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The Lion in the Ass’s Skin by Homay King

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1.The mobilization and mechanization of the image-crafting gaze began well before the advent of photography, with the invention of the easel. A wooden sawhorse that carried the artist’s canvas, tools, and materials, and that allowed him to paint with an upright perspective, the easel enabled painting en plein air, thereby rendering mobile something that had previously been confined to the walls of the cathedral or studio. The easel revolutionized image-production in several ways: pictures became smaller, they could be made on location, and they became individually marketable. The world changed, too, as a result: it seemed to give itself over to depiction in a new way. The word easel first appears in English in 1634. The word derives from the Dutch ezel (and the German: Esel), meaning ass or donkey. The easel is a mechanical beast of burden: a wooden mule. The easel is an example a skeuomorph, an object deriving its design characteristics from a previously existing artifact. More precisely, it is a zoomorph, an object designed to resemble an animal: here, the donkey, in both form (it has legs and a body) and function (it can be laden with goods). Its portability serves as a direct reminder of the link between animals and animation, which derive etymologically from anima, the Latin word for the soul, which in turn derives from the Greek anemos, meaning

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air, or wind, including the wind in the body, or breath. From air and soul to asses, easels, and the pictures they make possible.

2.The earliest known use of the word “mouse” in reference to a computer pointing device occurred in 1965, in a paper by a computer engineer working in Menlo Park, California, near San Francisco. Two years later, the Logo computer programming language debuted, and it was operated through the manipulation of a small, triangular icon called a “turtle.” A 1977 computer model from Commodore went by the acronym PET (for Personal Electronic Transactor). Apple Computer’s Macintosh operating system has gone through numerous names, with each iteration of the software. The classic Mac OS, introduced in 1984, was simply referred to as “the System.” Subsequent versions of the System bore the same name and were numbered in ordinal fashion, until the birth of OS X, when Apple began to name its software after large wild cats: Cheetah, Tiger, Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion. The core component of this software is still called “Darwin.” Apple broke from the large cat pattern in 2013 with the introduction of Mavericks, which was named for a popular big-wave surfing spot near Northern California’s Half Moon Bay. Version 10.10 of the Macintosh

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operating system, released in June, 2014, is called Yosemite. Located in the California Sierra Nevada Mountains, Yosemite National Park is a wilderness preserve that was inhabited for nearly three thousand years by the Ahwahneechee. The park is famous for its stunning views, rare glacier geology, tall sequoia trees, and richly diverse vegetation.

From small, domestic computer mice and turtles to the Orwellian System of 1984; from the System, to wild cats prowling the savannah. After the safari, we arrive finally in nature itself.

3.Once, tall trees were used as signal towers or flagpoles by which to send messages. Chopped down, they served as firewood for fuel. Later, wooden poles and metal towers were erected, designed to carry electrical power lines or telephone wires across great distances. These proudly proclaimed their man-made artifice. Today, ungainly cell phone antenna towers are built to mimic the form of sparsely foliaged trees, in a

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halfhearted attempt to camouflage them into the natural landscape. This landscape, though, barely exists anymore, especially in places with strong cellular signals. Tree- shaped cell phone towers are thus an accidental memorial to the lost forests that their own industries helped to destroy. New technologies often begin by miming their analogs in nature: skeuomophically, zoomorphically, botanicamorphically. As they continue to develop, they may begin to disavow their relationship to the natural world, shedding the embarrassing iconic resemblance. In a semi-romantic gesture, they come full circle when they model (or name) themselves once more after their real-life counterparts, at times replacing or memorializing them just at the point when their passing seem imminent. This cycle is not to be confused with progressive or teleological evolution: that would misread Darwin. The new regimes of vision and modes of interaction that come with changing technologies are intrinsically neither better nor worse, just different. The tree-shaped cell phone tower is not better or worse than a telephone pole, just, by turns, revelatory and obfuscatory of the relationship between nature and culture in different ways.

4.In Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), the replicant Rachel possesses an artificial

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pet owl. She describes this owl as “very expensive.” In the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, upon which the film is based, the situation is reversed: real animals are rare, whereas the imitation kind are cheaply and easily gotten.

5.Pigeons, dogs, horses, and other animals have historically been conscripted into military service, and were sometimes awarded prizes for their work. At the Military History Museum, in Dresden, there is a life-size diorama display of military animals, from elephants to rodents, explaining the roles they have served in famous campaigns. The ark is here reimagined as warship. But in the military today, real animals—carrier pigeons, doves with cameras strapped to their bodies, trained tracking dolphins—are gradually being replaced by artificial ones. Swarming robotic bumblebees, artificial hummingbirds with video cameras, and four-legged

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robotic transport machines are all well into prototyping stages. These inventions lengthen and extend the term “bird’s eye view,” which in cinema refers to a shot taken from an angle far above the object, looking down. The new military droids mimic not only the bird’s eye, but the whole bird, including its perspective, shape, and style of motion.

6.Walt Disney’s Pinocchio (1940) is a treasure chest of ideas about the relationship between the artificial and the real. Ostensibly a bildungsroman about the journey from the former to the latter, it frequently undercuts the distinction between the two, celebrating the world of mechanical imitations. The most obvious way in which it celebrates this world is its form as animated cartoon rather than live-action film. It is an animation about animation, essentially miming its own content through its form. Pinocchio was also the first film to employ electronic music. A Novachord, an early form of polyphonic synthesizer or electric organ that made its début at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, was used to create the sound of the Blue Fairy. And Pinocchio himself is hardly the film’s only spirited machine: Geppetto’s workshop is a carnivalesque party whose guests are raucous automata. Cuckoo clocks, behaving like proto-gifs, Vines, or video loops, sound the hour with scenes

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of attempted slapstick brutality—a man shooting a cork at a bird, a woman beating a child, a man attempting to decapitate a turkey with an axe. In every case, though, the target evades defeat and the struggle commences over again.

Pinocchio contains three examples of subjective point-of-view shots: shots in which the image approximates a character’s perspective not only with regard to the angle of vision, but in its sensory and affective coloring. The first of these occurs early in the film, when Jiminy Cricket bounds toward Geppetto’s workshop seeking shelter; here, the camera bounces up and down, mimicking the rising and falling sensation of jumping. The second of these is from the point of view of Cleo, Geppetto’s goldfish. When she first glimpses the marionette boy, he appears as though in a fish-eye lens, distorted by the water and curved glass bowl. The third

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occurs after Pinocchio has been lured to Pleasure Island, an amusement park where bad boys are turned into donkeys, put in crates, and sold into slavery. In a billiards hall, Pinocchio becomes ill from drinking beer and smoking a cigar; the corresponding point of view shot shows the eight ball wavering murkily in and out of focus. In classical cinema, subjective point-of-view shots are normally allocated to specific people. Their function is to humanize the camera’s vision: to make it less mechanical and monocular, to undo its tripod-mounted 20/20 perfection, and to render it more impressionistic and imperfect, more like the embodied human eye. Such shots are most frequently used to indicate that the character whose perspective we occupy is impaired in some manner. A swimming change of focus simulates drunkenness; cracks or blurred outlines warn us that a character’s glasses have been broken; a zoom-in and track-out combine to replicate a feeling of vertigo during an attack of acrophobia. The three subjective POV shots in Pinocchio, though, are allocated not to humans, but to a cricket, a fish, and a wooden puppet. Something similar is afoot in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), in which the computer Hal sees the world not with the accuracy of a machine, but rather in his own particularly inflected way, signaled by a red-tinted, bulging convex lens.

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In contemporary video games, the subjective first-person point of view is the norm, not the exception.1 This is in part because the genre scenarios into which these games generally insert the player are situations of peril: military combat, gang warfare, battles involving sorcery and dragons, where one’s clarity and stability of vision would expectedly be under siege. Harun Farocki’s Parallel I-IV (2012/2014) illustrates this point, particularly in the second and third sections, which deal respectively with the physics and terrains of modern video game worlds. We see Farocki’s hero strafe energetically alongside walls and cliffs, jog ridiculously in place, and rotate in circles as the world spins around him. We see this hero crash his stolen car many times into a concrete barrier; later, he attempts to swim under a mountain. All of this behavior experiments with the limits of this world, in a sort of auto-destruct mission to define its edges, test its gravity, and determine the density of its surfaces. In Parallel IV, the game-world hero invades the personal space of a woman governed by an automatic script, prompting her to say, “Listen, buster, back off,” and a few variants of the same sentiment. Other characters cower and flee when bumped by the hero. In one scene, the hero pulls a gun on a sales lady in a shop; she runs out the door, only to turn around and calmly re-

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enter. As the narrator of Parallel IV explains, “The sales lady has a short memory. As soon as she is outside the door, she forgets that the hero pointed a gun at her.” When she is threatened, she is programmed to flee, but once she is outside, her script requires her to go back into the shop to work, and so on. This repetition, says the narrator, “reveals to the hero the limitations of human freedom of action.” In conveying this message, the video game script resembles a cuckoo clock or a gif. Do all automata attempt to teach a similar lesson, over and over again?

7. Disney’s Snow White (1936) had been a huge commercial success, but due to a forty-percent drop in foreign revenue brought about by World War II, Pinocchio did not fare as well. Walt Disney, having read a book on psychology, decided to improve worker performance by denying bonuses and instead offering “salary adjustments” to certain animators who he felt did exceptional work, while others received nothing. In 1940, the Screen Cartoonist Guild left their shop and went on strike for five weeks. Disney retaliated by taking out an ad in Variety calling them Communist agitators. A federal mediator found in the Guild’s favor, and the Disney studio has been a union shop ever since. In the context of the Disney Animators’ Strike, Pinocchio can

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be understood as an allegory of labor. The animators are like marionettes or dummies who do not own or control their own images and voices. They are also like bad children seduced by the lures of Pleasure Island: a career in the arts, working for the company that would later build the happiest place on earth. They are like the donkeys crated up and sold out by Disney. They are redeemed with the intervention of the Blue Fairy-like federal mediator who makes good their labor. In his famous unfinished Disney book, Sergei Eisenstein wrote about Merbabies, an animated short from Disney’s early Silly Symphonies genre.

Though he was later disillusioned by them, for a brief moment Eisenstein saw in Disney’s animations a symbol of the radical potential of drawn form and matter. “Disney’s beasts, fish and birds have the habit of … mocking at their own form,” he wrote, continuing, “this triumph over all fetters, over everything that

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binds, resounds throughout.”2 In Eisenstein’s view, a certain freedom was made possible by animation, which pried the film image away from the physical and logistical constraints of pre-existing, material objects. There was something about drawings that are constantly animated and reanimated, perpetually morphing into other forms (often against slightly more realistic, water-color backdrops), which not only held great appeal to Eisenstein but also seemed to speak to the condition of stasis, atomization, bureaucratization, and compartmentalization afflicting contemporary life: the drawings pointed toward a kind of antidote to this condition. According to Eisenstein, line drawings tapped into animistic impulses, not only when they are animated in Disney films, but in general. Why? Because even the simplest line drawing involves a gesture of tracing, of moving one’s hand, arm, or body around the object depicted: a continuous motion that respects the continuity of that object’s outlines, and renders it as a whole rather than in fragments. The moving gesture is preserved in the final drawing, in its unbroken line, as is the overall gestalt of the object. This is the opposite of modern capitalist economics, which attempts to compartmentalize, abstract, and divide up the flow of life, human activity, labor, and objects into discrete components.

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8.The Pierre Huyghe film Blanche Neige Lucie (1997) tells a related story: that of Lucie Dolène, the soprano who voiced Snow White in the French dub of the film, but who remained uncredited by Disney.

In Huyghe’s video, Dolène sings “Someday My Prince Will Come,” and her singing voice is reunited with her proper name and her own image, now decades later. Snow White’s voice, as Dolène notes in text titles, is “a light soprano … fresh without being too technical.” The video is filmed in an empty studio, with a large blue screen—of the sort used in digital animations and chroma key compositing—visible in the background.

9.Tiven’s Two Devices tells the story of a donkey who has been sent on a mission. Although she is told that she is carrying wheat, rice, and fuel, her canvas sacks are in fact loaded with explosives. A computer-generated

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animation, this donkey appears in the video exclusively against the backdrop of a green chroma key screen. Her story is told in two ways: first, in a voice-over recounting recent historical cases of animals in Iraq and Afghanistan sent on suicide bombing missions, and second, in a text crawl, which narrates the donkey’s own journey from a third-person limited perspective. As she traverses the road to the city, she searches for torn paper stars clinging to pieces of broken glass in the rubble. She wonders how many copies of this star might exist: “Could I ever find all of them?” As she collects the shattered stars in her imagination, her gaze floats upward and zooms out wider until she occupies an aerial point of view, finally assuming a perspective in which the very periphery of the simulacral world she inhabits becomes visible. Soon, a beeping archway resembling a metal detector comes into view, and as the donkey approaches it, we get the sense that she is about to step off the edge of this world. This fable explores some of the same terrain as Pinocchio, Parallel I–IV, and Blanche Neige Lucie. The donkey has been instrumentalized by war. She is humanized in Tiven’s video with the bestowal of the internal monologue, which makes her a character. The animation slightly anthropomorphizes her, lending her expressivity. It also places her somewhere

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along the continuum between the impression of life-likeness and inanimacy, between virtuality and actuality, and between familiarity and strangeness. Her story could be read as a journey toward Masahiro Mori’s uncanny valley—a valley that in some sense, she is already in without knowing it, by virtue of being a cartoon, and by virtue of being instrumentalized.3 As Mori puts it in the essay in which he defines this term, “…when we die, we fall into the trough of the uncanny valley.” We become mere matter, but matter that was once animated by life, and might be once again. This donkey’s story also includes a journey of the eye: a perspectival shift from embodied, ground-level perception to an aerial point of view. As the donkey approaches the edge of the world, her gaze floats upward; as she nears the completion of her mission, she becomes increasingly detached from the earth and closer to the shattered stars. Like the puppet-donkey-boy, whose stages of development are rendered non-linear by virtue of the fact that his entire story is subsumed under the category of animation, she is a virtual object endlessly traversing and re-traversing all of these superimposed circuits.

10.In her text, “In Free Fall”, Hito Steyerl describes the cultural downfall of linear perspective: how the dominance of an

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upright, horizontal point of view (enabled by the easel, the tripod, and other tools for generating what Heidegger called “world pictures”) has yielded to the aerial point of view (suggested first by pigeon-photographers and balloon aircraft, and now by surveillance, satellites, and drones). Within the current logic of technical warfare, perhaps the sky now seems the most ideal, or least vulnerable, perspective from which to see. But the shift to aerial perspective just updates the project of linear perspective, albeit without the aspirations to divine omniscience. Aerial perspective seeks to uncouple flawed, subjective, or distorted vision from human beings, and refashion it as perfectly transparent, neutral, and objective. The aerial perspective suggests an attempt to eradicate Cartesian doubt, and achieve the dream of the Enlightenment subject, by increasing the eye’s distance from the earth and perpendicularity to it. Truth is at the far end of an infinite zoom out.

11. The skeumorphic impulse runs in both directions. There are real beings who want to become more artificial, more bullet-proof, more infallible, more immortal; and there are sawhorses, mechanical birds, and androids who wish to become more real. Intimidation is the goal of the first group; stealth and camouflage the desire of the second.

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12.A fable of Aesop:

An Ass, finding a Lion’s skin, disguised himself with it, and ranged about the forest, putting all the beasts that saw him into a bodily fear. After he had diverted himself thus for some time, he met a Fox; and being desirous to fright him too, as well as the rest, he leapt at him with some fierceness, and endeavored to imitate the roaring of the Lion. Your humble servant, says the Fox: if you had held your tongue, I might have taken you for a Lion, as others did; but now you bray, and I know who you are.

13.In War and Cinema, Paul Virilio describes how, from World War I through to the present, we have witnessed a “profusion of camouflage, decoys, jamming, smoke-screens, electronic counter-measures.” That is: visible weaponry (artillery, machine guns) have yielded to a proliferation of electronics, and other “invisible weapons that make things visible.”4 This ability to hide in plain view can aid survival or victory. But after decades of technologically-derived efforts to cloak, disguise, and dissimulate, what now explains the skeuomorphisms and mimicry of contemporary military robotics: those transport machines that move like donkeys, surveillance optics that fly like

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hummingbirds, and swarming mechanical bees? What connects the atavism of the natural as a design mode with the strategic mandates of electronic weapons?

While nature has always been seen as a goldmine of raw materials; today, it is also a goldmine of forms, and available engineering principles. Across major research and development laboratories, the mechanical intricacies of animals are being urgently studied and technologically recreated, precisely as the full scale of our unfolding ecological disaster comes into view. But even at the onset of an extinction-level catastrophe, it would not be surprising if the concept of nature were to migrate elsewhere, rather than disappear entirely. Perhaps nature will come to be defined as this catastrophe itself, and the natural world that preceded it as a paradise lost. Our transitional moment of evergreen cell phone towers and sublime operating systems is the backwards-reaching, romantic phase in this inevitable trajectory, marked by the desire to commemorate a nature that is now on the brink of disappearing—or perhaps to paper over its imminent loss. Once, the ass wore the lion’s skin, foolish and benign. Now, as machines costume themselves as pastoral fauna and flora, perhaps it is the other way around.

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Endnotes:1. See Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).2. Sergei Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, ed. Jay Leyda, trans. Alan Upchurch (London: Methuen, 1988): 4.3. Masahiro Mori, “The Uncanny Valley,” Energy 7:4 (1970): 33–354. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Politics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 2009): 76, 71.