Maybe shorts as in pants.
It would've been cool if I had a collection of pants and every chapter is just a picture of a pair. I mean, when you think about it, we collect clothes throughout our lives like those people that hoard all the good washroom...
In 2005, the Australian group, Gelitin, created a massive knitted rabbit sculpture named Hase and placed it in the Italian Alps (1) on Colletto Fava for the public to enjoy. Little ladders allowed visitors to climb up and on the rabbit, admiring it from close up. On the outside, it looks like a rather lovely idea for an art installation. So how come I find Hase so deeply perturbing? While Hase sits on top of a hill, the answer I seek lies deep in an uncanny valley.
Hase appears to be a velvet rabbit with minimalistic limbs and features, closely resembling a child's toy. The most obvious thing about Hase is the way it lies on the hilltop. The rabbit appears to have been haphazardly tossed there, its limbs akimbo. Its eyes bulge out of its face and its mouth is open in a permanent scream. The placement of these on its face is also irregular, like they're halfway in the process of falling right off. It is clear that someone discarded it there, or at the very least, was part of the process that ended up with it being there. Guts spill out of the side of its body, a portion of its large intestine unwinding beside it.
In the ten years following its implementation, Hase has slowly degraded until little of it remains. Looking on Google Earth, all that is left is a couple clumps in areas where the stuffing might have been more full. Hase has been reabsorbed into the ground and is actively still going. Its color has changed from a typical pastel pink to a duller shade that distinctly resembles flesh. This slow decaying, paired with the organs that spill out of its side, can only suggest one thing: Hase was once a living creature that is now dead. This is supported by the presence of guts and the expression and posture that Hase has taken, its limbs splayed out.
Why is the suggestion of life unnerving? To begin, Hase is quite large, being 60 m (200 ft) in length and 6 m (20 ft) in height along its sides (2). It's larger than the visitor center situated next to it on the hill. The idea of there being something of that scale wandering the Earth is worrisome, and not only is it out there, but we have never even seen it. This is the concept of the unknown, one that is made good use of in horror games. Logically speaking, without knowing what the threat looks like, we have no idea how to deal with it. Psychologically speaking, our brains can do a lot worse than whatever a game can come up with. Hase is a single entity of an entire system that we have no idea of — a system of massive beings that we never even would have known of without the discovery of this single corpse. It's the same sensation that comes with finding a creature from the deep sea wash ashore on some local beach.
Not only that, but Hase still resembles a toy. It does not look like something that would be alive. It is something that should not be alive, and yet there is no denying that it once was. This disconnect is one that is once again used in horror games such as Poppy Playtime (3) and, to an extent, Bendy and the Ink Machine (4), where these toy-like creations are very much alive and roam the same halls as you. Everything says that these beings should not be talking, and yet they are. Hase functions in the same way. It should not be moving, it should not be breathing, and it should not be dead.
So, Hase is a corpse lying in a corner of our world. Visitors stumble upon it like discoverers, and just like discoverers, they don't think too deeply into what they've found. Gelitin encouraged visitors to climb onto the rabbit and to rest, hence the little ladders. People were able to walk over the fabric and even climb into the mouth. This is the second reason as to why Hase is unsettling: we care not about why it is here, or how it ended up here in the first place. We treat it as nothing more than a sight-seeing opportunity. Hase is a massive being, so big that it nears being incomprehensible, and yet it has been normalized to the extent that visitors can comfortably climb on its decaying corpse. The name itself is simple: hase, the German word for hare. However, its simplicity also suggests that we don't know anything about it, and thus we can only liken it to the closest thing we recognize, which is a hare. But that? That is not a hare. If we look at it physically, taking a step back from its implications, we see that Hase is a creation made by an Australian group, placed on an Italian hill, and named in the German language. Its presence quietly affects us on a global level.
Hase is set to disappear in 2025, our current year. Once this year passes, there will be nothing left to mark its presence or the fact that it was even there at all to begin with. We go back to our initial ignorance. Our little reminder of something beyond our comprehension fades, and we let ourselves slip back into the false security we've garnered. After all, ignorance is bliss, is it not?
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