Talking to the animals…

Prophet grew up in a house full of animals, and to this day her mother regularly mistakenly calls her ‘Marmaduke’, ‘Ella’ or ‘Queenie’ – the names of various family pets. Like many people, Mama Prophet talks to her animals more than she does to other humans, and she probably imagines that they are talking back, each twitch of the tail and nod of the head transmits as clearly as speech. TechnoSphere’s beasties used to ‘talk’ to humans via email, occupying the space between trained domesticated animal, and wild thing. We cannot control them, but like TV researchers filming big cats, or marine biologists studying whales, we name them and monitor their behaviour.

It could be argued that the horse was the first domesticated animal, the first wild creature to be tamed. The famous horse Xanthos, meaning “tawny”, was one of the two horses of Achilles, and was supposed to have been able to speak, thus preceding “Mr. Ed the Talking Horse” of l950’s TV by more than two millennia. The idea that Achilles’ horse talked suggests that there could have been a special kind of communication between horse and human at that time. The directed evolution from wild, to tamable and breedable horse, to a rideable horse that works closely with its human rider in both hunting and warfare, has taken millennia. Is Achilles’ talking horse the final point in this long process?

The new TechnoSphere creatures will start off by communicating using images, you’ll see them running around in real-time in ways we could only dream of in the 1990s. But, hey! If you tell you’d like emails from them, or sms messages we’ll see what we can do!