink," and when Patterson remarked about her rhyme, Koko continued, "Love meat sweet." Koko's a poet, and apparently she knows it.

Animal Play and Use of Symbols

- Posted: 30.May.2007.




Mental Note from the new office.

Kokomo in Action

- Posted: 24.May.2007.


If Jackson Pollock was a chimp.

Bill enjoys Himself

- Posted: 24.May.2007.




Bill a 59-year-old Eureka Sequoia Park Zoo chimpanzee has been actively creating art since the early 1990s. has been actively creating art since the early 1990s.

Art is one of the enrichments offered to Bill.

“We just found that Bill has enjoyed having the canvas and the paint … and he really likes the feel of the brushes,” Roletto said. “Sometimes he prefers to paint his (canvas), sometimes his hands.”

The zoo supplies Bill with nontoxic tempura paints and nontoxic pens.

“He likes to draw as well,” Roletto said.

She said that with enrichments it’s important not to provide them too often, so they stay fresh and engaging.

Roletto said Bill favors the color blue.

“He will have more of it spread out on the canvas than the other colors,” she said.

On a recent Wednesday, Bill did something he generally does not like to do as he has become older. After accepting the canvas and brushes from Roletto, he stayed outside to paint.

He usually takes his materials and goes into his “night house.”

After she applied some colors to the first canvas and handed it to him, along with brushes, Bill put it aside momentarily to eat a banana and some lettuce. Then he pulled the canvas underneath his ladder and began to paint. His brush strokes were tentative at first and then they became quicker and more rhythmic.

“On the whole, animals want to be curious and want to explore and don’t want to sit and do nothing all day,” Roletto said. “We want to come up with as many things … to stimulate his mind and his body.”

Congo, a friend of Picasso

- Posted: 24.May.2007.




Dubbed the Cezanne of the ape world, Congo caused a stir among artists at the time, with reactions ranging from scorn to scepticism. Picasso is thought to have framed one of Congo's works on his studio wall after receiving it as a gift.

Does the Chimp's Doodle Look Like Entoptics?

- Posted: 23.May.2007.




In Thomas Wynn's paper 'Archaeology and cognitive evolution' we find the following:

Work with ape art has been of two kinds. In the first, researchers present an ape with appropriate media (finger paints, brushes and paint, etc.) and encourage it to create. In the second, researchers control the productions by supplying paper with pre-dawn patterns. The former is the more "archaeological", in that researchers have not tried to coax particular pattern productions. Perhaps not surprisingly, these spontaneous productions are patterned primarily by motor patterns. Fan shapes are common, as are zig-zags produced by back and forth arm motion.

Desmond Morris(Morris 1962), the most well-known researcher in ape art, thought that these productions may demonstrate a sense of balance, and tried to coax it out with a series of experiments using sheets with stimulus figures already printed on, following the earlier lead of Schiller(Schiller 1951). Morris’s work led to a number of subsequent experiments by others using similar techniques. The results have been enigmatic at best. Most chimpanzees presented with a figure that is offset from the center of the paper will mark on the opposite side, or on the figure itself . Morris suggested, cautiously, that this confirmed a notion of balance. Later Smith(Smith 1973) and Boysen(Boysen, Berntson et al. 1987) confirmed these results, but argued that the pattern resulted from the chimpanzee’s placing marks toward the center of the vacant space; balance was an accident.

It is hard to know what to make of this evidence. First, even with the few experimental subjects, there was a lot of individual variability. Indeed, each chimpanzee had an idiosyncratic approach to both the controlled and uncontrolled drawing. Second, most repetitive patterns resulted from repetitive motor actions. Nevertheless, the individuals did appear to place their marks non-randomly, and did attend to features of the visual field. Other, non-graphic, experiments have indicated that chimpanzees can be taught to select the central element of a linear array(Rohles and Devine 1967), so chimpanzees can clearly perceive patterns in which balance is a component. But they do not appear able to produce symmetrical patterns.

Chimp outsells Warhol

- Posted: 23.May.2007.




Collectors go bananas.