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Not sure? You can figure that out by visiting the "Animal Nature" exhibition at Carnegie Mellon's Regina Gouger Miller Gallery, running through Oct. 2.

An exhibition of works that push the boundaries of animal representation, it contains a video game you can play with your own DNA and those of others, provides an opportunity to interact with cyber-animals and allows visitors an opportunity to feel what it's like to be everything from a cow out in a field to a goat trapped in a well.

The exhibition developed out of an ongoing Web project titled "Criminal Animal" -- www.criminalanimal.org. The idea of "Criminal Animal" evolved from a graduate seminar in art taught by artist Lane Hall at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee during the spring of 2003.

Through creative art projects, journal entries, critical writing and participation in a regional conference on zoos, Hall and participants explored complex issues in animal representation: the animal body, the trace of the animal, animal agency, animal presence, animal voice and the cultural constructions that create our conceptual framework of what is "animal."

The Web site is intended to bring together a wide range of artists, critics, scholars and activists engaged in the broad field of animal studies for the same purposes. The site serves both as a clearinghouse for information and resources, as well as a means by which visitors can access the artworks and ongoing research of artists, scientists, philosophers, and cultural critics currently investigating the nature of "the animal."

The exhibition, on other hand, brings a lot of what is on the Web site into real-world terms. For example, one can easily download the excerpts from Catherine Chalmers' creepy cockroach video, "American Cockroach," from the Web site, but far better to be in the first floor gallery sandwiched between two larger-than-life screenings of excerpts from the film -- one in which cockroaches skip and scamper to a bongo back beat and another in which a live cockroach is burned at the stake.

The former will likely amuse, but the latter should evoke everything from feelings of disgust to compassion for the little critter being tortured to its death by fire.

As disturbing as that particular excerpt is, get on the elevator to the second floor and one will find just the opposite in "Oral Fixations," a humorous and quirky computer animation that plays continuously on a large flat-screen TV set up in the elevator.

Created by Carnegie Mellon professors James Duesing and Jessica Hodgins and their students, it features a bucked-tooth woman who flosses her teeth between chompings on hams that come into her kitchen via a conveyor belt. Wacky and weird, the piece is endlessly entertaining, especially when the woman does a little dance after each flossing.

On the second floor are the aforementioned video games and installations. With the help of an attendant, visitors can place cell samples they collect by swabbing their mouths or pulling a hair into an electronic microscope. Then they are asked to either explore areas of their own cell samples, match cell samples to digital photographs of previous visitors, or guess from which body part the cell samples came.

The video game/installation is titled "IntroSpection" and is by Steven Wilson, an author, artist and San Francisco State University professor who explores the cultural implications of new technologies.

In similar interactive fashion, an installation set up on the opposite side of the second-floor gallery allows visitors to step inside a virtual world and interact with cyber-animals created by Serbian artist Dorijan Kolundzija.

Titled "Parainfluenza Digitalle 4" the piece allows visitors to use a familiar instrument -- their bodies -- to engage in playful contact with projected animal-like creatures that do not really exist, blurring the boundary between real and digital, human and technological.

In a lot of ways, the piece is very much like the popular interactive video works by New York artists Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv on permanent display at the Pittsburgh Children's Museum, only a bit disturbing due to Kolundzija's rather prehistoric-looking creatures.

Also on the second floor, visitors can get a chance to feel what it's like to be a cow amongst other cows grazing in a field when confronted with an oversized projection of cow close-ups by Norwegian video artist Per Maning as well as experience what it's like to be a goat trapped in a well in the installation "Fleece" by CMU associate professor of art Andrew Johnson, which projects a video of a trapped goat into a makeshift well set up in the gallery.

Finally, on the third floor, visitors are confronted with even more unsettling works, not the least of which are life-size prints of giraffe pelts by Hall and collaborator, Lisa Moline, that are tacked to one wall, and a mixed-media wall-sculpture by Canadian artist Lyne Lapointe that features a farmer's sign once used for target practice. Both works, of course, drive home the idea of being a target.

But most engaging on this floor are several videos by London-based artist Edwina Ashton that feature people dressed in bug costumes, trying to navigate human domestic terrain as if they really are the mealy bugs and maggots they resemble.

Are Ashton's videos an interesting take on animal perspective? Of course -- point taken. But in actuality, it's pretty darn funny watching a larger-than-life-size centipede try to eat a bowl of cereal.

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