Wildschweine in Berlin

MJ and Mahal using the iPad

For the last six months, three orangutans at the Milwaukee County Zoo have had the pleasure of playing with a donated iPad a couple times a week, and guess what? They love it.
"We show them the iPad, and read them stories or let them have different apps," said Jan Rafert, curator of primates and small mammals at the zoo. "We don't let them hold them, but they can do some of the paint apps by sticking their fingers through the mesh."

Read more: HERE

Becoming animal: Timothy Treadwell

Nicolas Primat

In addition to B's becoming animal. Luckily i don't have a job, so i had time to go to the becoming animal lecture on Rietveld. There was this video by Patrick Munck of the work of the artist Nicolas Primat.
Shortly about his work, he enclosed himself in a cage with monkeys, sometimes in testfarms but also in Holland in Apenheul with bonobo's, to study them. Sometimes for over a year. There's is not much to find on the internet, but here are some links where you can catch a glimp of the work. Unfortunately he died last year.

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And here's a video of the dutch Philosopher Rene ten Bos about Men and Animal (unfortunately in dutch)

Nicolas Primat was the only artist in the world who specialised in working with monkeys and apes. This long-standing interest has included ongoing residencies at the Primatology station, CNRS, Marseille, working with baboons (Papio anubis), at the Pasteur Institute, Guyana, working with squirrel monkeys (Saimiri sciureus) and at Apenheul, Holland, working with bonobos (Pan paniscus).
Working to enrich the lives of monkeys in captivity, Primat showed a sensitive and intuitive approach to the animals he collaborated with. Noting that primate caregivers always wore footwear, he would venture into the habitat of the monkeys barefoot, letting them crawl over him and play with him. This playful nature informed his work, but it had a serious intent behind it. Primat used artistic interpretations of his interaction with other species to provoke thought into our attitudes and understanding of other species, in terms of how we might communicate with one another and what this revealed about similarities and differences and how this related to our attitudes to medical research and other uses of animals.
Primat started working with animals at the age of 14 as a young farm-worker. He saw his rural background and early intuitive contact with animals as integral to his work. Primat’s work began with a residency at CNRS Marseilles, working with tribes of baboons. His short film Portrait Du Famille showed the artist being groomed by the tribe after many months of gaining acceptance. He spent long periods of times with the animals learning to communicate with them in order to be accepted. Primat’s practice included video, sculpture, photography installation and performance. He exhibited internationally, most recently in the exhibition 'Neo-Futur' at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Les Abattoirs, Toulouse (2008), a major one-person show at the Chateau De Taurines, Aveyron (2007), curated by Pascal Pique, and finally in The Arts Catalyst exhibition Interspecies, at Cornerhouse, Manchester. He stimulated a new debate in the world of art and science about the way we humans regard our closest relatives and was an inspiration for the Interspecies exhibition.

Accept your inner ape

In the summer of 1960, 26-year-old Jane Goodall arrived on the shore of Lake Tanganyika in East Africa to study the area's chimpanzee population. The trip meant the fulfillment of Jane Goodall's childhood dream. mission being to advance the power of individuals to take informed and compassionate action to improve the environment for all living things. In this 4 minute video she compares the chimpansee community with ours: they have good mothers and bad mothers too.