1.

In 1937, the U.S. Army Air Corps issued “Circular Proposal X-608,” a list of military aircraft performance goals centered on intercepting and destroying enemy aircraft-bombers at high altitudes. To meet these demands, Lockheed designers debuted the P-38 Lightning, a twin-engined heavy fighter that became one of World War II’s most prolific aircraft, flying more than 130,000 missions. Manufactured inside the camouflaged Lockheed factory in Burbank, California, nearly 9,000 P-38s formed a fleet that shot down over 1,800 Japanese aircraft, more than any other American fighter. Shortly after the P-38’s debut in 1941, it came to be known as “the fork-tailed devil,” a translation of der Gabelschwanzteufel, its formidable nickname coined by German forces.

A few months before the P-38’s introduction, amidst the mobilization of industry in the service of the war, Harley Earl, GM’s lead automobile designer, took his top designers to the Selfridge Air Base outside of Detroit to view a model of the aircraft. Though the base was still classified at the time, officials granted research access to Earl, alongside other industry leaders who put their mechanical expertise to patriotic use. It was on this trip that Frank Hershey, one of GM’s designers, became infatuated with the P-38’s dual vertical tail fins. Immersing himself in design possibilities that incorporated a similar fin treatment to a car’s bumper, he ultimately conceived of the late, great Cadillac tailfin. Following the debut of tailfins on the 1948 Cadillac, the first postwar model, the style quickly became the norm, growing more theatrical with each model and lingering until 1965. In 1950, Cadillac reported sales of over 100,000—record-breaking for a luxury car line—leading Fortune magazine to declare, “Probably never before has one material object become so much the focus for so many of the aspirations that propel the American ego.”

Indeed, by the late ’60s, the Cadillac immediately conjured wealth and the elevated status of its owner. With each model becoming ever longer, sleeker, and more opulent, the car garnered the nickname “land yacht,” apt for cruising the ribbons of highways that snaked across a country frenetically coming into its own.

2.

In 1972, the San Francisco-based architecture collective Ant Farm was given a list of eccentric millionaires. Hoping one of these millionaires would fund a future project, Ant Farm sent out proposals, in the form of artistically rendered postcards, to potential sponsors across California and the Southwest. As a collective, Ant Farm was committed to dissecting phenomena surrounding American consumerism and mass media, staging interventions and producing large-scale installations that ridiculed capitalism, exposed the absurdity of contemporary television, and used spectacle in the service of social satire. Operating under the influence of utopian ideals and other drugs, Ant Farm served—according to member Chip Lord—as an “art agency that promotes ideas that have no commercial potential, but which we think are important vehicles of cultural inspection.”

Their most monumental work, Cadillac Ranch, which brought much to bear on a literal interpretation of the term ‘vehicle,’ materialized after prospective benefactor Stanley Marsh 3 (who believed Roman numerals were pretentious) responded positively to the collective’s postcard outreach for funding.

3.

A businessman and heir to the Marsh Enterprises oil and gas fortune, Stanley Marsh 3 had gained a reputation for both his unpredictable and eccentric behavior as well as his large-scale art commissions in and around his native Amarillo, Texas. These commissions included Robert Smithson’s Amarillo Ramp, completed by Nancy Holt, Richard Serra, and Tony Shafrazi after Smithson died in a plane crash while surveying the site in 1973; Andrew Leicester’s Floating Mesa (1980), a cluster of sky-blue panels installed along the side of a mesa to make it appear as though the mesa’s upper half is suspended in air; and a series of street signs, installed throughout Amarillo in the 1990s by the collective Dynamite Museum, that bear cryptic messages such as “Life is a dream that keeps me from sleeping,” “Passports expire and so do invitations,” and “The roaches in my kitchen tremble.” In response to criticism, Marsh once declared, “Art is a legalized form of insanity, and I do it very well.”

In March of 1974, Marsh received a postcard from Ant Farm in which they proposed Cadillac Ranch, a work chronicling the evolution of the tailfin by featuring ten Cadillac models from 1949 to 1963, buried nose-first into a patch of land near the old Route 66, itself a major progenitor of America’s love affair with the automobile.

Marsh famously responded to their proposal, “It’s going to take me a while to get used to the idea of Cadillac Ranch. I’ll answer you by April Fool’s Day. It’s such an irrelevant and silly proposition that I want to give it all my time and attention so I can make a casual judgment of it.” By June of the same year, Ant Farm and Marsh celebrated the completed installation of Cadillac Ranch, executed within their $3,000 budget: the cars, sourced by scouring auto junkyards and used car listings, averaged $200 each. Marsh threw an opening party for two hundred friends to enjoy guacamole and gin and tonics under white tents erected in the dusty desert. Members of Ant Farm wore tuxedos while the daughter of Amarillo’s Cadillac dealer placed plastic bouquets next to each car. After the artists doused the 1949 Cadillac with a bottle of champagne, Cadillac Ranch was declared officially open and shortly began to garner national attention.

The monument serves not only as an ironic toast to American postwar consumerism but also as an ethnographic exhibit of sorts, putting on display the Cadillac’s immense cultural baggage. “We were having fun,” Marsh recalled in an interview on an Amarillo news station, adopting the insouciant tone that so often accompanies outlandish wealth, “and we thought it’d be fun to play with the Cadillac tailfin. And we didn’t have any deeper, serious motive; we were having fun working hard.”

4.

Then-college student Malcolm Brenner arrived at Floridaland in the same year Ant Farm installed Cadillac Ranch. Contracted to photograph the amusement park’s popular dolphin show, he maintained personnel-only access to the dolphin pens, often dipping into the water to cool down alongside the dolphins. According to later interviews, soon after Malcolm’s employment at Floridaland, Dolly—the only female dolphin in the show—began to display what he interpreted as signs of desire: rubbing her underside alongside his body and grazing her teeth on his chest.

There is precedent for this sort of human-dolphin courtship. In the mid-1960s, only a few years before Malcolm’s time at Floridaland, Margaret Howe Lovatt, a naturalist interested in human-animal communication, moved to the island of St. Thomas to study in a secluded, state-of-the-art facility run by John Lilly, a counterculture figure working in marine biology and neuroscience. In the late 1950s, Lilly conducted research on dolphin brains, presenting data at scientific conferences that suggested dolphins have a human-like capacity for language due to their highly complex nervous systems. Lilly’s research was picked up by Earl Ubell, New York Herald Tribune’s science editor, resulting in grants from NASA, the Office of Naval Research, and the National Science Foundation. Soon enough, Lilly found himself hosting audiences with the likes of J. Edgar Hoover and representatives from the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Defense, all curious about his experimental attempts to control dolphin behavior by implanting electrodes within their brains. Lilly eventually participated in confidential government meetings to discuss how his research might relate to human mind control. Though these meetings never resulted in conclusive tests (as far as the public knows), Lilly’s research contributed to the inclusion of dolphins within the US Navy’s Marine Mammal Program, which today still trains the animals in asset recovery, underwater mine detection, and infrastructure defense.

At Lilly’s Communication Research Institute on St. Thomas, Margaret began an intense research regimen intended to foster interspecies communication in English between her and Peter, a male dolphin at the facility. Frustrated by Peter’s slow progression in English and convinced that spending all of their time together would accelerate their ability to communicate, Margaret cordoned off a sector of the pool from the other dolphins, engineering a half-aquatic, half-terrestrial environment where she and Peter would cohabitate. Soon into their shared living arrangement, Peter began exhibiting signs of sexual interest in Margaret. In response to Peter’s attempts to act on these urges, Margaret sent him back into the larger pool, an elevator ride away, to spend the day with the female dolphins. However, as these urges grew more frequent, the process of transporting Peter via elevator became too disruptive to the Institute’s ability to carry out their research. Margaret conceded to simply taking care of his urges on her own for, as she saw it, the sake of science. “It was sexual on his part; it was not sexual on mine, sensual perhaps,” Margaret explains in a documentary about her time at the research facility. She continues, “I was there to get to know Peter; that was part of Peter.”

Similarly, in Floridaland, Malcolm experienced episodes of intense flirtation from Dolly. Recalling instances in which Dolly grew increasingly violent toward him, nearly drowning him when he refused to match her desires, Malcolm eventually chose to dismiss the cross-species component of the situation, equating it with any routine flirtation with a woman: “If this was a woman would I come up with these rationalizations and excuses?” In contrast to Margaret’s justification of scientific efficiency for handling Peter’s sexual tendencies, Malcolm openly professed his zoophilia and intense love for Dolly, with whom he consecrated their courtship toward the end of his time at Floridaland in an experience he describes as an “intense sense of merging with [Dolly] on every level: emotionally, mentally, physically, spiritually. It’s really like we stopped being two individual creatures and became one creature that was making love with itself.”

5.

Guillermo del Toro’s 2018 film The Shape of Water presents an eerily similar narrative of a human/non-human love story facilitated by a government-funded research facility in the early 1960s. Elisa, a mute cleaner at the classified laboratory, falls in love with a supernatural aquatic creature held there for testing amid claims that the creature’s biology may hold technological secrets potentially valuable to Cold War-era military research. Witnessing the mistreatment of the Amphibian Man by the army generals patrolling the lab, Elisa smuggles him out and harbors him in her home’s bathroom, where the couple eventually copulates.

In one scene, Colonel Strickland, one of the army sadists, attempts to torture the Amphibian Man, provoking the creature to slice off two of Strickland’s fingers. His power is called into question after this defeat; Strickland later strides into a Cadillac dealership, where a salesman convinces him to purchase a Cadillac DeVille: “Four out of five successful men in America drive a Cadillac,” the salesman taunts. The following scene shows a smug Strickland cruising down the highway in his new purchase. With his bandaged hand gripping the wheel, Strickland has taken ownership of an alternative finned entity—the Cadillac—a fully controllable object with a cultural cachet that promises to void any doubt of the colonel’s power.

6.

Inspired by John Lilly’s research, Ant Farm members dove into studies surrounding interspecies communication and habitation. In 1975, the group published drawings in Esquire detailing their scheme for Dolphin Embassy: an expanded sculpture-cum-utopian platform built for engaged exploration into interspecies communication via the cohabitation of dolphins and humans.

In these first renderings—titled DOLØN EMB 1 (nicknamed Research Vector John C. Lilly, or, for short, RV John Lilly) and DOLØN EMB 2—Ant Farm proposed a triangular watercraft replete with living quarters for the scientists, a control room for navigation and data analysis, and a half-water/half-ground atrium that would open out onto the ocean.

In 1976, the New South Wales Institute of Technology invited Ant Farm on a lecture tour across Australia, arranging appearances in Brisbane, Melbourne, and Sydney. Following an artist talk in Brisbane, a student whose father owned a dolphinarium in Surfers Paradise approached the collective with an offer to visit the facility. Reorienting their Dolphin Embassy project to this sliver of Australia’s coast, Ant Farm submitted a proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation, which agreed to fund the project.

The sketches for Dolphin Embassy bear, in their rendering of the pneumatic sail that would orient the watercraft, a formal resemblance to the Cadillac tailfin—a vestige, of course, of the P-38 aircraft.

By assigning their project the ideology that accompanies the designation of an “embassy,” Ant Farm indicates that radical diplomacy is inherent to the work. While embassies are traditionally conceived of as safe havens of familiarity within foreign territory, Dolphin Embassy, in its quest for the interspecies equilibrium around which Donna Haraway has structured her “companion species” model, mandates a space in which neither dolphin nor human is the foreign agent; half-land, half-water, Dolphin Embassy acts as a littoral zone, liminal in its composition but generative in its ability to foster meaningful connection. In essays and articles published in Australian newspapers to raise funds for the project, Ant Farm member Doug Michels consistently affirms the project as “a manifestation of...trans-species diplomacy,” hinting at grander ideals of “future co-evolution.”

Focused on establishing a system of communication between humans and dolphins through Dolphin Embassy, the project differs from Lilly’s original endeavors to mediate this interspecies communication. While Lilly, with the aid of Margaret Howe Lovatt, strove to teach dolphins English, Michels structured Dolphin Embassy’s research on devising a shared cross-species language based on “social patterns common to both man and dolphin—touch, affection, compassion, play acting,” so that exchange remains mutual and equitable. Indeed, architecturally lodged into the vertex of one of the watercraft’s three hulls was the “Brain Room,” a space equipped with underwater computers trained on sonar recognition software that could be used for dolphins and humans to jointly steer the vessel. In Haraway’s When Species Meet, she explains that human and nonhuman nonlinguistic communication fundamentally engages a “material-semiotic means of relating.” Bodies that interact without the constraints of a shared language, she posits, rely on what is evident within time and space, thus producing an understanding that is unobscured by the ease with which a common language allows one to lie. In the context of this analysis, it is a critical detail that Elisa, who falls in love with the Amphibian Man in The Shape of Water, is mute.

While this form of interspecies communication is certainly conducive to platonic connection, Michels’ enthusiastic call for “co-evolution” hints at a form of filiation more closely tied to Malcolm Brenner’s relationship with Dolly. Dolphin Embassy’s logo—which adorns all of Ant Farm’s correspondence, articles, and sketches that pertain to the project—shows an intertwined human and dolphin, cavorting in a posture that recalls how Malcolm describes his and Dolly’s positioning during intercourse. The implicit undercurrent is that Michels may have envisioned this interspecies diplomacy founded not solely on a shared space and a common language, but also on physical intimacy and an eventual collective genetics.

7.

A fire erupted in Ant Farm’s San Francisco studio on August 7th, 1978, destroying nearly ninety percent of their artistic production. Soon after, the group officially disbanded and plans for Dolphin Embassy were scrapped due to an inability to secure funding that Ant Farm’s dispersion only further exacerbated. Michels spent the rest of his life investigating quixotic models for interspecies habitation. Emboldened by the notion that humans could utilize their brainpower more efficiently in low-gravity settings, Michels worked for nearly 25 years on Bluestar, a scheme for a space station inhabited by dolphins and humans. In 2003, he was working in Sydney on a documentary about whales when he fell to his death while climbing to an observation point.

Michels’ fall mirrors other falls within this convoluted, conspiratorial history: falls from grace, falls into despair, and falls off of proverbial high horses. As Michels looked to zero gravity research, so did John Lilly, inventing the sensory deprivation tank after his research facility was shut down due to objections to his injecting LSD into dolphins.

This shutdown forced Margaret to separate from Peter, who was transferred to a lab in Miami. Malcolm left Floridaland as the amusement park neared its closure, and Dolly was moved to an aquarium in Mississippi. In both cases, shortly after these transfers, the dolphins were found dead at the bottom of their pools. Unlike humans, dolphins breathe voluntarily; Peter and Dolly’s drownings indicate a conscious choice to stop breathing.

In The Shape of Water, Elisa and her accomplices manage to smuggle the Amphibian Man out of the government facility. As they race through the parking garage, their van slams into Strickland’s new Cadillac, a clear symbolic destruction of the alleged arbiter of masculine success. As a stationary signifier, the totaled Cadillac exposes the artifice of the grandeur that its sleek mobility was meant to bestow.

Back on the American highway, this very mobility was being called into question. In 1965, political activist and future presidential hopeful Ralph Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile, which cataloged a series of pedestrian injuries and deaths as a result of piercing and puncturing by tailfins. Citing a study into the industry, Nader noted that the American car consumer annually pays about $700 for stylistic changes made to each subsequent Cadillac model; comparatively, automobile manufacturers allot about twenty-three cents per car toward “design and evaluation of crash safety improvements,” a claim that compromised the integrity of Cadillac’s brand and expedited the stylistic decline of the tailfin.

Ant Farm’s utopian ideals suffered from a comparable demise. As Cadillac Ranch grew in renown, its image traveled, serving as productive fodder for advertisements, restaurant murals, and an eponymous Bruce Springsteen song. Although officially anti-privatization and anti-consumerist in their approach to art-making, Ant Farm members capitalized on these mass media appearances, first by copyrighting the image of Cadillac Ranch and then by engaging in a series of copyright infringement lawsuits throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s. The vehicle they once proclaimed as a peak example of capitalist planned obsolescence became a catalyst of their own ‘selling out.’

While the Lockheed P-38 has been out of production since the end of WWII, the US Navy Marine Mammal Program continues to manage around seventy-five dolphins trained in mine detection, object recovery, and attack missions. In declassified reports, the Navy has revealed that these dolphin agents have been deployed in combat zones in the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, and the Iraq War. Impressive for their mental acumen and superior hydrodynamic physiognomy, dolphins are used as models for dubious experimentation in the technological advancement of intelligent design. Motivated by the allure of a military operative who embodies the necessary physiognomy for both terrestrial and aquatic dominion, perhaps classified government agencies have already begun scheming practical applications of John Lilly’s mind control research to encourage procreation between dolphins and humans as a means of raising this new type of trans-species agent. Perhaps Malcolm and Margaret served as undercover or unwitting operatives, persuaded with mind control into gauging the potential progeny of these sexual interactions. Doug Michels’ fatal fall may have been accidental, or it could have been engineered by CIA agents who feared his calls for co-evolution had ventured too far into public consciousness as ‘art’ rather than military strategy. Despite the wane of Cadillac’s fin treatments, the Navy and CIA’s collective, prolonged interest in dolphin-human hybridization in the service of military prowess suggests an everlasting—if conspicuously sexually-charged—inclination toward a tail-finned tomorrow.

A version of this text was published in Nerve Meter, edited by Lynsey Robertson, in 2019.