BORTOBY is clearly animal-like, but is impossible to define well. One can see a lion-like body, crabs feet and devils, but also a transformer robot or a monstrous creature. BORTOBY is monstrous in other respects as well, for instance in its diluting of different media. It is exactly this crossover and the doubt that comes with it that is intriguing and that Nick Ervinck constantly returns to when he is looking for the subtle border between abstraction and figuration, the suggestion rather than the definition of an idea. Ervinck is fascinated by the possibility that, in the future, children might create their pets out of a mix of artificial, biological and robotic elements. The desire to create non-existing animals is clearly related to the 'God games' he liked to play as a child. These games reveal a basic human need to keep control over our surroundings and the need to reconstruct the past. There is this age old strange mixture of wanting to keep life under control, combined with this headstrong need for fantasy. Creating monsters thus is our human condition. You can see this in cave drawings and fairy tales, image puzzles and 3D games. Ervinck likes to connect this to his love for science fiction and games as well. So the idea of the monsters goes from mythological animals to Xmen, Batman, Superman, Stargate, Aliens, cyborgs, robots, the Hulk, Frankenstein, …