In ‘Meeting’ (1976 - 78) a muzzled Alsatian, pinned down by a bright spotlight, is observed through a glass screen apparently undergoing interrogation or indoctrination. Words are projected onto screens and a battery of sophisticated equipment is ready for further tests.

The dog’s alarm is relayed in recorded sounds of uncertainty, suspicion and anxiety.

The inhabitants of Alphaville are conditioned and adapted to their artificial city, but Masi’s animals are clearly held against their will - captives restrained by various devices such as cages, barriers and stockades, prisoners of a human agent whose pleasure they anxiously await. Stuffed by the taxidermist in life-like poses, theirs is the state of suspended death shared with the laboratory victim,or the death-in-life of the zoo or battery farm animal, or of the urban pet - animals whose lives are fashioned and articulated for our convenience.

‘In the United States’ writes John Berger, ‘it is estimated that there are at least forty million dogs, forty million cats, fifteen million cage birds and ten million other pets.’ They live in our environments according to our rules, leading a way of life that may be as harmful to us as it is to the animals we have imprisoned. ‘The small family living unit,’ Berger continues, ‘lacks space, earth, other animals, seasons, natural temperatures, and so on. The pet is either sterilised or sexually isolated, extremely limited in its exercise, deprived of almost all other animal contact, and fed with artificial foods. This is the material process which lies behind the truism that pets come to resemble their masters and mistresses. They are creatures of their owners way of life.’

The inhabitants of Alphaville, subdued by drugs and high temperatures into a waking somnabulance which allows for no experience of basic and spontaneous feelings such as anger, desire, frustration or love, exemplify the constraints of urban living taken to an extreme. They must kill the animal in themselves in order to function as smoothly as robots and fulfill their role in the social machine.

New York apartment dwellers, suffocated by central heating that they can’t regulate or switch off and drugged by TV and tranquilisers are similarly constrained. If we do not control the beast within ourselves, society will do it for us. The film one Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest can be seen as an analogue of how the anarchic, the criminal, the insane and the racially ‘inferior’ are restrained by internment, drugs, therapy, shock treatment and lobotomy. In this light, Masi’s animals also read as metaphors for those aspects of ourselves that have no place in the urban life. In early video pieces the artist himself appears as the victim of technology that his is unable to control. His animals are under surveillance. What role are we, the audience, then offered? Do we, through our own act of voyeurism, become identified with the team of observers - Big Brother’s henchmen? By passively watching rather than acting, are we implicated in their guilt? At a time when surveillance has become a powerful weapon of control in real life, can the bystander, any longer, claim innocence or neutrality?

Through paraphrasing aspects of contemporary life, Masi’s installations raise uncomfortable moral questions. But if by implication, identification with the human aggressor is unacceptable, empathy with his victims sparks off a chain reaction of discomfort. Rats, for instance, are classified as vermin. Their presence in sewers of our cities is a cause of alarm, giving rise to popular myths about mutants, resistant to all known poisons, that are so large they can only be killed by polecats. Rats are the evil lurking in the cellars of our individual and collective unconscious, always in danger of escaping into the daylight - monstrous and out of control. In Camus’ The Plague they symbolise moral and social disintegration. In our sewers they epitomise the sickness at the very foundations of our society. If the Wang advert and Masi’s installations offer a glimpse of the Hi-tech utopia, his rats read as a symbol of the reality that underpins the dream - crime, unemployment, and inner city decay. His rats are caught and caged, but to be ‘caught like a rat in a trap’ is, according to the saying, to sink to a state of abject self-loathing and despair.