Submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society is a creepy short trailer called Hominid. Created from photo composites by Brian Andrews, we see human skeleton frogs, bugs, and spiders battle it out in the natural world.
From Brian Andrew’s artist statement:
Frequently, images of animals lurk within my artwork. These animals live in an ontological quagmire. When we look at them we can see both the unknown of the wild and the potential for humanity. In the current discourses of art, the animal is seen as a representation – a symbol of our cultural projections and anthropomorphisms surrounding our ideas of nature. As Steve Baker writes, “It is the animal … which more than anything else prompts a rethinking of what it is to be a human ‘subject’, and which points to the shortcomings of earlier philosophical accounts of the human.”
Both Andrew’s statement and the video remind me of Thomas Nagel’s essay “What is it like to be a bat?” and about what it means to truly inhabit another mind or another species. By seeing the human form in these animals, it creates an inherent connection between the viewer and the character. Which makes the ending, I feel, all the more horrific.