Recently, I was in Montreal and luckily I had my camera when I stumbled onto this sculpture again. This time, I got to see it at night! Then later, I found him a “friend.”
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My ability to anthropomorphize the statute along with you (co-anthropomorphize?) kind of scares me a little. It reminds me of my Cultures of Technology class when the CS department loaned us an Aibo. Immediately we marked it gendered as male and attributed emotions and motivations to it, as if it had true artificial intelligence, which, of course it did not.
Do you think the tendency to anthropomorphize is an evolved characteristic that grants humanity some sort of benefit, perhaps the ability to domesticate animals better?
That’s actually a fascinating question that I would love to see some research on!