The Mouth Project

[starsystemerror]

The next one is significantly longer, enough that I wanted to explore two separate-but-related ideas in a single video. My first videos are actually all clustered around the same area, near the end of Mouth Sounds and the beginning of Mouth Silence. Not sure why, but it's interesting. This one is for track 16 of Mouth Sounds, Mullet With Butterfly Wings.

This video involves animals handled humanely but sometimes roughly in uncomfortable situations, in small cages, and in settings that are intended for testing on animals. Nothing graphic is shown, but there is a minor amount of blood at the beginning (a vampire bat is drinking it out of a dish) and there is a rabbit shown that is acting strangely as a result of a test (the test is not shown).

Artist Statement:

Spoiler

So, the obvious takeaway from this may at first be that I am against animal testing. But then, what does the other theme in the video imply? Am I equating laboratory testing and animal showing? The answer, in a subjective personal artist intention way, is that I am not equating anything. I'm presenting the scenes and letting their juxtaposition provoke the viewer's own thought.

As a result of wanting to present a view of animal testing that was not overt shock footage, I ended up using a lot of pro-animal-testing videos. This does not necessarily mean that I "believe" these are the conditions all lab animals are in, but it is interesting to me how we get sanitized looks at both the testing and show sides of animal husbandry: it's just that the testing is more known to be harmful when it's harmful. I don't think either are inherently "evil," but both have serious potential for suffering that needs to be carefully weighed versus the benefit to humanity.

Speaking of humanity, all the animals in this video are very closely tied to humanity by three main strings I have identified: Usefulness, Love, and Spectacle. A lab mouse is not particularly loved, nor is it made into much of a spectacle, but it is considered very useful. A pet dog may be loved, and training it to enter in a competition makes it into a spectacle, and if it wins, it may be useful. A working dog at a trial is useful, but being presented as a spectacle. I could detail this for every animal in the video, but that would take some of the fun out of it, I think.