top of page

Crappy Taxidermy

In being viewed increasingly as a hobby, and a weird, quirky one at that, taxidermy lends itself to kitsch and humor, including Crappy Taxidermy.  Started by Kat Su in 2009, Crappy Taxidermy proudly proclaims that it is “the Internet's largest image depository of crappy and awesome taxidermy” (Crappy Taxidermy).

In Pieces

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.

What Is Missing?

The focus on species extinction and habitat loss also forms the focus of Maya Lin’s website What is Missing? Created in 2009, What is Missing? Is a multimedia project that functions both as a memorial for lost or threatened species and as a resource to connect people, “presenting plausible future scenarios for a sustainable planet, and showcasing examples of what is already being done around the world to make these ideas a reality, all the while providing people the much-needed feeling that it is within our power to make change” (What is Missing?).

Please reload

Boundaries between bodies, between human and nonhuman, between living and dead, between physical and digital are repeatedly evoked and dissolved in these websites. Crappy Taxidermy, In Pieces, and What is Missing? show how the permeability or collapse of distinctions and boundaries between humans and nonhumans is complicated in the world of digital animal bodies.

 

The digital presence of the animal bodies in those websites is in many ways more vital than the original materiality of flesh-and-blood animal bodies out in the natural world. Their digital presences travel farther, faster, and more reliably than flesh-and-blood animal specimens. In What is Missing? and In Pieces, they connect people and raise awareness about species and habitat loss.

 

Yet digitized animal bodies also separate us from the real animals, a separation with both positive and negative implications. With our focus on digitized animals, we can potentially leave real animals alone and undisturbed, but we can also find ourselves caring less and less about the real animals and their fate. After all, the digitized animals are far easier to control, contain, and manipulate than real animals; they do not die, escape, or resist us.

Digitized Animals

bottom of page