This essay is a reading of Hana Yoo’s artistic practice through the tensions of anthropomorphism. Using short interpretations, it discusses several of her works while interlacing them with the distinction – as stressed by Hana Yoo – between anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism. The text describes the artworks as experiments with the human perspective onto non-human modes of being in the mode of a critical anthropomorphism: by perceiving non-humans through qualities that have previously only been attributed to humans (e.g., emotional, compassionate, empathetic), one may deconstruct the objectification of those beings (all too often practised in capitalist extractivism) while acknowledging the similarities between humans and the many lifeforms sharing this planet.

A little while ago, I had the great pleasure of discussing Hana Yoo’s video installation, Splendour in the Grass (2020), with my students and the artist [I]. As one sometimes does when facilitating a public talk, I formulated a statement in conversational haste: “The installation sensitively plays with the notion of anthropomorphism or anthropocentrism.” Hana kindly intervened, clarifying that “anthropomorphism is not anthropocentrism” – or at least, not necessarily so. This clarification stayed with me because of its conceptual accuracy and because it was asserted in such a straightforward manner as to suggest a deep understanding of the distinction and its general relevance for Hana’s work. One should remain careful when picking one central theme as a way to write about any specific artistic practice, declaring it as a topos that connects all its manifestations like a ghostly invisible thread. Nevertheless, I will attempt to identify in Hana’s work the traces and variations of the tension between anthropomorphism, “the attribution of human characteristics to non-human things or events,” [II] and anthropocentrism, the idea of human exceptionalism, where the Anthropos constitutes the monotheistic ‘crown of creation’. This tension significantly contributes to the richness of Hana’s multispecies storytelling, with its fascinating capacity for what Donna Haraway calls “speculative fabulation”: the narrative experimentation with new forms of “multispecies becoming-with.” [III]

Splendour in the Grass is the work that introduced me to Hana’s artistic practice some years back. Inspired by experiments in Russia that used virtual reality goggles and simulations of green meadows for the reduction of stress in dairy cows [IV], the video installation centres around a cow recounting this seemingly still quite traumatic experience to their human psychotherapist (played by the artist and researcher Zihern Lee). Hana and I first met in the Vilém Flusser Archive at the Berlin University of the Arts. As a cow is the video work’s main protagonist – an anthropomorphism I use deliberately – we discussed its strong connection to Flusser’s essay, Cows, written in the late 1970s [V].

The Czech cultural philosopher Flusser was engaged in philosophical investigations that combined essay and fable, the most well-known of which might be his book Vampyroteuthis infernalis [VI]. Developed in collaboration with the bio art pioneer Louis Bec, who contributed a series of speculative drawings, the experimental book re-imagines a deep-see cephalopod (a taxonomic class shared with squids and octopuses) as a radical alterity to humans only to, via radical anthropomorphic storytelling, tie the seemingly odd (from a mammal’s perspective) deep-sea creature back to the human condition. This is not intended to subjugate the Vampyroteuthis under a bias of a human ‘crown of creation’ supremacy. Rather, Flusser’s posthumanist investigation employs the metaphorical capacity of anthropomorphism to complicate the distinction between human animals and non-human animals. As the essay continues, it becomes increasingly clear that their differences are not as apparent as the human-made biological taxonomies suggest (even if the Vampyroteuthis is considered an alien specimen from the dark abyss of the sea, a habitat much different from the human lifeworld).

Similarly, although using different narrative strategies, Flusser’s essay, Cows, complicates this Nature-Culture distinction: Are cows, bred over countless generations for the extractivist production of milk and meat, considered as ‘animals’, or are they ‘apparatuses’ (a term central for Flusser’s philosophy of culture and technology) of the agricultural industry? In other words, do they belong to the domain of Nature, the domain of Culture, or are they what Bruno Latour has called “hybrids”[VII] transcending the grand modern dualism? In a complex techno-anthropological gesture – for Flusser, probably following the lead of the paleoanthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan, culture evolves as objects, practices, and signs conceived by humans – the cow as an apparatus presents itself as yet another hybrid anthropomorphism.

Ambiguities like these are also a repeating motive in Hana’s work [VIII]. In Splendour in the Grass, for example, they are apparent on various levels. Besides the hybrid status of the cow, underlined by a very obvious human actor in a carnival cow mask, the intention of the therapist advising the cow on how to cope with their VR-induced anxieties also remains ambiguous: Is she really acting on behalf of the cow’s wellbeing? Or is she, like the Russian scientists turned techno-solutionists indulging in their artificial meadows, an agent of the agricultural industry, for which the cow’s health is just another variable of production efficiency? Her continuous inquiries into her patient’s milk quota suggest the latter. She concludes their therapy session with the seemingly casual statement: “We are all programmed in some way,” tying Splendour in the Grass to both Flusser’s techno-deterministic notion of apparatuses affecting human perception and behaviour, as well as the various practices of normalising the subjugation of lifeforms, human and non-human, to a capitalist market regime. In the “Note from the author” that accompanies her account written from the cow’s perspective, Hana brilliantly expands the “utilisation of technical apparatuses in the welfare of both humans and animals” into discourses of feminist science and technology studies (STS): “The assumption that presenting utopian images will reduce anxiety connects to the sovereign control of mental health and female reproductive labour being the ultimate catalysis for capitalism.” [XIX]

Like Hana, Donna Haraway refers to “control apparatuses” in the context of reproductive labour and the governed reproduction of lifeforms, human or non-human [X], pleading for the recognition of lost life through her notion of “the Disappeared” [XI], referring to all the humans and non-humans considered by capitalist and colonialist structures as ‘less valuable’ than others: deported people, species threatened by mass extinction, ethnic minorities facing genocides, ‘livestock’ to be killed and turned into products; the list is long. This choice to align humans and non-humans alike is not intended as a devaluation of human beings, in the sense that ‘this group of humans are like animals’ (although it is important to note at this moment that ‘dehumanisations’ such as the designation of migrants as ‘vermin’ has again been rehabilitated from a fascist past into the neofascist present of US politics); instead, Haraway pleads for a sense of ‘multispecies kinship’ where empathic relationships, respect for each other, and the general appreciation of life are not limited to natal kinship but extend all the way from humans to non-humans.

This stance against “the relentless resourcing of all things terran [by] extractionist, exterminationist colonialism and capitalism”[XII] is a profoundly ethical plea in Haraway’s writing. ‘Ethics’ is here to be understood beyond the limitations of humanism or human exceptionalism and towards “multispecies environmental and reproductive justice”[XIII]. Multispecies kinship promises a viable method against the injustices of what Frans B. M. de Waal has called “anthropodenial”[XIV]: to deny animals traits formerly made exclusive to humans, such as fear, boredom, happiness, compassion, or depression. This anthropocentric denial can be traced back (at least) to the champion of modern dualist thinking, René Descartes. In his mechanist worldview, Descartes compared the bodies of both humans and non-humans to that of machines. [XV] According to Descartes, the difference is that humans have consciousness, which ‘elevates’ them to human beings while denying all other animals the conscious access to their outer and inner world. This equation of animal and machine, also known under the eponym ‘beast-machine’, not only bolstered human exceptionalism and the creationist belief of the Anthropos’ dominance over all things living. It also objectified non-human animals, denying them their capacity – now shown to exist in many species (not limited to mammals) – for demonstrating complex mental and emotional states.

Randall Lockwood, a distinguished author on animal cruelty prevention, identifies behaviourism and its “proliferation of mechanical models of animal and human behaviour that attempted to avoid any taint of anthropomorphism” [XVI] as a direct outgrowth of such an anthropodenial. Behaviourism has been extraordinarily influential, particularly in the US, for psychology (assigned to humans) and the studies of animal behaviour (assigned to non-humans). By focusing essentially on input (stimulus) and output (reaction), behaviourist approaches turn humans and non-humans alike into black boxes. Its mechanistic models, devoid of any interest in, or empathy for, the inner life of the given ‘specimen’, can then be further applied: If a given input stimulates a specific output, one can train a reaction by controlling the connected stimulus – further objectifying the specimen through conditioning. For this experimental operation, the behaviourism pioneer B.F. Skinner has coined the term “reinforcement learning” (RL). This concept was one of the starting points for a series of Hana’s works – Arbitrary Radius Circle, The Fall, and Bare Life – which she combined in the installation Chambers.[XVII]

The video installation Arbitrary Radius Circle is built around the classic Skinner box experimental setup, an apparatus to train the behaviour of rats reacting to input stimuli (food) with a specific output reaction (a repetitive behaviour). The work speculatively connects B. F. Skinner’s basic principle of reinforcement learning to the repetitive input-output principle of machine learning (ML) training. In often precarious micro-tasking work situations, human labour is integral to the seemingly autonomous self-learning artificial intelligences. By juxtaposing ML-human-labour with RL-rat-conditioning, the work asks who is training and who is being trained in the opaque, behaviourist human-machine-intelligence constellation.[XVIII] Through this, it investigates anthropomorphisms such as learning or intelligence inherent in AI narratives, which are projected from the human cognitive domain via non-humans (the laboratory rats) onto machines. In her discussion of the piece, Hana speculates about the consequences of such anthropomorphisms: “Is there a new type of empathy emerging through the technical apparatus? What makes the animals in the lab invisible, and their labour unrecognized?” [XIX]

For the ML-generated animation The Fall, Hana employed the game engine Unity to place rats as 3D game objects in a grid of 66 chambers. The rat entities were briefly trained for just twenty-three seconds by an ML algorithm to execute a specific task, which most of the entities fail to do and which, as a result, fall through the chambers, signifying an escape from the grid (or laboratory prison). The movements of the rats, including their fall, are traced by black lines, resulting in a virtual sculpture which resembles the endless fall of the clinamen in the antique Greek philosophy of Lucretius. Here, these atomistic particles signify an element of chance within the framework of determinism – an ontological tension that can be linked to the domain of probability or stochastics on which current AI or ML paradigms rely.

The short film ‘Bare Life’ presents (non-sequentially) three cases. The first one features archival footage of a pest controller using an air gun to eliminate wild rats. The second case presents a masked protagonist in a dimly lighted room with a black background, resembling the documentary aesthetics of talking heads. The interviewee shares her perspectives on freedom and the duality of being inside and outside; this report juxtaposes shots of concrete wall encasements on which security cameras are mounted. The third case examines an experiment by the Animal Welfare Laboratory at the Free University of Berlin where ML systems analyse facial expressions of lab mice before and after anaesthesia to develop a method to identify their suffering. The equally beautiful and unsettling imagery of the film, particularly its montage of the masked interviewee and the laboratory rodents, evokes Haraway’s troubling image of the Disappeared: humans and non-humans that have been incarcerated and/or are discarded for systemic purposes after being deemed ‘less valuable’ forms of life. The comparisons invoked by cinematic montage enable a very direct experience of anthropomorphism’s aesthetic, epistemological, and investigative capacities.

Anthropomorphism without anthropocentrism, as investigated in Hana’s Chambers series, can be applied as a strategy to learn more about one’s own (individual) human condition and dissolve the barriers instilled by modernity between humans and non-humans and between Nature and Culture. Understanding non-human behaviours, needs, fears, and affections through anthropomorphic thinking may bolster what one might call ‘multispecies empathy’ if – and only if – anthropomorphism does not relapse into anthropocentrism where all non-human behaviour is subjugated to human agency. For such a cognitive challenge, Gordon M. Burghardt coined the term “critical anthropomorphism”[XX] to consider both the benefits and the (anthropocentric) risks of applying anthropomorphism for research into non-human animal behaviour. Operating with Burghardt’s concept, Lockwood concludes that the investigation of “the validity of anthropomorphism as an intrinsic human tool for the establishment of connections to people, animals and nature” in science and lawmaking shows that “the antithesis of anthropomorphism is not simply anthropocentrism but dehumanization – seeing anyone and anything as less than human or less deserving of moral or ethical concern”.[XXI]

However, developing a non-human perspective is not an easy task as the human phenomenological position remains limited to human cognitive functions. Yet the tensions evoked by those limits can still be productive for both onto-epistemological exercises – How can we learn what about non-humans?’ – and posthumanist ethical considerations – How can we engage with non-humans without dragging them to an anthropocentric worldview? There have been many thought experiments in the history of philosophy and science that demonstrate the potential and limitations of taking a non-human perspective. They range from Jacob von Uexküll’s famous investigation of the inner and outer world of a tick to Flusser’s Vampyroteuthis infernalis to Thomas Nagel’s What is it like to be a bat?

First published in 1974, Nagel’s seminal essay became instrumental not only in cognitive science and the study of animal behaviour but also in the legal arguments of animal rights activists. Similar to Flusser’s non-human protagonist, the bat is, albeit a mammal, somewhat alien compared to human beings: besides the fact that it can fly and humans cannot, a bat perceives the world not primarily through its optical apparatus but mostly by echolocation, an auditory sense perception very difficult to imagine for human beings. Thus, “we believe that bats feel some versions of pain, fear, hunger, and lust […]. But we believe that these experiences also have in each case a specific subjective character, which is beyond our ability to conceive.” [XXII] But Nagel also qualifies these limits of the human capacity to conceive or to empathise with a non-human position:

“It may be easier than I suppose to transcend inter-species barriers with the aid of imagination. For example, blind people are able to detect objects near them by sonar [or echolocation], using vocal clicks or taps of a cane. […] The distance between oneself and other persons and other species can fall anywhere on a continuum. […] The imagination is remarkably flexible.”[XXIII]

It is in the domain of the arts, among other forms of multispecies storytelling or aesthetics, where imaginative capacities can be tested, challenged, and expanded.

I would like to close this essay with some remarks on Hana’s most recent work, whose performance lecture Acts of Proximity No. 2: Where Have All the Sheep Gone? I had the pleasure of attending during this year’s transmediale festival (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, January 29 – February 2, 2025). The lecture activated the installation Acts of Proximity No. 1: Sleepless Skies, a 3D-printed sheep sculpture mounted on a polished metal base, seemingly about to start floating from a weather balloon. The piece is inspired by a weird manifestation of the continuous tensions between North Korea and South Korea: Between May and August 2024, the regime in the North sent weather balloons carrying bags of garbage – dubbed ‘trash balloons’ – to the South. Besides household waste, the ballons carried valueless matter such as destroyed clothes, which seem to have been donated by South Korea, traces of fertilisers and batteries, as well as “soil containing parasites that may have originated from human faeces” [XXIV]. A total of 3,500 balloons were sent in eleven waves. While Kim Yo Jong, the sister of North Korea’s Supreme leader Kim Jong Un, has cynically described the balloons as “gifts of sincerity”, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol condemned them as an “act of provocation”. While balloons disrupted flights at Seoul’s Incheon airport, sparked a fire on the roof of a residential building, and hit cars, farms, schools, and restaurants, one balloon randomly landed in the precincts of the presidential palace. This is quite remarkable, considering that South Korean authorities were barred from entering the presidential palace in their attempt to arrest President Yoon, the same place a balloon had so easily entered just a few months earlier. [XXV]

This is the ambiguity incorporated by the trash balloons, between gift and provocation, between joke and aggression, between random landing points and the invasion of high-security parameters, which Hana has pinpointed as her fascination with the “non-verbal dialogue between North and South Korea.” [XXVI] To materialise the concept of ambiguity, Acts of Proximity No. 1: Sleepless Skies switches the trash bags out with something that holds a perceived value: a sheep. The figure of the sheep is a concrete materialisation of value when measured in the extractivist parameters of livestock objectivation under which the cows in Splendour in the Grass or the lab rodents in Chambers are quantified. “I’ve heard that people living in the North are mostly vegetarians” Hana’s performance lecture persona, the South Korean streamer, states, “So many people don’t live with sheep; sheep are only for some people.” The balloon-sheep hybrids take on a ghostly autonomous agency, suspended between “living and dying” [XXVII], highlighting another uncanny parallel to Haraway’s Disappeared: “When they landed, they transformed into this crazy cosmic middle-state, in Korea, we call it 귀신: a ghost. A balloon ghost. It’s like they’re stuck between being alive and dead, joke and aggression, the ambiguous state of ‘both’.”

I took many notes during Hana’s performance lecture in anticipation of writing this essay. The one I highlighted is taken from a video clip that is part of the performance during a moment when Hana’s narrator speaks in Korean (translated by subtitles): “It’s more painful to live stretched time than broken space.” This again made me think of the incarcerated, exploited, or extinguished humans and non-humans in global extractivist systems. Systems that not only restrict space (to industrial farms, factory compounds, refugee camps, deportation prisons) but also stretch time into long-suffering, strictly controlled routines, or endless waiting for expulsion. I took the liberty to ask Hana about the significance of this (possibly) quite personal sentence. She explained that it reflects how it feels when she is back in Korea, “in the war that ‘technically’ never ended, but strangely kept ‘peace’ for decades, [where] it feels like time and space got twisted”. Hana also shared that the sentence was inspired by a passage in Thomas De Quincey’s seminal book Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: “The sense of space, and in the end the sense of time, were both powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes, &c., were exhibited in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive. Space swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity.” [XXVIII] This recalls another literary account of psychedelic self-experimentation, Henri Michaux’s book Miserable Miracle (Mescaline) of 1956, which includes some of his famous drawings documenting his experiences. In one section, Michaux describes a strange anthropomorphism induced by psychoactive mind expansion:

“I begin to glance at the text and in the flickering light of the wood fire with difficulty making out a few words: ‘the giraffe … a ruminant, between the antelope and the … by its shape …’ Wait! At these words something seems to stir. I close my eyes and, already responding to the mention of their name, two dozen giraffes are galloping in the distance, rhythmically raising their slender legs and their interminable necks. True, they have nothing in common with the muscular, beautifully colored animals of the photographs I have just been looking at, and which were unable to create any ‘inner’ giraffe. These are moving diagrams of the idea ‘giraffe’, drawings formed by reflection, not reproduction.” [XXIX]

In our investigations of anthropomorphism, we do not have to resort to drug-induced images; they are but chimaeras anyway, “artificial paradises,” as Charles Baudelaire described them in his 1860 book of the same title (inspired by De Quincey’s accounts). However, Michaux’s insight that his drawings are reflections or diagrammatic abstractions of what one might call ‘the giraffe essence’ – a very human point of view – and not simple visual reproductions of a giraffe ‘out there’ might again point us to the intimate relation between artistic imagination and (critical) anthropomorphism.

I am indebted to Elise Hunchuck for her valuable editing of this text. Her suggestions did not only sharpen the essay’s argument but also its linguistic style, thus greatly contributing to its general accessibility.

Daniel Irrgang

[I] In an undergraduate course on media aesthetics at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg on November 28, 2024. For information on Hana Yoo’s work, please see the extensive documentation on her website: yoohana.net.

[II] Here, I am using a definition by Stewart E. Guthrie as quoted in Randall Lockwood’s “Anthropomorphism and Anthropocentrism in the Anthropocene” in The Routledge International Handbook of Human-Animal Interactions and Anthrozoology, edited by Aubrey H. Fine et al. (Routledge, 2023). With this paper, Lockwood delivered an extraordinary account on anthropomorphism without anthropocentrism to which I return to later.

[III] Donna J. Haraway, “SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far,” in: Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology 3 (2021).

[IV] Cf. the “Note from the author” accompanying Hana’s essay “A Statement of an Experiment – From the Splendour in the Grass: Woman, Animal, and Utopia,” in: Radical Film, Art and Digital Media for Societies in Turmoil, eds. Ursula Böckler, Julia Lazarus and Alexandra Weltz-Rombach (K. Verlag, 2023).

[V] Published in various languages, e.g., in Flusser’s book Natural:Mente: Vários Acessos ao Significado de Natureza (Duas Cidades, 1979); in German: Vögelflüge (Hanser, 2000); and in English: Natural:Mind (Univocal Publishing/University of Minnesota Press, 2013). Separate English publications in Philosophy of Photography 2/2 (2012) and Artforum (September 2013). For a further discussion of Hana’s Splendour in the Grass in the context of Flusser’s essay Cows see the wonderful review written by New York Times art critic Martha Schwendener, “Hana Yoo’s Post-Historical Cows from Splendour in the Grass,” found at: https://yoohana.net/Martha-Schwendener

[VI] First published in German as Vampyroteuthis infernalis. Eine Abhandlung samt Befund des Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste (Immatrix Publications, 1987); and in English as Vampyroteuthis Infernalis

A Treatise, with a Report by the Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste (University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

[VII] Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Harvard University Press, 1993).

[VIII] As Hana emphasized in a conversation with me during the preparation of this essay.

[IX]Yoo, A Statement of an Experiment, p. 337.

[X] Donna Haraway, “Making Kin in the Chthulucene: Reproducing Multispecies Justice,” in: Making Kin not Population, eds. Adele E. Clarke and Donna Haraway (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018), p. 98.

[XI] Ibid., p. 78.

[XII] Ibid., p. 69.

[XIII] Ibid., p. 68.

[XIV] Frans B. M. de Waal, Anthropomorphism and Anthropodenial: Consistency in Our Thinking about Humans and Other Animals. Philosophical Topics 27/1 (1999).

[XV] Most notably in his seminal work Discours de la Methode (1637).

[XVI] Lockwood, Anthropomorphism and Anthropocentrism in the Anthropocene.

[XVII] At Post territory Ujeongguk, Seoul, 2021.

[XVIII] Cf. Alice Barale, “‘Who Inspires Who?’ Aesthetics in Front of AI Art,” Philosophical Inquiries 9/2 (2021).

[XIX] Hana Yoo, “Arbitrary Radius Circle,” yoohana.net/Arbitrary-Radius-Circle

[XX] Gordon M. Burghardt, Cognitive ethology and critical anthromorphism: a snake with two heads and hognose snakes that play dead, in: Cognitive Ethology: The Minds of Other Animals, ed. Carolyn A. Ristau (Lawrence Erlbaum 1991). I am here using Lockwood’s discussion of Burghardt’s concept (cf. Lockwood, Anthropomorphism and Anthropocentrism in the Anthropocene).

[XXI] Lockwood, Anthropomorphism and Anthropocentrism in the Anthropocene.

[XXII] Thomas Nagel, “What is it like to be a bat?,” The Philosophical Review 83/4 (1974), p. 439.

[XXIII] Ibid., p. 442; emphases D.I.

[XXIV] The quotes and information are gathered from the case study news page of Reuters, which not only contains beautiful illustrations and infographics but also employs impressive parallax scrolling effects. Sudev Kiyada, Han Huang, Adolfo Arranz and Simon Scarr, “A torrent of trash: How North Korean balloons have dropped tonnes of waste on the South,” Reuters (August 23, 2024). https://www.reuters.com/graphics/NORTHKOREA-SOUTHKOREA/TRASH/klvynygmjpg/

[XXV] South Korean President Yoon was impeached over his declaration of martial law on January 3, 2025. For more, see: Amy Sedghi, “Investigators suspend attempt to arrest South Korean president Yoon after standoff with security service,” in The Guardian (January 3, 2025). https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/jan/02/south-korea-police-on-way-to-arrest-president-yoon-suk-yeol-latest-updates

[XXVI] In a conversation with me during the research for this essay.

[XXVII] Haraway, Making Kin in the Chthulucene, p. 78.

[XXVIII] Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater [1821] and Suspiria de profundis (Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1853), p. 111.

[XXIX] Henri Michaux, Miserable Miracle (Mescaline) (City Light Books, 1972), p. 20.