The arachnid hominid makes an appearance in Andrews' video.Brian AndrewsAnyone with arachnophobia is all too aware of how a spider moves. And we’re all accustomed to the rhythm of human ambulation. So it’s a little disconcerting to see a human pouncing like a spider. The creature—a woman’s body carried by long spidery legs—is part of artist Brian Andrews’ animation “Hominid,” a tale of predator and prey inspired by x-ray films of human and animal skeletons.
Mythology is rife with examples of chimerical creatures, from Greek centaurs to the jackal-headed Egyptian god Anubis. Even now, we remain fascinated with beings, such as the mythological Sasquatch or historical Neanderthal, that blur the lines of what we understand to be human. Science is expanding our idea of “self” by characterizing the myriad microbes that populate our bodies and by expressing human proteins in transgenic animals.
“I’ve always been interested in the boundaries between human and animal, especially apes and primates, which are challenging to our ideas of being human and separate,” says Andrews, who was working on photographs of taxidermied animals when the idea to “provoke the line” between human and animal first occurred to him. “I decided to use artistic license and ...
