[1] Nicholas Currie, “Holidays from Being Human,” LiveJournal, Click Opera (blog), December 2, 2006, para. 2.

[2] Currie, para. 2.

[3] sarmoung, “Holidays from Being Human [Comment],” LiveJournal, Click Opera, December 2, 2006.

[4] Sako Kojima, An interview with a human hamster, interview by Milène Larsson and Luca Deasti, Vice, May 5, 2009, para. 2-5.

[5] Sharon Kinsella, “Cuties in Japan,” in Women, Media, and Consumption in Japan, ed. Lise Skov and Brian Moeran (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996), 251.

[6] Elizabeth Legge, “When Awe Turns to Awww... Jeff Koon’s Balloon Dog and the Cute Sublime,” in The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness, ed. Joshua Paul Dale et al. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 6.

[7] Joshua Paul Dale et al., eds., The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness (New York: Routledge, 2016), 9.

[8] Debra Benita Shaw, Technoculture: The Key Concepts (Berg Publishers, 2008), 65.

[9] Organic farming grows produce without pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, genetic modification or radiation.

[10] Off-the-grid houses are autonomous houses in remote locations that do not rely on municipal water supply, sewer, natural gas, or electrical power grid. The idea has been popularized on television in shows like House Hunters Off the Grid and Building Off the Grid.

[11] Christopher D. Wraight, Rousseau’s “The Social Contract”: A Reader’s Guide (London; New York: Continuum, 2008), 12–13.

[12] Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 10–11.

[13] Baker, 169.

[14] Baker, 168.

[15] Baker, 166.

[16] Baker, 170.

[17] Baker, 167–69.

[18] Baker, 170.

[19] Baker, 170.

[20] Baker, 172.

[21] William Cronon, “The Trouble with  Wilderness; or, Getting   Back   to   the   Wrong   Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996), 8.

[22] Dennis Weiss, “Post-Human Television: Part I,” in Post-Screen: Intermittence + Interference, ed. Ana Moutinho et al., Post-Screen Festival (Lisbon: Universidade Lusófona, 2016), 198–99.

[23] Baker, The Postmodern Animal, 45.

[24] Kojima, An interview with a human hamster.

[25] Lisa Le Feuvre, “Introduction: Strive to Fail,” in Failure, ed. Lisa Le Feuvre (London: The MIT Press, 2010), 16.

[26] Baker, The Postmodern Animal, 172.

[27] Ryan Duffy, “The Japanese Love Industry,” Vice, December 25, 2013, para. 1.

[28] Hiroshi Aoyagi and Shu Min Yuen, “When Erotic Meets Cute: Erokawa and the Public Expression of Female Sexuality in Contemporary Japan,” Text, April 1, 2016.

[29] Kirsten Cather, “Must We Burn Eromanga? Trying Obscenity in the Courtroom and in the Classroom,” in The End of Cool Japan: Ethical, Legal, and Cultural Challenges to Japanese Popular Culture, ed. Mark McLelland (Routledge, 2016), 2.

[30] “Fursecution,” WikiFur, the furry encyclopedia, August 18, 2006.

[31] Yoke-Sum Wong, “A Presence of a Constant End: Contemporary Art and Popular Culture in Japan,” in The Ends of History: Questioning the Stakes of Historical Reason, ed. Amy Swiffen and Joshua Nichols, 1 edition (Abingdon (UK): Routledge, 2013), 15.

[32] Maya Kimura, “Drawing National Specters: Makoto Aida’s DOG and The Giant Member of Fuji versus King Gidorâ,” Sightlines, no. 7 (2008): 95.

[33] Matthew Penney, “‘Human Dogs’, Aida Makoto, and the Mori Art Museum Controversy,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, March 11, 2013, para. 5.

[34] Sako Kojima, “Performance,” sakokojima.info/, accessed June 13, 2019.

[35] Ashcraft, “This Isn’t Kawaii. It’s Disturbing.,” para. 1-3.

[36] Ugly Feelings (Harvard University Press, 2007), 271.

[37] Kojima, An interview with a human hamster, para. 9.

[38] Kojima, para. 9.

[39] Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 272.

[40] Sako Kojima, “2016 Project Hamster Collection - A Hamster Works and Collects Art,” sakokojima.info/, accessed June 13, 2019.

[41] Joshua Paul Dale, “The Appeal of the Cute Object: Desire, Domestication, and Agency,” in The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness, ed. Joshua Paul Dale et al. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 37.

[42] Kōga Yun, Loveless, run in Monthly Comic Zero Sum (Tokyo: Ichijinsha), since 2002.

[43] Sianne Ngai, “Our Aesthetic Categories,” PMLA 125, no. 4 (October 1, 2010): 951.

[44] Sianne Ngai, “The Cuteness of the Avant‐Garde,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 4 (2005): 838.

[45] Dale, “The Appeal of the Cute Object: Desire, Domestication, and Agency,” 51.

Years ago, I came across a LiveJournal post by Momus—the Scottish musician, essayist, and known Japanophile who often wrote about Japanese art and pop culture in his famous, now-defunct blog, Click Opera. The post, titled “Holidays from being human,” was about The Reason Why I Became a Hamster, a performance by Japanese artist Kojima Sako. [Video 1] First executed in Osaka in 2002 for one week, The Reason Why I Became a Hamster was re-enacted several times since then: at the Maison Folie Wazemmes in Lille (four days), on occasion of the 2004 European Capital of Culture, and at Collection Lambert Avignon (one week); at Kunstraum Bethanien in Berlin, in 2012 (one month) and the at Japanisches Kulturinstitut in Cologne (two days), in 2013; in Vilnius, Lithuania (two days); and at the Behaviour Festival Glasgow, in 2015 (five days), which also spawned the short film “A Hamster,” with footage from the performance. In the performance, Kojima, then in her twenties, dressed up in a hamster suit and lived for a week inside the window of a gallery. [Figure 1] She ate giant sunflower seeds, chewed on wood and paper, scratched the walls, sent darting looks at the visitors and generally behaved as “hamsteresque” as a girl in furry rodent cosplay possibly can (in Glasgow, the performance included a human-scale spinning wheel). [Figure 2a, b] The video recording of The Reason Why I Became a Hamster immediately became the cutest thing I had seen all year.

But as in most things kawaii, there was an underlying dark side to the cuteness of Kojima’s performance. According to Momus, by embodying the hamster, Kojima “took a holiday from being human,”[1] allowing herself to escape the tight social expectations weighing on young Japanese women, as well as “the bombardment of words and information”[2] assaulting the lifestyles of our contemporary, post-industrial societies. Momus’s solemn explanation, contrasting with Kojima’s adorable actions and appearance, raised more than a few eyebrows among the readers of Click Opera. Indeed, a cursory look through the comment section of the post is enough to retrieve somewhat antagonistic views on Kojima’s “solution” to her human troubles. One commentator, for instance, is unimpressed with the artist’s choice of animal, suggesting that living as a fox in the wild would make for a more convincing escape:

Others express their dislike along the same lines, pointing to the futility of Kojima’s performance. “The sad thing is, even though Kojima was trying to escape being ‘a Japanese female artist in her 20s’, she ended up confirming that very stereotype,” someone points out. “The stereotype for Japanese females in their 20s is to be unrelentlessly cute.” And adds: “Maybe I just can’t handle that much cute in one sitting.” Hinting at the possible (if unintended, according to Kojima) sexual overtones of the piece, someone else writes that “Hell, if she was naked, she’d at least be appealing to my instinctive needs... that’d be a million times more ‘animal’ like than wearing fuzzy underwear and chewing on paper for a week.” For these commentators, the cuteness and domesticity of Kojima’s performance appear to be the main point of contention, working against Kojima’s intentions and, ultimately, depriving the piece of artistic seriousness and depth. 

Adding fuel to the fire, Kojima, interviewed by Vice, expands on the politics of The Reason Why I Became a Hamster, explaining that it was, in fact, the product of a prolonged period of depression:

Kojima’s depressing account of her personal experience with mental illness is seemingly at odds with the cuteness of her performance. Especially since, instead of a realistic hamster, her costume resembles a kigurumi (from kiru, “to wear,” and nuigurumi, “stuffed toy”), i.e., a cartoon-character suit. [Figure 3] The get-up gives off the appearance of a stuffed toy, complete with a hamster-eared hood and enlarging contact lenses for big, blue eyes. Kojima’s arms and legs remain naked, which highlights the comical difference between the artist’s skinny members and the bulky fursuit, adding an extra element of humor. However, those familiar with the roots of cute culture in postmodern Japan will not be surprised about Kojima’s dark rationale for The Reason Why I Became a Hamster. As demonstrated by Sharon Kinsella in “Cuties in Japan,” the kawaii is primarily a youth culture mobilized against adulthood, which Japanese young men and women perceive as a bleak period in life, equated with responsibility, self-discipline, tolerating severe conditions, hard work, and obligations.[5] This same notion is brought forth in a more recent volume on The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness (2016), suggesting that today’s pervasive cute aesthetics is a symptom of widespread “political depression.” According to the authors, cuteness allows us to cope with the various “malign velocities of contemporary capitalism,”[6] ranging from neoliberal precarity to the loneliness experienced by individuals in the Digital Age:

This retreatism often rests upon the “return to a state of nature,” Jean‑Jacques Rousseau’s concept for the natural condition of humankind before the advent of the political state and its inequalities.[8] To some extent, contemporary trends like that of organic farming[9] or off‑the‑grid living[10] reproduce this Rousseaunian notion of nature as an Arcadia away from human civilization. Kojima’s statement that “today’s standardized society is safe and we’re spared from hunger, but we’re not living” echoes this idea, conceiving a “state of nature” devoid of coercive relations and oppressive hierarchies.[11]

In contemporary art, the representation of wild animals in their natural habitats has been a vital moving force of environmental art, for instance, in the collaborative practice of British artists Olly and Suzi, who have abandoned their studio to paint and draw endangered predators in the wild.[12] But also, rawness itself is perceived to be a desirable, even indispensable, attribute of art. This is because, as artist and writer Steve Baker puts it, “for many contemporary artists, the way they deal with animals reflects the way they see themselves as artists: it is part of their self-image.”[13] Thus, the status of the domestic animal, especially the house pet (as opposed to the working animal), in contemporary art is by and large a negative one, perceived as “an aberrant creature, a living betrayal of its properly animal potential or trajectory.”[14] In The Postmodern Animal (2000), Baker traces a genealogy of this “fear of the familiar”[15] evoked by the pet, from Nietzsche’s claim in Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science, 1882) that humans “as tame animals… are a shameful sight,”[16] which perfectly fits not just Kojima’s “shameful” positioning of herself as a flesh commodity on display, but her shaming in Click Opera; to novelist and art critic John Berger’s 1977 essay “Why Look at Animals?” or Deleuze and Guattari’s adage that “anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool.”[17] Baker concludes that such “lashing out at domesticity”[18] stems from the fact that companion animals, in their ambiguous position between animality and humanity, bring about the specter of art’s harmlessness. In his words,

The romanticization of wilderness is the reason why, for the commentators of Click Opera, it is the noble fox in the wild and not the ignoble hamster in a cage that would more appropriately fit Kojima’s “holiday from being human.” However, it is debatable whether any animal, be it a fox or a hamster or whatever, when absorbed into the sphere of human art, is ever capable of such feat. As Baker puts it, “once inside the sad safe space of the art gallery, neither Hirst’s preserved tiger shark nor Beuys’s coyote can any longer carry the full weight of its wilderness.”[20] There is also an underlying gender politics at work in the stigmatization of the pet as an animal stained by domesticity in a post-humanist landscape that is, more often than not, coded masculine. Both nature and civilization have been constructed as feminine and masculine, depending on the ideological alignment of the writer, and such femininity or masculinity deployed to serve both conservative and progressive agendas. In particular, as argued by environmental historian William Cronon, there is a whole “macho” tradition for which “the comforts and seductions of civilized life were especially insidious for men, who all too easily became emasculated by the femininizing tendencies of civilization.”[21] The figure of the metrosexual is an excellent example of this, as an urban heterosexual man who perceivably lost his manliness and became feminized through an excessive attachment to traditionally female occupations, like shopping and fashion. On the opposite side of “high” wilderness and “high” (military, industrial) technology rests the domesticity of housewives and their “low” technologies, such as kitchen appliances and the television.[22]

Even when artists do portray the domesticated animal, it is often in ways that reveal its fundamental untameness. For instance, despite very different in their purpose and execution, both Oleg Kulik’s testosterone-filled performances as a rabid dog and Paula Rego’s Dog Woman engage with “man’s best companion” to defy human authority and rationality. In the first case, during a group exhibition in 1996, Kulik was chained to a sign labeled “dangerous,” attacking gallery visitors who ignored the warning and even damaging other artists’ works. [Figure 4] The second case, Rego’s 1994 pastel drawing, shows a powerful woman squatting down and snarling, as she embraces the raw physicality of her human condition. [Figure 5] In fact, the point made by Kulik and Rego that animals are only ever “temporarily ensnared by domesticity”[23] is also made by Kojima in The Reason Why I Became a Hamster. When asked by Vice about “why did you choose to be a hamster? If you were a kitten you could just cuddle up and sleep or play with fluffy stuff all day,” the artist brings up the hamster’s supposedly wild nature as justification. “I like hamsters because they’re weak and vicious at the same time and they have this cool, stone-faced approach to humans. You can’t really tame them,” she says. A particularly Rousseaunian claim follows Kojima's statement: “I’ve had three pet hamsters since elementary school and I always felt guilty for keeping them in a cage. Hamsters, just like humans, are meant to live in the wild.”[24]

While Kojima’s insistence on wildness may appear forced or out of place, it raises an interesting hypothesis that hamsters may be the embodiment of the pet’s abjectness. Hamsters are “aberrant creatures” not just because they are pets, but because they are failed pets. Hamsters are adorable yet weak and violent, with an infamous penchant for intersexual aggression and cannibalism. They are unintelligent, with poor social skills, mostly solitary and will fight fiercely if housed together. They have short life spans and generally lack the dignified aura of other companion mammals, like dogs and cats. As I have shown at the beginning of this section, the comments in Click Opera likewise verbalize the “failness” of Kojima’s performance. As one commentator puts it, “it comes across as an attempt to be super cute but ends up as incredibly mindless and annoying,” expressing a dislike both for the performance’s gimmicky nature, and Kojima’s inability to subvert the racial stereotype of Japanese women as submissive, dependent, and tame. But the premise behind The Reason Why I Became a Hamster is, to begin with, laughable and absurd: attempting to escape social constraints by dressing up in a cute hamster costume is bound to disappoint. Considering this, “failure” is perhaps the whole point in Kojima’s performance. The realization that “all individuals and societies know failure better than they may care to admit—failed romance, failed careers, failed politics, failed humanity, failed failures”[25]—resonates deeply with both Kojima’s incapacity to function in society and the Japanese identity, structured around collective failure and defeat. Murakami Takashi’s 2005 book Little Boy, precisely, promoted the notion that Japan’s obsession with the kawaii steams from the (historical, psychoanalytical, affective) trauma of World War II, as well as the political depression of the Lost 20 Years (Ushinawareta Nijūnen, the two decades from bubble’s collapse in 1991) marked by economic stagnation and slumping birth rates.

Another important aspect at play in Kojima’s performance is the phantasmatic overlap between the pet shop and the gallery, suggesting that “while artists want art to be wild, it usually isn’t.”[26] These two different spaces under surveillance —one for tamed animals, another for the “wild” avant-garde—are thus connected by an aesthetic of failure, linking the window cage to the white cube, the pet shop’s transparent displays to the voyeuristic looks of potential gallery visitors (i.e., customers) peeking from the outside. [Figure 6] Furthermore, the fact that the glass window showcases a young Japanese woman in a costume that leaves her arms and legs bare inescapably prompts a series of sexual connotations (however unintended) to surface. On the one hand, the Japanese sex industry has a reputation for being the site of bizarre practices, mixing cuteness with erotic or pornographic settings. For example, Tokyo’s cuddle cafes (where costumer go to hug and cuddle with girls)[27] or the ero-kawa (“erotic kawaii”) fashion trend[28] have helped to perpetuate a longstanding Western tabloid interest in “Weird Japan.”[29] On the other hand, Kojima’s costume is suggestive of the furry fandom and their fursonas. Although furries are not intrinsically sexual, on the Internet, they have gained a reputation for creepy sexual deviancy, a phenomenon known as “fursecution” (persecution of furries).[30]

Moreover, cuteness is the leading aesthetic quality separating Kojima’s performance from Kulik’s and Rego’s “dogs,” who are thoroughly un-cute and whose untameness is plain for all to see. Arguably, The Reason Why I Became a Hamster is closer to the “apocalyptic cute”[31] of artist Aida Makoto’s ongoing DOG series, which started in 1989. [Figure 7] Aida—known for his deliberate use of shock imagery of sexual and violent character—depicts beautiful girls resembling aidoru singers in archetypal nihonga (“Japanese-style paintings”) landscapes. The girls, however, are naked, collared and leashed, while walking on all fours with their arms and legs amputated, most likely a reference to the limbless sex slaves in Nagai Go’s infamous manga Violence Jack from the 1970s.[32] Aida’s DOG series has sparked a flurry of protests, namely on the occasion of his retrospective exhibition at the Mori Museum, Monument for Nothing (November 2012-March 2013), in which the People Against Pornography and Sexual Violence issued an open letter that called for the show to be withdrawn for its misogynistic pictures.[33] Although Kojima’s performance differs from Aida’s explicit sexual images, both artists employ cuteness to address negative feelings of aversion, be them body horror or the more existential terror of The Reason Why I Became a Hamster, as pantomimic recreation of the “city dweller whose life is helplessly formulated in the daily routine of work-eat-sleep.”[34]

The Reason Why I Became a Hamster will hardly elicit the angry reactions prompted by Aida’s paintings, unless, perhaps, for the waste of funding on a costumed performer. But a cursory look at Kojima’s oeuvre, particularly her sculptures of cute animals in sadomasochistic settings, reveals the artist’s familiarity with the aesthetics of kowa‑kawaii (“creepy cute”), guro-kawaii (“grotesque cute”), and kimo‑kawaii (“disgusting cute”).[35] [Figure 8] Kojima’s hamster performance, however, moves away from the explicit violence and sexuality present in both her sculptures and the other artists’ aforementioned “dogs.” She does not snarl, sexual gratify, or otherwise seem to acknowledge the presence of humans. This “mindlessness” is so disconcerting that, as we have seen, it prompted one commentator in Click Opera to suggest that she should at least be naked for the performance to acquire meaning by catering to “animal needs.” Indeed, Kojima’s performance is “boring” and “pointless” when compared to other famous performances where (male) artists dress up as animals. In The Reason Why I Became a Hamster, there is no expedition into the Great Outdoors, like Fischli and Weiss’s Der Rechte Weg (1983). Nor is she like Japanese artist Miyake, Shintaro, who makes his drawings while wearing various kawaii costumes, thus producing something while performing. [Figure 9]

As Kojima explains, “while doing the performance I’m almost mindless, as my head goes empty when I mimic a hamster’s movement,” regarding her process. “When I move quickly, my heart beats faster and my feeling of shame disappears as the world outside gradually becomes meaningless to me.” This description agrees with Sianne Ngai’s concept of “stuplimity,” “a concatenation of boredom and astonishment—a bringing together of what ‘dulls’ and what ‘irritates’ or agitates”[36]; and irritate it does, considering the generally negative impact of The Reason Why I Became a Hamster on Click Opera readers. Moreover, when told by the Vice interviewer that “Hamster life looks like so much fun and everyone is smiling at you!” Kojima responds that “Actually, the quick movements are very difficult and tiring for a human-size hamster.”[37] Kojima’s reply addresses the issue of cuteness as a form of affective labor, which also takes a toll on the performer’s body. “Since in my mind I’m a hamster throughout the whole performance, it isn’t until after that I feel my muscles ache and realize that my front tooth is broken,”[38] she adds. As such, The Reason Why I Became a Hamster not only results from the performer’s state of mindlessness, but its “repetitive, minor exhaustions”[39] are contrary to our ingrained expectations of a sublime experience in the face of nature’s greatness. It offers no opportunity for displays of heroic action in the wilderness, only the “minor” bodily damage (muscle ache, the broken tooth) often resulting from occupational injuries in pink‑ and white-collar jobs.

In 2015, Kojima embraced the more playful and extravagantly cute side of her performance in a 3-day workshop called The Reason Why We Become Hamsters, in Osaka, in which Kojima and a group of children made their own hamster suits and then performed in them. [Video 3] One suspects that this debasement of “high art” reduced to an adorable kids’ play party would further aggravate Click Opera’s commentators. In 2016, Kojima continued to explore these relational aesthetics with Hamster collection - A hamster works and collects Art, a 3-month project at Tokyo Wonder Site Berlin’s residency program. [Video 4] Hamster Kojima curated an exhibition of Berlin-based artists and, in exchange for their participation, undertook whatever task they asked her to perform—organizing their room, cutting their hair, cleaning their windows, cooking Japanese food, babysitting a child, and so on.[40] [Figure 10] Both projects embraced an iyashikei (“healing”) approach to art and its role in sociality outside the capitalist art market, suggesting a shift in the way Kojima initially employed cuteness in her performance. Indeed, tameness in art may be a “shameful sight,” but a cursory look at the horrors that circulate in the news every day is enough to make one realize how humans in their wildest, unregulated states often turn out to be cruel, predatory creatures, rather than romantic adventurers. The uses of Kojima’s hamster character in The Reason Why We Become Hamsters and Hamster collection seem to engage more thoroughly with scholar Joshua Dale’s vision of cuteness as “a form of agency: namely, an appeal aimed at disarming aggression and promoting sociality.”[41]

Nevertheless, by executing many household chores like cleaning, cooking, and babysitting, all in her hamster suit, Kojima’s actions resonate with popular comedy anime series like Itō Risa’s Oruchuban Ebichu (1991-2008). Ebichu is a faithful housekeeper hamster who looks after her master’s house, an office lady in her late twenties, but always ends up involved in overtly violent, scatological, and sexual situations, and is often punished and beaten. [Figure 11] Although Kojima’s actions are candid, her voluntary subjugation to barter economy preserves some of the perverse undertones of her earlier performances. In Japanese pop culture, there is a whole lineage of becoming‑pets that use the device of kemonomimi (“animal ears”)—animal features, such as ears or tails, applied to human bodies like cosplay accessories—to problematize these ambiguous politics of power and domination. [Figure 12] One of its most intriguing uses is Loveless (since 2002),[42] a shōnen-ai battle manga by Kōga Yun, in which boys and girls are born with cat ears and tails that fall off once they lose their virginity. The association between “petness” and the sexual innocence separating children from adults is a powerful idea that resonates deeply with the logic of the kawaii. Loveless further complicates it with the introduction of dominance/ submission undertones and references to erotic bondage, as there is no shortage of bandages, collars, chains, loops, leather corsets, etc. in the series. [Figure 13]

Whether domination and submission are sexual or post-Fordist, this “blend of tenderness and aggression, fun and unfun”[43] is a common feature to Loveless and Kojima’s performances. The hamster, a tiny representative of pets, dangling on the borders of tameness and untameness suggests that as Ngai points out, “this powerlessness… makes all art not only seem undignified but even ‘ridiculous and clownish.’”[44] “Undignified,” “ridiculous,” and “clownish” are words that seem to fit the totality of Kojima’s Hamster series remarkably well, from her gallery performances (as seen in the indignation expressed by Click Opera’s commentators) to children’s workshops and the residency project as a little hamster helper. More generally, though, the premise that, as Dale puts it, “cuteness is an appeal to others”[45] is the political basis of all of these becoming-pets; an appeal that delves deep into the cages of human identity and relationality only to gnaw at them from the inside, like Kojima chewing on a sunflower seed until her teeth breaks. Against art’s self-sufficiency, these artists go for broke, seeking our visceral reactions from “aww” to “eww.” 

See in CUTENCYCLOPEDIA – “CGDCT” & “Pastel Turn.”

See in PORTFOLIO – Idle Odalisque.

REFERENCES in Hamster.

CONTENT NOTICE

This entry is potentially disturbing or unsuited for some readers.

Mentions or depictions of excessive or gratuitous violence, mental illness, misogyny,  sexualized violence, and sexual objectification of minors.