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Horned hares are mythic creatures, chimeras, whose appearance symbolizes promise and threat in folktales from across the globe.
In Medieval and Renaissance texts, the Wolpertinger is described as an animal that haunts the alpine forests of Eastern and Central Europe.
In the 1930’s, these earlier tales, inspired the brother’s Herrick to create a taxidermy specimen of a creature they named a jackalope. The brothers claimed to have shot the jackalope in the wilds of Wyoming. Their specimen set off a small craze for jackalope specimens in the United States.
While in the same years, Richard E. Shope, M.D., similarly inspired by old tales of horned creatures, infected cottontail rabbits with shope papilloma virus (SPV) to grow horned like structures. Shope’s research is considered one of the earliest breakthroughs in the study of oncoviruses.
Today, Bio-robotic researchers continue to seek inspiration from Wolpertinger myths in their quest to engineer new drones and robots for military and civilian use.
The cyberWolpertinger I created for the Ukraine Drop draws on this rich cosmology of science, engineering, and myth. It suggests the many ways in which a historic event can haunt collective visions of technology and life well beyond any time and place.
-T.S Halpern