Brief #2 – Week 1
For this brief I chose Jacques Burkhardt’s set of scientific drawings. In 1865, Luis Agassiz, founder of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and a dozen of assistants set off on a 15-month expedition. The aim was to investigate the distribution of Brazil’s freshwater fish species. Jacques Burkhardt was Agassiz’s personal and main artist.
I downloaded the first 100 images on the collection. I catalogued the drawings in 3 different ways.
The first one was by thinking of them as human (anthropomorphism). I asked 15 people to imagine the personality this fish would have as a human, based on the way they look. I divided them in 3 categories: positive, neutral and negative responses. So basically nice, average and the scary/bad fish.
While browsing through the collection I found myself trying to narrow down the search. I obviously do not know much about fish and their scientific names and website did not give me the option to search by appearance so I thought for my second experiment I would sorted them by their physical characteristics like colour, shape, texture, etc.
For the third experiment I focused on each image’s caption and organised the fish by their names. So, fish that have names that correspond to objects they resemble, animals they look like, things they do (behaviour), or that refer to a physical characteristic.
Feedback:
- Do some more research on Anthropomorphism and maybe get more information about each fish… maybe age, personality, gender, occupations?
- Design a survey where I can ask more questions. Take humanising the fish to the next level.
- What characteristics do people that are considered “nice” or “mean” have in common? How is that related to how they are being perceived and categorised?
- Maybe adjust the scale of the images so they that size is not a factor in the way they are perceived.