pulsing abstract shapes that resembled paper-doll cutouts or Matisse dancers. The shapes flickered in and out of recognizable sexual activity—scored to excerpts from The Nutcracker—creating an effect that critic Margaret Hawkins described as "Fantasia meets Fritz the Cat". Others deemed it a clever upending of assumptions about animation, pornography and elite art that deflated the charged cultural and legal discourse around pornography, returning to its basic, sometimes clumsy, originating act. With her three-channel video Installation Love Me Not (2001), Ruttan considered the concealed intentions in intimate physical expression. She captured three different couples tickling one another to exhaustion, heightening the emotional charge as they traded roles of aggressor and victim by shooting close with an encircling camera and manipulating the playback speed. Inquiries into aggression and war After 9/11, Ruttan's interest shifted to questions about human aggression and rationality, often in comparison to animals. The video work Impersonator (2005) explores George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's notion that human reason is shaped by the specifics of human bodies, and thus, on a continuum with animals rather than separate from them. Facing videos show a cat pacing the perimeter of a room and a man mimicking the cat; the disparity between the innateness of the cat's actions and the man's mimicry reinforces how embodied behavior is. The video Lapse (2005) projects a large, slow-motion close-up of a man's face as he bursts in rage and then calms in cognition of the act, foregrounding the dislocation between the two emotional states. Primate works In 2004, Ruttan became interested in evolutionary biology and primates—humanity's nearest biological relatives—as a means of understanding humans. Her mixed-media drawings, Individuation in Bonobo Grooming Habits (2006), documented her discovery (in three different communities) that bonobos in captivity express themselves through distinct, individual "hair styles." The series slyly compares species, while entertaining the idea that habits of individuation and self-adornment might represent, like toolmaking, legitimate intelligent behavior involving socialization. "Fringe Dwellers" (2007) stemmed from bonobos' endangered species status; Ruttan photographed them in human spaces, imagining them as an immigrant group struggling to integrate into human culture. Her "Bred in the Bone" works (2008) paired videos and photographs of primate social interactions that she shot at Wild Animal Park with like images of people in order to problematize assumptions of human rationality. Ruttan's research eventually took her to the work of primatologist Jane Goodall. She was fascinated by the account of