Crosstalk

Gabrielle Hoad  | Crosstalk (still from work in progress) | 2021

Made for Creative Reactions Nottingham with Dr Rebecca M Hock, Research Fellow, School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, Crosstalk is a digital animation that responds to research into associative learning at Nottingham University. 

Testing assumptions about the human brain using laboratory rats is common practice in medical research; most of us probably owe at least some aspects of our health and wellbeing to lab rats.  It's part of a wider interdependency between our two species.  

My short animation mingles images of human and rodent heads so that they are difficult to tell apart. A sense of malleability in the imagery points to the research team’s interest in inhibitory learning: how healthy brains are able to adapt and ‘apply the brakes’ to unhelpful reactions.

In neuroscience, ‘crosstalk’ refers to the way that electrochemical signals in the brain may affect others. But there is also a sense in which crosstalk (ie incidental communication) between rats and their handlers is part of everyday life in the lab and an acknowledgement of their agency outside the mechanics of experimentation. 

While anthropomorphism (ascribing human characteristics such as intention to nonhumans) is often discouraged in science, its usefulness in reframing our relationships with animals has been highlighted by a number of contemporary thinkers including Vinciane Despret and Eileen Crist. In dealing with this difficult subject matter, I have also been immensely grateful for Donna Haraway's wisdom in her chapter 'Sharing Suffering' from When Species Meet (2008).  

Image of white rat adapted from original by Jean-Etienne Minh-Duy Poirrier under a Creative Commons licence CC BY-SA 2.0

Image of rat brain MRI adapted from 'The SIGMA rat brain templates and atlases for multimodal MRI data analysis and visualization' by D.A Barrière, R. Magalhães et al. Nature Communications Vol. 10, Article 5699 (2019) under a Creative Commons licence CC BY 4.0

Crosstalk is a Sci-Art collaboration exhibited online as part of  'Creative Reactions' for the national Pint of Science Festival 17-20th May 2021