Adventures of Percival

The first installment in Dis Voir’s new illustrated fairy tales for adults, The Adventures of Percival is based on the classic probability proposition that a chimpanzee randomly typing will eventually type a Shakespeare sonnet. Here, McIntosh, a gardener-mathematician (and spiritual cousin of Baron Munchhausen), decides to take the fable seriously, and with the assistance of a typewriter and a chimpanzee called Percival, undertakes to enact the experiment. Naturally things don’t go as planned, as the chimpanzee proves to be less compliant than expected and bizarre behavioral mergings occur between man and animal. Nicolas de Crecy’s comic drawings sometimes illustrate and sometimes contradict Senges’ narrative, or inveigle themselves between his lines like a creeper. Inspired by research in animal behavior led by Dominique Lestel, and by the work of the landscape artist-gardener Alain Richert, Senges’ tale of interspecies cognition makes a conscious nod towards contemporary debates within the cognitive sciences.