Installation view Eastern Cape Bienalle at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Museum October 2014

All images © Monique Pelser 2014

"This is fantastic... Where else would animals learn the basic functions to create music?" CNN. 2014

Medium: Three-channel video installation 

Duration: 05:08 (looped)

This video installation, displayed on three computer monitors, is a slideshow from a Facebook page flanked by footage of an Orangutang playing a keyboard and Asia Small Otters playing a keyboard.  

The footage of these animals playing music was found on CNN and has been appropriated and recontextualized into a gallery setting.  The soundtracks, which overlap each other are repetitive, frenetic and disturbing. The centre screen, displaying the slideshow, was created by repeated clicking on images from a Facebook album of wildlife caught or kept in urban environments. The repetitive clicking starts to reflect the Orangutang and the Asia Small Otters hand and paws, respectively, hitting the musical instruments.

For this on-going project I do a Google search for wildlife images, looking predominantly through CNN and SKY News footage; I take a screen capture often contextualising it with a CNN logo, for example,  I then place the images into various categories such as; animals dressed up, animals being photographed, animals performing or animals inside. The images are then uploaded onto Facebook in these categories.  The Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/jimi.jim.718) has been active for over two years.  

I am interested in how we how we look at and consume images. How this looking establishes ideas and normative thinking despite the content of the images being potentially problematic and/ or absurd. Recontextualising the images highlights how we as consumers look at animals and how animals, particularly wildlife, have become a spectacle commodity.