Homotherium is an interactive animation-based artwork which takes the form of a journey. It’s a cautionary tale of truth and how we form it. The story unfurls through a series of digital flipbooks – waymarkers in the landscape – founded on revived ‘Ice Age’ creatures, their bones and the notebooks of the cave explorers who unearthed them.

It’s all bundled up in a smartphone app (for both iPhone and Android phones) which you can find here.

Its central character is the elusive, enigmatic – and extinct – Scimitar-toothed Cat Homotherium latidens, a close cousin of the more familiar Sabre-tooth. As you collect flipbooks and unlock the story, so you will gradually assemble your own Homotherium which, when you’ve collected all 13 books, will spring to life once more.

Quite when the Homotherium went extinct is – and always has been – a matter for hot debate. It’s a scientific story that is still revealing itself piece by painstaking piece. What we can say with certainty is that the beast, like many predators, appears to have held a powerful attraction for us Homo sapiens over many millennia. And that when it first became the subject of intense scrutiny by the Victorian gentlemen explorers of the emerging scientific order, extinction itself was not recognised as a mechanism.

The story of the Homotherium and the Cave Hunters (as these august researchers were styled by nineteenth century society) reflects the twists, turns and pitfalls in the emergence of science as we know it today. But like all great stories it speaks universally; of time, change and flaws in the human condition – hubris, jealousy, greed and the manipulation of truth that is often their consequence. It also shows how the mechanisms of science have evolved to safeguard against the impact of these foibles – and so why we should respect its particular truth today.

Thus we might say that the the Scimitar-toothed Cat, the vessel of this story, is a truth machine of our making – bringing to mind William Blake’s Tyger, forged in the fire:

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat.
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp.
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?