Impersonator
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson write in their book Philosophy in the Flesh
that our understanding of the world and the ability to reason is shaped by the peculiarities of our human bodies, by the remarkable details of the neural structures of our brains and by the specifics of our everyday functioning in the world
. They state that reason is not an essence that separates us from other animals; rather it places us on a continuum with them
.
In the two versions of Impersonator
(black and white) a young man carefully tries to mimic a cat’s slow decision to fight or flee. Two monitors face each other, one with the young man and the other with the young cat. The cat paces the parameter of the room; body hunkered down close to the floor, as if in anticipation of some unknown danger. In the opposite monitor to the cat the young man paces the same room moving in almost perfect tandem to the cat. The young mans earnest efforts to mimic the cat merely reinforce that we are closed to really understanding the cat, we have only learned to mimic locked as we are in our own embodied reality.