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?

  • OldManBOMBIN@lemmy.world
    10·
    2 months ago

    I’d follow the Dr. Lily program and take a bunch of LSD and hire some gal to whack em off. If nothing else, we’ll get some Pollock knockoffs.

  • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
    5·
    2 months ago

    The fuck, I’ve been looking forward to this for like my whole life, literally whales and cetaceans language being translated, and I totally missed the fact that someone in Iceland figured it out already?

    Was there zero freaking announcements of us discovering intelligent language from animals?

      • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        2 months ago

        it is, whoops.

        i know they’ve been studying dolphin with AI for a while now and grabbed the first article because I thought this announcement was real.

        now I’m pretty confused, I guess the joke article is satirizing like one step further than the actual progress they’ve made with translating cetacean languages.

        • Rikudou_Sage@lemmings.world
          21·
          2 months ago

          AFAIK, we have managed to translate some words we taught them, meaning they’re capable of learning new words and using them.

      • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        2 months ago

        plus familiarity with using shitty AI voices.

        That’s how people know you’re a journalist.

    • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      You’re referring to the parody story. The real thing did happen, just much more recently and being a much less exciting process.

      • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        2 months ago

        oh, they’ve been studying dolphin language with AI for so long, I just grabbed the first article.

        so who actually discovered it?

        isn’t the process the same? they used AI to analyze dolphin sounds? I know they’ve been doing this for cetaceans for a while now.

        • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.eeEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          They have. It’s a team effort pioneered by Denise Herzing and is half-way to its end. It’s not like we discovered anything that parallels us though, the small-talk the team has studied with is more like “my name is X” or “let’s hunt that fish” or “I’m bored”, basically tamagotchi levels of communication and only just enough to get some ideas.

          • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
            2·
            2 months ago

            I’m only semi-jokingly putting forth the assertion that those limited sentences are mostly “us”.

            thank you for the link.

  • OldManBOMBIN@lemmy.world
    2·
    2 months ago

    If you want a more serious answer than my LSD statement, the obvious answer is synchronized swimming and bubble tricks

  • Nefara@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 months ago

    Dance, and music. It could probably be argued that dolphins already dance and don’t need any extra encouragement. I bet a dolphin would love to play with a sound board that could play tones when buttons are pushed. Object arrangement, like someone else said. Sand patterns maybe. They can also interact with things out of the water too so painting isn’t so ridiculous, they just don’t have the dexterous appendages that elephants or chimps do.