Monsters to us, Animals to Nature:
Mixed blood monsters, cats with fish skin, dragons that eat babies...
We see enough of paintings, sculptures and many forms of representations documenting monsters and mythical creatures.
In the early times, these creatures symbolizes a world lead by a pot of no-rules evolution. They are "beings" that indicate characteristics that are "extremely abnormal". Before studies on mythical creatures exist, they are symbols for the "un-explained".
"uphold morality, enforce taboos, connect to divinity, warn against dangers and, most importantly, entertain". Says Simon Young, British historian of folklore.
How do you prove the creatures DO NOT exist?
Jean-Baptiste de Panafieu, author of Creatures Fantastiques believes that - as long as we have 1% of imagination, you are the ability to picture/believe the existence of these creatures. They are only mythical because they are extinct animals.
And in the field of Natural History, using Inductive Reasoning and reference probability - it is possible to derive scientific existence of something that's seemly random.
For Natural History Scientists and Historians, it is vital to avoid two possible behaviors. Skepticism &Sequacious
If we see an animal, we can prove that it exists. But how do we prove if a creature does not exist? In addition, sometimes we also face hyper real fictions. For example: the long tradition of making specimen of rabbits with wings and horns ; Monkey body - Fish tails Mermaids.
Zoology & Cryptozoology
The studies of unknown species are a big part of zoology. While they have been discovering species that are relatively in small scale and has rarely being portrayed in mythical stories, Cryptozoology's focus on the other hand is gigantic mythical creatures.
Legal Protection only for the ones that have names
In the science field, we never know if/how we will be discovering next.
Regardless if certain creatures are real or not, or if it's possible to find them - we can assume that they are extremely rare. Only the animals that have names and known to society receive legal protections. This lead us to our on-going research study for Mythical Pet.
MYTHICAL PET & Ecology
keeping a fictional creature as our pet, we try to normalize abnormal phenomenon. In order to bring up the awareness of Kinship and Ecology. Challenge society's limited understanding of time scale, history and knowledge on the unknown creatures, we would like to evoke conversations on multi-species Co-existence and Eco-diversity.
Tamagotchi and many more: existing digital pets
The iconic Tamagotchi pets took over the world around 1995. "Keep them alive" was THE thing for kids at school after and during class. Other devices, games and apps since then have been promoting the concept of "digital companionship". Sometimes players are the creatures themselves too. But overall, technology keeps challenging and improving, hoping to be one step closer on the "spirit companionship" creation.
A visual diary that archives Mythical Pet from a cultural, kinship and social perspective
We are currently in process of working on a diary archive. Where we started from the stone lion as the first creature that we are keeping as a pet. The lion survives on incense dust; gets sick from no-visit; enjoys a nice night walk.
We invite the audience to learn the creature's characteristic and origins from folk tales, in order to understand why it has certain behaviors if it was domesticated. And how you might want to change your surroundings personally, which potentially lead to bigger societal changes if the creature was real. For example: our stone lion hates the sun, so we need to go to a specific park that has the night walk section for stone lions.
Eventually, we would like to expand and look further into mythical animals from multiple cultures. To re-imagine and speculate 10 different mythical pet scenarios. Together as an archival of diaries, ultimately we'd like more voices in discussing our current policy & structure that lacks of Empathy, curiosity and understanding of a multispecies world.
