this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
34 points (90.5% liked)

Asklemmy

43916 readers
1531 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Was wondering this in celebration of the fact dolphins have officially been confirmed to have their own translatable proto-language, a longtime speculation we kind of already knew and which fulfills a friend's prophecy. It's common to train animals to perceive and perform art, and/or for them to already have a sense of what it is. Give an elephant a brush and a canvas and they'll paint glyphs of other elephants, chimps can draw avant-garde "masterpieces", and pigeons can even be trained to recognize the difference between good and bad art.

Dolphins surpass all of these animals in intelligence. But there's just one problem, they live underwater. And water tends to destroy most art mediums. Paper canvases shrivel, residue washes and floats away, hammers made for sculpting tend to strike softer, sculpting ice floats, fashion requires sources of fabric you can't get underwater, you get the idea. A dolphin's life is Murphy's Law for an artist. But for an artist, if there's a will, there's a way, and humans are known to challenge what we expect to be ways in which art can be created, such as with crop circles, Nazca lines, shadow art, and soap sculptures made from microwaving soap into molds. What improvised method/means of artform would you coach dolphins to do who want to be artists if you had to do so in some way?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] dddontshoot@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

Wikipedia says that they "lack short wavelength sensitive visual pigments in their cone cells", so they don't see blue as well as we do... Which isn't surprising really.