For reasons as diverse as wish fulfilment, group cohesion, predictive model building, and good humour, we habitually animate and humanise our environments, betting on the most meaningful interpretation available. As placeholders for disorienting experiences and inexplicable natural phenomena, ancient deities too fell in love, married, had children and extramarital affairs that spawned more children, broke down and away, fought, rode horses, but if cattle and horses and lions had hands, or could paint with their hands and create works such as men do, horses like horses and cattle like cattle also would depict the gods' shapes and make their bodies of such a sort as the form they themselves have, or so goes the critique of Greek popular religion attributed to the monotheist philosopher Xenophanes, of early 5th century BC. After Jesus there were Teletubbies, HAL 9000 and the subsequent hype and fallacy of Al, abominable snowmen, and an ever-growing menagerie of celluloid pets that throw hands across contemporary animated blockbusters. Beyond enacting situational comedy archetypes and occasionally unsettling insipid social routines, here the 'human' is able to once again become a site of amoral disturbance, rather than being a model of exemplary behaviour.
Text by Masha Ryabova
Photos by Jaakko Myyri