Dazzle Camouflage

Dazzle Camouflage was a strategy first deployed by the British on their warships during WWI. Credited to zoologist John Graham Kerr, the idea was not to conceal but to confuse perception by painting the ships in disruptive, jarring patterns so that the ship’s direction of movement, scale and distance of remove became less legible to the enemy.

Here Pleistocene era creatures are subject to dazzle camouflage in the context of the mediated environment.

Dazzle-Cam strikes me as a compelling area of investigation because it:

•Represents a life-and-death utilization of aesthetic concerns.

•Suggests that aesthetics are at root a matter of abstracted biological camouflage

•Highlights the pivot point involved in rewilding and de-extinction – i.e.: is the animal emerging from extinction or receding further into the past, is the mediated environment the de facto landscape wild creatures must now breach for their survival?