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Entertainment

Tamagotchi Pets Inspire Virtual Animal Installations

Unlike the 90s fad toy that just turned 15 years old, Alinka Yakubenk’s video installation Tamagotchi speaks to the reality that some day animals may only exist virtually.

Remember Tamagotchi’s? The virtual pets that had to be fed, taken care of, cleaned up after and micromanaged so they wouldn't die. Believe it or not they still exist, just turned 15-years-old and still have a lot of owners addicted to their upkeep (though now the computerized eggs come with a pause or on/off switch).

Over the years Tamagotchi’s have been repurposed as anime, inspired iPhone apps and computer games, weird humanized knock-offs, and in the case of Russian-born Alinka Yakubenk, they've inspired art.

Tamagotchi is a series of urban video installations that also feature virtual animals, but unlike the pixelated pocket-sized creatures, Yakubenk’s projections resemble actual animals—beautiful, phantasmagorical apparitions that she projects around the metropolis.

With this series, she wanted to expose the irony of a peaceful coexistence between wild animals and humans, while in reality "many of them are endangered because of human action. This project wants to show that in the future animals may only exist digitally."

Maybe we should channel the obsessive energy we use to spend on our virtual pets and instead focus it on protecting endangered animal species. As beautiful as the apparitions may be, they certainly invoke a haunting perception of the future.