Pandamania
By:
December 7, 2010
How you react to a guy in a panda suit may depend on what species you are.
Recently in Brooklyn, performance artist Nate Hill donned a panda suit and invited passers-by to take out their aggressions by punching him. It is not clear whether participating sidewalk aggressors were inspired to lash out against quatsch in the form of giant cute or simply from pent-up frustration with the stresses of modern life, although one imagines it might be a bit of both.
Pandas, on the other hand, don’t lash out at all. Despite the extreme stress caused by habitat depletion and dwindling population, baby pandas do not attack the panda suit. They seem to identify.
In this case the cub also seems to identify that the uncanny has entered his bamboo-forested valley — but overall he seems ok with that.
Of course the Punch Me Panda does resemble an anime character more than wildlife, whereas Hug Me Panda is slightly more realistic; or, as realistic as the experiment needs it to be.
[Harry Harlow, Surrogate Mother Experiments, 1957 – 1963]
But let’s remix the mashup. How about a guy in a panda suit on the streets of Brooklyn, acting like an actual panda: eating bamboo, sleeping, snurfling around intent on its own agenda. Performance artists could work in collaboration with animal behaviorists and field biologists. Of course a panda’s “own agenda” would itself be a mashup, as outside of zoos and suits they do not live in Brooklyn.
We tend to use the uncanny to mimic ourselves, but we may open up additional valleys to explore by mimicking the other.
[12 Monkeys, dir. Terry Gilliam, 1995]