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In Pieces

In the “About This Project” section, James again evokes fragmentation and unity: “Their survivals laying literally in pieces. Each species has a common struggle and is represented by one of 30 pieces which come together to form one another” (“About This Project”). For each of the thirty species, James created a polygon comprised of thirty triangles. As the user switches between the different species the triangles shift and rearrange themselves to form the next animal. Each of the polygon animals is animated, making slight movements of the head, tail, wings, tongue, or other body parts.

Created in 2015 by Bryan James, In Pieces is a “CSS-based interactive exhibit celebrating evolutionary distinction” (In Pieces). The website features thirty animal species, each one threatened or endangered, largely due to human actions. In Pieces embraces a productive tension between ideas of unity and fragmentation. In the website’s introduction, James stresses the “fragmented survival” of the thirty species who “share their struggles, and unite together in an interactive exhibition.”

Users are also given the option to download each animal as desktop wallpaper: “Give the Vaquita a digital home by downloading a desktop wallpaper.” In addition to the polygons, users are provided with statistics about each species and their population decline, as well as brief information about how and why it is threatened and a video that addresses the threat to the species and features the only images of real animals on the site.

The animal polygons with their geometric, origami quality function as stand-ins for material animal bodies. Such substitution seems fitting; the real animals themselves are quickly disappearing from the planet leaving only representations and abstractions. Yet even in their abstraction, the polygon animals speak to the animal body as an entity composed of pieces or parts, symbolic of the viscera, organs, and animate matter of real animal bodies.

The individual pieces engage in a version of shifting materiality as the thirty triangles shift and alter in switching from one polygon animal to the next. The animals of In Pieces are entirely man-made stand-ins for the real animal, and the website leaves animal bodies entirely under the control of human users. We can decide which animal to look at, if we want to randomly cycle through the different animals, if we want to “give a home” to one of the digitized animals, or if we want to seek out ways to take action to try to save the real flesh-and-blood animals. The messy entanglements of human and nonhuman actors have been flattened out into thirty triangles.

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