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[ HOMINIDAE ]

VIEW ARTWORKS THAT MODEL SEXUAL AGGRESSION IN APES

HTML / CSS / Javascript / P5.JS Built in 2020 View transcript Hominidae is a series of interactive autonomous artworks that illustrate sexual violence and aggression seen in the Great Apes.

However, at no point do I try to justify sexual violence as “good” or “correct” simply because similar behaviour is seen in non-human animals and is therefore natural. Just because something is a certain way that it ought to remain the same way is a flawed argument. The fact of the matter is sex and reproduction is unfair. It wasn’t always the case. The first organisms to evolve were in the sea, unable to move. They’d spew out millions of gametes into the ocean with the hope that they’d meet. But that was hardly an efficient mechanism of reproduction, and eventually evolution separated the two sexes. The female built an egg with sufficient nutrients in it and the male worked to go find that egg.

But once evolution proceeds, the whole animal can walk over and find a mate. If the eggs are already laid, the male simply needs to lay the sperms right on top of them, an act that hardly requires the amount of energy that the female is putting into her eggs. That’s where we start seeing an inequality between the two sexes. Females make a few eggs, and her eggs are very expensive and rare, but males still make many, many sperms, and his sperms are plentiful and cheap. Once they take these two different evolutionary routes, different reproductive strategies come into play for the both of them.

Males compete with each other for dominance and use that dominant status to mate with the female. And females try to find the male with the best genes for their offspring, and in species where males fight for dominance, females choose the winners. The male that wins possesses some genes which allow him to win these fights—he's big and strong and has sharp teeth. And the female will choose the most violent male to father her children because then her offsprings will also become these big, violent & successful males.

What happens then is that both the male and female reproductive strategies collude in increasing the violence a little bit in every generation. If the males are fighting each other, and reproductive success depends on winning these fights, then the males will tend to get larger. Which is when a second strategy for reproductive success comes into play, and that is that the male doesn’t need to fight the other males; he is bigger and larger than the female so he can just coerce the smaller female into mating. If this trait enters a species, the females begin choosing a male who is the most successful at coercing females for their offspring to inherit the same traits.

Of the five species of primates in which sexual violence has been observed, four of those are the Great Apes. And Hominidae was conceived as a collection of artworks that computationally simulate the different forms of sexual violence seen in these ape species.