Radicalizers
The Art Installation That Changed My Perception of Animals Forever
I went vegan after watching people turn into birds in Marcus Coates’ “Dawn Chorus”
A popular meme on TikTok begins with the opening line from Pixar’s Inside Out: “Do you ever look at someone and wonder, what is going on inside their head?” The line is usually heard over a video of a dog or cat, slow-zooming into its eyes as it sits innocently on a bed or rug. The audio then cuts to the bass-heavy beat from “Sweet Dreams are Made of These” over a montage of the pet doing things like jumping at its own reflection, chasing its tail, forcing its head into a tennis ball tube.
It’s very funny. And the message beneath the meme is clear: animals — they’re not like us!
But if we did act like them? If we genuinely tried to approach another species’ experience instead of measuring it solely against our own… would we feel the same way? It was this question, staged as a shamanic art installation I witnessed in 2012, that led me to…
