ART FOR ANIMALS
“If art is genuine it is creative revolution regardless of who
looks at it”1
A crowd of apes and monkeys sit clustered upon a box gawping and grinning
and staring at a canvas. They’ve seen nothing like it; or they are bored by it;
or they raise their arms in delight at the general hullabaloo. They are of a
number of sorts, baboons, gibbons and others, all however have the painting as
the primary focus of their attention or reaction. What is on the canvas is
hidden from view, all we see is the gilded side of a carved frame. Gabriel von
Max’s turn of the century comedy in oils, The Jury of Apes2 points
at the trade of the art critic, utter monkey business, but also at the viewer
of art, a mug, an enthusiast, or, in the stare of an ape turned to address the
viewer through half-closed lids, a rare specimen in itself. For apes to look at
a canvas makes the pretensions of those who look with a mind to judge also
minds to be judged, or at least, to be sniggered at.
Pliny the Elder’s Natural History3,
a book which places painting and sculpture amongst an inventory of animals,
plants, and minerals, gives us another story along these lines. In a
competition between two painters in trompe l’oeil technique, Zeuxis and
Parrhasius, face off in front of a crowd. The first artist pulls away the
curtain protecting his work to reveal the most perfectly rendered bowl of
fruit, so lucidly real in fact that a flock of birds immediately descends upon
it and starts to peck away the paint. Impressed, Parrhasius stirs, but does not
move. He simply stands and watches. The annoyed Zeuxis demands that he remove
the curtain from his canvas. The second artist does indeed reveal his painting,
but by stating that he has no curtain to remove, that it is a painting of a
curtain. This painting has deceived the eyes of an artist not a mere bird.
Parrhasius wins the competition and perhaps brought to a temporary close a
current in art which is only just re-emerging, art for animals.
Art for animals is art with animals intended as its key users or
audience. Art for animals is not therefore art that uses animals as a substrate
or a carrier, nor as an object of contemplation or use.4 (Needless
to say given these criteria it does not fall into the category of transgenic
art, with its all to frequent tendency to animal abuse and naive sensationalist
celebration of genetic engineering.) It is not art that, like The Jury of Apes,
that depicts animals for human viewers, or that incorporates animals into
living tableau, but work that makes a direct address to the perceptual world of
one or more non-human animal species. There are only a very small number of
works that make such an address. This essay will make a brief survey of them
and then go on to discuss their implications. Where it differs from Pliny’s
tale is in that it works, not on the level of successful imitation, of setting
up perception as a means by which one is duped, but in rendering perceptual
dynamics as both somewhat more irresolved and more powerful.
A further important category of work that does not usefully fall
into this current are objects such as dog-kennels by celebrity architects (such
as Frank Gehry5)
or housings for birds. Whilst some work in zoo design, notably for Carl
Hagenbeck by Johannes Baader, and the aviary in London Zoo by Cedric Price does
attempt to engage with animals’ behaviours, in a way that Berthold Lubetkin’s
famous double spiral ramped penguin pool at the latter zoo does not.6 Thomas
Schütte installed a work originally entitled Hotel For Birds on
a plinth in London’s war monument congested Trafalger Square.7 Made
of brightly coloured layers of perspex, this is a sculpture in the style of an
architectural maquette designed to catch light, and to act as a ‘public space’
for urban rock doves displaced by a cleansing policy established by a different
branch of the body commissioning the work. (Indeed on installation the work was
re-named Model for a Hotel.) Whilst being of interest, it is primarily a
‘housing’. David Nash, an artist who works with the materiality of wood, and
whose aim is for the work to integrate into natural processes, has made shaped
blocks of oak for use in a small copse, by sheep who gather there to escape the
rain. They use the blocks for “shelter, safety and scratching”8More
recently, the sociology artist Jeremy Deller is using the device of an
architectural competition to produce a design for a Bat House for the Wetlands
Centre in South London.9 Whilst
these are interesting projects, they largely address animals in terms of
ergonomics, making spaces that physically ‘fit’ them.
At the same time, because many animals experience and shape a
locale by literally inhabiting it, there is no absolute distinction between
what is proposed here as art for animals and work that produces scenarios that
animals live in, work on, and complete, or render definitively unfinished.10Equally,
other projects that involve moving animals from one context to another as in
the case of Hans Haacke’s Ten Turtles Set Free (1970) or sorting systems for
animals, as in Robert Morris’, A Method for Sorting Cows, (1967) are assumed to
engage some aspects germane to this project, such as the categorical systems,
including property, to which animals are assigned, but fall outside the scope
of this essay.11 Equally,
durational performances of co-existence with animals are related but sit to the
side of the present text.12
Other areas, which would possibly suggest further development, but
which are outside of the present discussion include the production of visual
material by animals (famously including paintings by chimpanzees or elephants.)
Other perhaps more promising research includes findings that indicate pigeons’
capacity to distinguish between styles of picture making. (i.e. Shigeru
Watanabe’s research that showed pigeons could learn to distinguish between
works by Monet and Picasso and subsequently, that they were able to carry over
this capacity for distinction to categorically related art by Cézanne and Braque.)13
A weakness of some of the main streams of cultural theory over the
past decades is that in its emphasis on the constructive aspects of culture,
biological questions are neglected or considered reactionary. At the same time,
a thread of biologically based research, functioning largely by an
unsophisticated positivism makes any chance of a dialogue between disciplines
and styles of research difficult. There is a certain laboriousness in getting
through the clunky formulations that are dredged up by instruments incapable of
finding anything but what is expected and that are proudly displayed as having
‘explained’ culture. Certain currents in contemporary biology have made an
attempt to perform a ‘land-grab’ on culture, to suggest that biology provides a
base-line level of explanation for all forms of behaviour. Often these are
characterized as being simplistically ‘Darwinian’ in motivation, with
characteristics of culture identified as mere epiphenomenon. It is not
necessary to get locked into simply refuting the shrillest voices or those
advocating the most absolute reductionism as an a priori. But this kind of
argument has not come solely in the form of a landgrab on culture, nor has it
come only from scientists. A ‘recall to biology’ has been a ruse often played
by those in the domain of art discourse who attempt to enforce a ‘shared
symbolic order’ of the kind once supposedly provided by religion.14 I
would suggest that much of this work is a betrayal of the subtlety and
speculative nature of the current of thought set in play by Darwin.
Much of such work prefaces its findings by a complaint. In this
scenario, biological approaches to culture are refused out of hand because of a
conformist consortium of Marxists, poststructuralists, feminists, queers, and
others who bunker culture off from questions of innateness or predeliction.
When Marx has written about species being, Foucault on biopolitics, Cixous on
ecriture feminine, and there is a plethora of more recent research and art
emphasising corporeality, it is unfortunately mistaken to describe those
primarily concerned with culture as somehow assuming that they entirely surpass
biology. Ellen Dissanyake suggests that art is a refusal to ‘grow up’, a
prolongation of the sense of exploring the world for the first time, of
maintaining sensual delight in novel growth and experience, the capacity to
escape from a subordinate role.15 Perhaps
certain participants in science too are undergoing such a thrill in their
discovery of culture, and their entry into culture as a previously taboo
domain. If so, this is entirely to be welcomed, but perhaps they should calm
down just a little. At least, in a society such as ours, for scientists to
borrow the Cultural Studies ruse of presenting one’s arguments as the knowledge
of the oppressed, at least has the virtue of being amusing.
Art for animals intends to address the ecology of capacities for
perceptions, sensation, thought and reflexivity of animals. The capacity for
art is part of the rather mobile boundary line that performs the task of
annihilating the animal in human and in demarcating the human from animality.
The purpose of this text is not so much to legislate upon the placing of this
line, but rather to suggest that the sensual and cultural capacities of various
kinds of being, whether ordered into species or not can be explored and to
follow a few ways in which this has been done. Paul Perry, has installed a
small robotic device to spray Bobcat-urine high up a tree to stimulate an
imaginary of pheremone responses. Natalie Jeremijenko makes a robotic goose,
the aim of which is to set up interactions with a small group of geese, in a
number of other projects she sets up devices for inter-species communication.
Louis Bec attempts to set up a dialogue between two speciated parts of the same
genus of fish. Anthony Hall also works on communications and perceptual
reflexivity with weakly electric fish. Marcus Coates stages a series of actions
with animal materials and behaviours with interaction with other species as the
prime goal. Some of this work is rightfully absurdist, whimsical,
self-trivialising. But all of it moves towards setting up actual, multi-scalar
and imaginal relations with animals that involve a testing of shared and
distinct capacities of perception.
Deleuze and Guattari, following von Uexkühl, Kafka and Maturana
and Varela amongst others, have placed animal subjectivity at the core of their
reinvigoration of thought. In this, they provide some dynamic formulations of
conceptual personae as animal-beings and of animals as engaged in reciprocal
relations of life shaped by colour, growth and habitat formation. In their book
What is Philosophy art and nature are described as being alike because they
combine an interplay between House and Universe, the homely and the strange,
and the specific articulation of the possible with the infinite plane of
composition. ‘Art for Animals’ takes up such work for the category of art.
In engaging animal cultures and sensoria, these projects also make
art step outside of itself, and make us imagine a nature in which nature itself
must be imagined, sensed and thought through. At a time when human practices
are rendering the earth definitively unheimlich for an increasing number of
species, abandoning the human as the sole user or producer of art is one
perverse step towards doing so. More widely, a core process of Guattari’s
writing, one which it amplifies in that of Deleuze is the project of
understanding ecology at multiple scales, from the social, to the medial,
technical and aesthetic, to that of subjectification. This text draws upon such
processes to develop the question of animal-human subjectivation as a cultural
and inventive process. Within a web of interconnected capacities and materials
a set of processes and instances, set-ups, ruses, devices, work to establish
what Rosi Braidotti has called ‘affirmative interrelations’16 between,
not simply a fixed set of innate behaviours and predilections but of the
capacities for becoming that might exist between different forms of life and
aesthetic dynamics.
It is not the intention here to suggest that there is a necessary
continuum between human and animal, a continuum is a figure that implies fixed
ends and a neat metric running between them. Rather, what is suggested in this
initial sketch of a possible field is a myriadic ecology of
perceptual-cognitive sets, some of which my overlap or share functions and
capacities. As the primatologist Frans de Waal notes in his reflections on
culture, “One cannot expect predators to react the same as prey, solitary
animals the same as social ones, vision-oriented animals the same as those
relying on sonar, and so on.”17 Equally,
we cannot expect sensual experience to stay the same amongst members of what is
logged as the same species. Humans for instance have domesticated themselves
since advent of agriculture, with, at the genetic scale, changes in composition
equivalent in the degree of change to that found to be involved in the
transition from wild corn to domestic corn today. In certain populations such
changes manifest in the ability to digest foods associated with a sedentary
mode of life, (such as the developed ability to digest lactose linked with the
unfortunate tendency to eat cow’s milk). At a sensory level, rather than a
genetic one, our habituations tend towards similarly substantial changes: one
recent study for instance suggests that it is possible, with a little
retraining, for humans to acquire an equivalent capacity of smell to that of
dogs.18 Regardless
of whether this is desirable or not, or whether it might also suggest the need
for an uptake of the scenting and smelling habits of dogs, art for animals does
send a tingle along the edges of what we take for granted as our current capacities.
It suggests that we search out and test the discontinuities and overlaps
between our sensual and intelligent capacities and those of others. What would
it be like, for instance, to be able to see just the very edge of ultra violet
in the iridescence of a petal or on the wing of a butterfly? How would such a
change in sensual capacity re-order us, make life bulge? Is there a market for
drugs that temporarily reconfigure nervous and perceptual systems to those of
other species?
Gilles Deleuze laughingly describes the sensorial world of the
spider: a juicy fly can be placed in front of it, it doesn’t care. All it wants
to feel are a few small twitches on the far reaches of its web. Just a few
details, a muttering in the background, that’s what is appetizing. This, says
Deleuze, is the same sense of the world as the narrator of Proust’s “Search…”.
Deleuze himself mobilizes various nonhuman sensoria, ticks, lobsters, dogs,
lice, bees, wolves, bowerbirds, flies, the horse-knight assemblage. Such
creatures become ethological devices to overstep what can be sensed, thought or
said. They are paths of becoming, gravitational lodes of traction which pull
the human out of its skin, and pull the singular animal into the multiplicity
of packs, of evolution and of ecology.
There are a number of ways and particular domains in which such
becoming can be seen to occur, at the scale of brains, that of bodily elements
and organisation, and that of means and kinds of communication, amongst other
things. Paul Rozin for instance catalogues a number of ways in which human
cultural processes and evolutionarily accrued predispositions are interwoven in
the case of food.19 What
such work reveals is that the bodies of individuals in evolutionary conditions
are means by which forms of life scan for potential adaptions, they are also
means by which eco-systems arrange themselves, and the platforms for cultures
to articulate, be experienced, revised and produced. They are in turn worked on
and produced by cultures. Ecologies emerge in a multi-scalar way. What Deleuze
and Guattari argue for is that an understanding of the virtual be added both as
a specific scale within ecologies, as a dimension of relationality that exists
at every scale within such a system, and a diagonal which connects them.
Evolution by natural selection, is often characterised as a
process of the survival of the most fit. Fitness is a relative, and distinctly
processual, term. A whale is fit for its habitat, but, as the current
representative of a mammalian lineage that re-entered the water, it is also the
result of massive and quite possibly awkward adaptational change.20 It
cannot be understood to be perfectly fit, but as the ongoing result of many
interlocking morphogenetic, material and adaptive capacities that may involve
substantial shifts in the use or function of bodily elements. This given, it is
useful to consider the question of the virtual in relation to the way in which
bodies, entities that can be regarded as their components (such as genes or
organs), their aggregates, and those of their products, such as cultures,
explore, adapt to, make adaptations of and co-evolve with and form, ecologies.
It is a commonplace that organs, behaviours or other entities in
ecologies can change or add functions over time. Julian Huxley, in his early
work of ethology, notes that the behaviour of grebes in courtship includes
adaptations and appropriations of movements, such as dives, that might have
primarily developed as feeding movements but which are repurposed as displays
of fitness and of courtship interest. These are elaborately linked and synchronized
in a distinctive and beautiful set of behaviours.21In
a further dislocation of signaling into mimickry across species, when showing
aggression Meerkats, raise and curve their long tails over their backs. In
this, they are thought to be mimicking the posture of their enemy and food
source, scorpions. North American Chickadees (red-breasted nuthatches) are able
to distinguish between the alarm calls of Black Capped Chickadees, according to
whether the species being alerted of is likely to predate them, so the
signaling of information crosses between species.22 Signs
given of for one purpose are used for another. Such chains of dislocation are
potentially endless, the mouth, originally used for biting and eating, over
time gains additional functions such as speech and, in humans and a few other
primates, sexual activity. Chains of dislocation constitute a form of primary
experimentation of the capacities and materials of bodies and of life. They may
occur across all scales of a body or at those of individuals or populations.
Aside from adaptions and accumulations of function and behaviour,
co-evolutionary assemblages, such as the wasp-orchid reciprocation machine
described by Deleuze and Guattari, set up consistencies across scales and
discrete objects or organisms, by means of which each probes the virtuality of
the other, but also interacts more generally, as an assemblage, with wider
formations and compositional dynamics. Thus an entity, or a process might be
imagined to occur in the liver of one being, be sensed as creepy sizzle by the
automatic fight or flight responses of another, stimulate pheremone exchange
between two members of different species, determine the use of grammatical
tense in an essay by a specimen of another, but exist as much more than these.
There is no teleology in such occurrences, but rather a drift of reciprocal
relays established more or less directly by potentially thousands of
interacting and diverging entities.
The question of the exploration of virtuality within an ecology is
also carried out at an experiential scale in play. The kinds of play associated
with different species are equally heterogeneous. The field of comparative
psychology is developing understanding of multiple forms of consciousness:
mirror recognition (a test of self-awareness); theory of mind; tool use;
emotions and empathy; the capacity to imitate; the capacity to think about
thought, metacognition; language; reflection recognition, and other capacities
which in turn become affordances for entities, capacities and dynamics, which
almost weekly produce experimental results widening the domain of intelligence,
and the distribution of skills and aptitudes once thought exclusive to homo
sapiens. In his landmark survey of play in a multitude of species, Gordon
Burghardt states that, “Play with objects is behaviour in which an animal investigates
not just their nature…but what he or she can do with them.”23This
would also suggest that play not only acts as a context in which animals probe
potential affordances amongst their conspecifics and the things that surround
them, but also count themselves amongst the things that, at multiple scales,
are being so probed. Play behaviours can also be autotelic, independent of
adaptiveness or function, or as such, producing a reserve of ‘anticipatory
adaption’ as such it is at once something that is absolutely live, but also a
gateway into the virtual, the plethora of forces and possibilities that
interact to produce the actual.
In Deleuze and Guattari’s account of ecology as melody24 affordances
become counterpoints, relays between one set of compositional dynamics, such as
the bumblebee and the snapdragon, that trip, not simply in tight
co-evolutionary couples, but out, from oikos, home, the root word of ecology,
to the cosmos. Extending this cosmological dimension, if we concur that, “a
work is always the creation of a new space time”25 art
for animals also allows us a way of thinking through the processes of
intersubjectivation that we experience in ecology, a move that chimes with
Guattari’s critique of the ‘pure intentional transparancy’26 of
phenomenology. Guattari calls instead for a means of recognition of components
of subjectification which meet each other by means of transits that are relatively
autonomous from one another.27 The
cosmos figured here is one that moves towards openness. The works considered
below as art for animals can be thought of as specific articulations of such a
process of opening.
Paul Perry – Predator Mark
In his work on the literature of wilderness, Gary Snyder suggests
that, “Other orders of being have their own literatures. Narrative in the deer
world is a track of scents that is passed on from deer to deer with an art of
interpretation which is instinctive. A literature of blood-stains, a bit of
piss, a whiff of estrus, a hit of rut, a scrape on a sapling and long gone.”1In
encounter with changes in the use of land, these literatures find themselves
recomposed. Urban foxes in London for instance are notorious for their habit of
shitting on children’s toys left outside overnight in gardens and yards. Their
territory marking habits have been displaced and appear as cunning acts of
deposition.
Paul Perry’s 1995 installation Predator Mark is a subtle
reordering of such a literature of scents. The work consists of a device made
up of an electronic timer, a compressed gas spray mechanism and a flask of
bobcat urine. This mechanism was installed high on a tree in a wooded estate,
Landgoed Wolfslaar, in Breda in the east of the Netherlands. Bobcats are native
to North America and Mexico. Their scents are thus not part of the vocabulary
of ecology of the area.
Bobcat urine is however commercially available in north america,
along with that of other local predators such as wolves. It commodification,
and provision for credit units over the internet, allows its dislocation from
territory. Once bought by the user it is judiciously sprinkled to deter certain
animals from crossing into the space that the scent suggests is inhabited as
territory by another. Other scents, such as the urine of doe deer in heat, are
used as lures by hunters, in this case to draw deer away from trails into the
line of sight of hunters. The urine of both predator and prey animals, like
other animals products available for retail spell out a new kind of literature,
one of commodification, of humans gaining the capacities of cunning shitters,
and the grisly promise of meat on a stick.28Whether,
like mosquito repellent, these products have anything more than fetish value
for men investing in quality time alone with nature remains questionable.
In Predator Mark, introducing the scent of any animal, predator or
not, is imagined to shift the register of references to presence within the
place. It suggests an openness to the possible that resingularizes experience
as an event in which the dimensions of relationality surging through it require
recognition. This is a speculative literature of piss, involving floods, drips
and sprays of matter, energy and signs, and the intelligences they invoke to
sense and comprehend them.
Whilst one form of experiment is to set things out, to wait and
see what gathers or grows in the manner of Duchamp’s early artificial life
work, Elevage de Poussiere, (Breading Ground of Dust).29 Perry
did not set out to observe if there were any differences in behaviour
associated with the installation of this work as would be characteristic of a
scientific experiment proper in which one variable only is isolated and probed
for the conditions of its variation. Indeed it is not even clear whether the
species most drawn to the scent marking activity of art was even aware of the
work’s existence. This gratuity of the work, that it addresses itself primarily
to animals, those who read no press releases, and its operation in a way that
is imperceptible, indeed, by its height from the ground and position deep
within a wood, almost impossible to experience, distinguishes it from an entity
operating within the
normal dynamics of art systems. If, to make one comparison,
conceptual art made the move towards experiencing the materiality and multiply
structurating forces of ideas and language, such work suggests a means for such
conceptuality in multiple species and across many means of sensing, acting in
and interpreting the world.Here
Natalie Jeremijenko – OOZ
Natalie Jeremijenko is engaged in an ongoing series of works
called OOZ30,
which test human animal cohabituation of city spaces and set up novel kinds of
instruments and infrastructure for urban and feral animals. OOZ, as a series of
works, and ongoing revisions of projects, establishes situations for animal and
human interaction in contexts in which, unlike that of a zoo, the animals are
free to leave. The OOZ series has involved work adopting the housing paradigm,
such as an installation on the roof of the Postmasters Gallery in New York in
2006.31 Whilst
this was largely to do with providing amenities such as houses, perches, a
supply of fresh water and the growth of plants with medicinal function, there
were also two other key directions to this work. One included anthropomorphic
architectural organizations of space, such as a ‘shopping mall’, and
architectural work offering ironic recognition for the benefit of human
viewers, such as components testing the mechanical understanding of what is
normal for animal provision by applying architectural notions of ‘luxury’ to
fittings and spaces. There is an air of the flea circus about aspects of this
project, dinky versions of high-end contemporary architectural concerns and
urban systems. To achieve these, the project involved commissioning elements
from a number of architectural studios perhaps inevitably leading to a tendency
towards calling-card architecture. Such elements might perhaps work as lures,
sparkly things that attract attention and draw humans towards them. Perhaps
anthropocentrism can work as an interpretative layer for one species, whose
cognition is partly organised by glamour, without ruining the primary emphasis
on addressing the perceptual and experiential capacities of another. More
importantly, the project tests the notion of what the feral condition implies,
might there be an outgrowth of provision from urban systems in order to provide
more edges, and habitats for displaced and incoming non-human inhabitants of
cities? Such provision might entail the imagination of multi-scalar ‘green
corridors’, micro-to-macro scale affordances built on into and through cities
for ameliorating, or even improving on the kinds of ecological condition they
erase, build into or establish.
A common thread between the different components of the OOZ series
is that of experimental forms of communication. The Postmasters installation,
titled OOZ (for the birds) included a ‘concert hall’ space for pigeon calls.
Whilst this functioned as something of an architectural in-joke, being a
miniaturely scaled version of Casa de Musica, the Office for Metroplitan
Architecture’s 2005 concert hall in Porto, it allowed for the amplification of
voices and calls. In other work, Comm. Technology, (2006) Jeremijenko has set
up novel devices for pigeons to amplify their vocalizations.32 A
series of perches to be attached to buildings consists of a hollow plastic horn
fitted with a small microphone and speaker.33 The
noises made by the pigeon whilst using the perch are powered up to address the
street. Jeremijenko’s wager is that the pigeons will recognize this, and note
the changes in reaction of humans using the street, including possible food
sharing, and begin to favour the use of the perch. Unlike Perry’s Predator Mark
therefore, there is a sense in which the use of the work is monitored and
evaluated, even if only informally. This is in part because Jeremijenko’s work
sites itself very much in dialogue with design, and the critical design
discourse also involving Anthony Dunne34,
Beatriz da Costa35,
Phoebe Sengers36 and
others. Here, design without a direct client or a customer and with animals as
its users enters a modality that is enormously suggestive.
An early component of the OOZ project was Robotic Geese (2005 –
onwards) one unit of which, in an installation with the Bureau of Inverse
Technology, Romancing the Geese, was placed in a small stretch of water next to
the De Verbeelding, art centre in Flevoland.37 The
goose, a basic plastic decoy body with added features including motorized legs,
an articulated neck, a head mounted camera, microphone and speaker, was remote
controlled from a seat which allowed a visitor to view the eyeview of the
robot, to steer it and to “make utterances” through it.38 The
idea is to stage interactions with a small population of Greylag and feral
domestic geese who inhabit the area. In the projected full iteration of the
work, each speech interaction will trigger the recording of short bursts of
audio-visual information to a database. Once it becomes public, items on the
database can be correlated so that users can gradually, through standard
collaborative filtering algorithms, aggregate opinions on the semantic content
of the utterances of the non-robot geese.
Communication amongst humans is increasingly configured as a means
of the delivery of order words and the management of the distribution of
micro-compulsions to respond, advise, participate, collaborate and to organize
attention. Against this figure of the regime of responsiveness, to think about
communication outside of the boundary of a species sets up a number of
possibilities. Perhaps OOZ allows us to imagine a form of taxonomy in which
speciation was marked not by the matter of which animal could engage in
effective genetic transfer with another, but on the basis of those which engage
in semiotic (memetic) relays.
Marcus Coates – Out of Season, Saprrowhawk Bait, and Dawn Chorus
Marcus Coates has embarked upon a body of work which maps out a
certain set of figurations of interactions with animals, with birds in
particular. Only a few of pieces of his work fall into the art for animals
current and are early, perhaps more minor, more throwaway or institutionally
indetermined than the larger-scale projects he is more recently embarked upon.
They may indeed be pointing towards something that with his continued interest
in ‘animal becoming’, will return to. Before addressing these, some of the
other works are also worth mentioning. In a second work entitled Dawn Chorus
(2007)39 high
quality field recordings of bird songs are slowed down 16 times until they
reach a pitch easily matched by a human throat. The resulting sounds are played
to volunteers who learn to repeat them. These enactments are videoed, then
played back as a projection. It seems that, at least in terms of their
re-enaction, only the relative size of the vocal apparatus distinguishes the
calls of the birds and humans.
In Journey to the Lower World, (2003)40 Coates
uses a persona suggested by brief training in the rituals of Siberian Shamen.
He performs a ritual for residents of a soon-to-be-demolished tower block in
Liverpool, wearing the skin of a deer, mimicking the work of a shaman,
apparently communing with a number of bird spirits and in so doing bringing
back a vision of hope for the bemused ladies and gentlemen attending his
ritual. The latter work is interesting because it knows that it is weak but
makes use of this. The action is awkward, based on a relatively shabby,
slightly embarrassing, day of training with the kind of guru who acquires their
flock through postcards in health shop windows, and carried out by a denizen of
the upper world. Nevertheless this specimen of the contemporary European,
gawkily decked out in the culled, shameful, trappings of authenticity, as
compromised as it knows it is, attempts to get something going. There is an
earnestness achieved through a reflexive mimicry, of ritual, and of animal
calls, especially Coates’ constant attention to those of birds, that carries
through into his work fitting more precisely into the art for animals current.
Mimicry is a means to set up ruses, initiatives that skirt the edge of
multi-directional fraud in which the everyday and ideas of the wild, the primitive
and capacities of sensual perception that overlap between species can be
mobilised. Here mimicry unfolds both as play and as learning; in bird calls
with their worlds of call and refrain, or their re-mobilisation of surrounding
sounds; and in contemporary art and its constant reversioning of appropriation,
pastiche, copy, plagiarism, found materials, how to deal with and configure
what exists, what repeats, in relation to the creation of the new. These are
vectors in the generation of what Coates calls ‘animal becoming’ but, partially
overlapping they also shift each other.
During a series of short live works in the Grizedale Forest,
Coates set up three interactions with local bird populations. They share some
of the “do it and see, (or imagine) what happens” approach of Perry’s Predator
Mark. The experiment is done for its experiential value rather than the
extraction of unequivocable data. In Sparrowhawk Bait, (1999) Coates makes
himself the target for a predator. The corpses of: a Blackbird; a Blue Tit; a
Mistle Thrush; a Grey Wagtail and a Green Finch are tied to his hair. He runs
through the forest, with the anticipation that a local Sparrowhawk will be
attracted by and pounce on the momentarily re-animated bodies. Of course, it’s
silly, nothing happens except for the bouncing of some bodies. In Dawn Chorus
(2001) a crop-headed male actor enters an area of young pines and shouts
football chants, fan versus fan abuse in good spittle-flinging style. Taking
place in a deciduous wood, Out of Season (2000) another short video, documents
the same kind of performance, with another actor and the addition of a Chelsea
shirt. Aside from its relay and remediation as a video, the primary audience
are the birds whose territorial and mating calls normally fill the spaces. In
the work concerned with mimicry and imitation, whether of the shaman or of
birds, making these chants and calls, listening out for any response, Coates
has to link himself as an apprentice to the song domain of the birds, the
processes of learning and training of listening and responding, which they
establish. Taking the football chants to the forest, sets out not only an idea
of how human communications may often be so similar in their territoriality to
those of birds. It shows too how demented and dreamy the possibility of talking
to the animals really is, but also makes us wonder whether it could ever really
be anything more than an unreturnable ‘fuck you’.
Louis Bec – Stimutalogues, and Anthony Hall – Enki
Louis Bec describes himself as a Zoosystémicien, a sole
participant of this discipline working with an extended conception of
artificial life, an abstraction of life in more general terms, and some
developed ideas as to how to proliferate interrelations between technologies of
information and different biological manifestations of signification and
intelligence. His work tends towards a science fiction in practice and Bec is
an adept at the time-accredited techniques of neologism, fabulation,
mind-boggling and acronym usage. His manifesto text ‘Squids, elements of
technozoosemiotics’41 strives
for a moment in which hyperbole and a series of programmatic and poetic
statements achieves a density of semantic condensation sufficient to bring a
world to life.
Aside from a number of projects developing interactive animated
versions of artificial life projects, Bec has worked with various species of
fish which use electrical pulses released by special electric organs located in
certain parts (varying across species, generally transmission towards the tail,
reception in foveal regions at the head) of their bodies. According to a
document describing the research programme, this series, the Stimutalogues
project includes:
Logognathe Artefact (interactive customizable loop of
communication
between the living, artifact and interactive agent)
Logomorphogenesis (modeling by dynamic morphogenesis of
information exchanges between 3 Gnathonemus Petersii)
Ichyophonie / PanGea (setting up a communication device allowing
exchanges between Mormyridées in Brazil and Gymnarchidées in Africa, trying to
connect two continents which are getting separated gradually with the tectonic
plates).42
These fish are nocturnal, as well as having good hearing, they use
their electric organs over short ranges to signal mating readiness or
aggression, to locate food and to navigate in the dark water. Research by the
sensory ecologist Gerhard von der Emde43 suggests
that their complex sensory system is capable of using the way in which an
object resists or stores mild electrical currents to determine its shape, and
are able to categorise what they find. The movement of the fish, and the tail
bending required for ordinary motion, allow the process of electric organ
discharge to effectively ‘triangulate’ objects.
Anthony Hall, is leader of a related project called Enki, (2006)
which also uses a number of species of weakly electric fish including Black
Ghost Knife fish. (A species which breeds quite comfortably in captivity.) The
technique is to place them in a tank containing sensors which pick up the
electrical signaling of the fish. The signals are then converted into waves
which are played at a seated user by means of sound and flickering LEDs. A lead
travels from the arm of the user carrying electrical pulses from the human body
to an electrode in the water in which the fish swims.44
As with the Logognathe Artefact and Logomorphogenesis proposals,
the fish are placed in conditions in which, compared to their native habitat,
they are sensorially and behaviourally deprived. Elephantnose fish (Gnathonemus
Petersii) do not breed in captivity, and will therefore in every case of their
use as a component in such projects, have been captured from the wild, from
areas, Nigeria and Brazil, already subject to significant pillaging for
materials. In terms of the development of species-specific art, the question of
how markets in animals and animal products intersects with the organization of
art, and with the global distribution of habitats and organisms, is essential
to recognise. By comparison with the emphasis on the capacity for animals to
come and go in OOZ projects, most of the work done with elephantnose fish has
substantial problems in terms of its ethical composition. The one clear
exception to this is a version of the Ichyophonie / PanGea project which will
be discussed last.45
In versions of the Enki project which also involve a human
subject, it is not clear whether, if, from the perspective of the fish due to
their modeling in the system that receives them, and their mediation by layers
of devices, it might not be simpler to replace them, or indeed the human user,
with an entity in software equally capable of providing aleatory stimulus to
the mechanism. The latter is the approach of Bec’s Logognathe Artefact.
Underneath the generalizations about possible therapeutic
implications and pastel fractals of one early iteration of the Enki project
website it becomes clear that certain aspects of the project are potentially
quite welcomely dark. Gregory Bateson, in work discussed by Guattari in The
Three Ecologies, suggests that decisions and learning may be made by systems
“immanent in the large biological system – the ecosystem”46 or
“at the scale of total evolutionary structure,”47 that
are analogous to or developing qualities characteristic of mind. Such minds,
systems of learning, occur between interacting elements, they are not
isolatable to one single entity bounded by a membrane, but arise from
cybernetically describable relays of entities bound at such a scale. One spin
on the Enki project is that what we might be seeing here is the production of a
mind or mentality, a mind that is at once fish and human but not reducable to
either. That the fish part at least, (when petersii are used) in its refusal to
breed, is displaying classic signs of confinement stress suggests significant
questions about the ethico-aesthetic dimensions of art for animals involving
captive life. Extreme doubt must be applied to any project that involves
confinement, and especially confinement with such negative consequences. And
here the question of the conjunctive form ethico-aesthetics proposed by
Guattari is useful to draw upon. The Three Ecologies emphasizes processes of
subjectification that are artistic in style and inspiration, in imaginal power,
rather than being quasi-scientific. Ethics does not consist of the completion
of a series of tick boxes of an approvals committee. More fundamentally, to
make of the fish an instrument, even one whose cognitive and communicational
processes ‘complete’ the work is to curse it. Art for animals proposes instead
that animals have a necessarily ontological world-making dimension. As such an
ethico-aesthetic approach disrupts the normal great chain of thought, that
starts with ontology, proceeds through epistemology and ends with the mere
implementation details of ethics and aesthetics. It suggests that each moment
of each scalar state is riven through with such figurations and modes, without
any gaining an a priori superiority or precedence to the others. Electronic art
is trivial and boring when it simply confirms the inter-relation between
sensors and responses. Art using animals is trivial and abusive when it locks
animals into devices that deplete its involvement in and creation of the world
rather than supplementing it.
This given, the last listed of Louis Bec’s projects in this series
is particularly interesting to attend to. Ichthyophonie / PanGea is an attempt
to develop a communication network between two families of fish using electric
signaling, location finding and, more fully, echoperception. These two
families, the Mormyrids in located in South America and Gymnarchids in West and
Central Africa, originally sharing an early common ancestor, were split apart
into different phylogenetic branches by the movement of continental plates as
they broke from the early super-continent, PanGea (or Panagea). As yet
unrealised, the plan involves setting a network of sensors / actuators in the
habitats of these fish which are to be connected to each other via internet.
This would allow the communicatory behaviours of these fish, at least those
transferable by such means, to enter into some kind of sense of co-location
with the possibility for sensorial interplay: perhaps, evoking and probing
remnants of shared signaling; or perhaps simply adding a small sizzle of now
meaningless noise to a particular patch of water. Perhaps too, it is something
else, a paradox: something that tickles the fishes’ curiosity, changes the
economy of their attention, dislocating their access to the virtual.
In this respect, Enki also establishes some interesting
possibilities for further development. Electroperception in electric fish has
some very special qualities. Electric waves move in curved rather than straight
lines, and the reflections produced typically become larger the further they
are from the object – so this is something rather different to the capacity for
orientation via sonic ecolocation or by vision. These fish can also produce
concepts of the objects in the sense of abstract categories that are
transferable across entities they may encounter. In other iterations of the
project, Anthony Hall set up a context in which no human was attached. The
fish’s signal was picked up by one or more electrodes, typically placed in the
corner of their familiar tank. This signal was then fed back to the fish in a
different corner of the tank. Because the fish perceive the world in waves, the
effect of this can be imagined as being something similar to pushing a limb
towards a mirror only to have it ‘reflect’ via a wall behind you, an experience
Hall recounts as provoking much curiosity in the fish. When two weakly electric
fish of either of these families meet they go through a process of modulating
the individual frequency of the current they give off in order that each can
maintain their own signal or refrain. Interestingly, the signals produced by
the fish in this context do not carry this ‘handshake’, suggesting that they
recognise themselves in this substantially distorted context, one which they
spend time in exploring.
“ Je weet nooit hoe een koe een haas vangt”48
One way in which art for animals might progress is along the lines
suggested by biosemiotics or zoomusicology.49 Biosemiotics
is concerned with the transmission of information as part of living processes,
expanding the domain of signaling from that of DNA, to molecules, the
interoperation of body parts and systems to the function of organisms and out
into other scales of ecologies. Coupled with this, it is a field which develops
an idea of a more generalised domain of semiosis, such as communication,
subterfuge, courtship and ludic enjoyment configured at the level of the
organism or, as with Bateson’s ecology of mind, in interactions between organisms.
Of importance here too is a notion of aesthetics, of the configuration of
beauty. This is something that has been present in a certain way in biology
from Darwin’s work on sexual selection, and threads through to sociobiological
accounts of beauty configured as attractiveness. Amongst other creatures,
Deleuze and Guattari draw upon the stagemaker bird, whose pergola is an example
both of an extended phenotype and an exuberant courtship display. It is usually
taken to be a highly nuanced example of aesthetic judgement involving
dimensions that are spatial, colouristic, to do with the freshness of materials
and their inter-composition. For them, this constant act of the compilation,
sorting and arrangement of materials epitomizes an enactment of territory as
rhythm within the melody of ecology.
In many accounts of a possible animal aesthetics there is a dance
performed around the threshold of functionality or expressivity configured as
being demarcated as that which is gratuituous. This dance may pass through
various sub-thresholds according to whether expressivity corresponds to a given
stack of drives and needs, to evoke curiosity, to learn, to mate, to eat, to
dominate, to play. Where this dance gets stuck is to read these as purely
obligatory functions or, in a bipolar switch, as being utterly ‘free’ – without
inter-relation with other compositional forces or constraints. This is part of
the terms of their composition, but the dance around their thresholds might
also usefully recognise the dance within each of these scales themselves. For
instance, in a dance within the scale of play as play, comes the dance of the
mimicry of mimicry, one which opens out onto all other scales. Such a dance
between gratuitousness and functionality needs to be recognized within the
context of the general economy, Bataille’s substantial contribution to the
intellectual work of ecology in which all, drives included, are ultimately
gratuitous.50 As
such it is a liberation and a curse which can only be remedied, or modulated,
by being entered into with adequately vivid forms of life. Any point in this
stack, or others not named or yet to be invented may tip this dance into a new
rhythm. Each element of this stack whether operating as drive, function, play,
may become more dislocated or increase its capacity of dislocation for a moment
yet to come. Equally, in this dance between scalar function and cosmological
gratuitouness, elements may exist across many assemblages functioning in
different terms in each, as anchors, blocks, voids or torrents. It is taking
part in this movement, doubling it by means of reflexivity, in this case, not
simply the reflexivity of a single mind or within the scalar boundary of a
compositional entity, but its multiplication by an ecology of sensoria, that
art for animal emerges.
Whether it is paint, wood, chrome, text, scent, move, sound, leaf,
art works with and through materials that are direct to hand, to thought or to
experience, but which also anticipate their coming into composition, their
recomposition, with, or by means of, other elements, art may require work from
primary natural forces in order to become complete. Think of Edward Munch’s
habit of leaving his oil-painted canvases out in the rain for weeks in order
that they may be worked upon by it. It may be suspected that something of the
same happens in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, something which brings
it closer in practice both to art and which allows it to produce itself as a
receptive domain in which ecologies of texts, histories and ideas, occur, spawn
and leave their traces. This is philosophy which leaves itself out in too many
weathers. In doing so, they form new relays with ecologies.
Before they too become mulch, those who advocate purity of the
discipline now have their turn to rain upon this work, so go the almost
inevitable recalls to reason. But this is philosophy. With two thousand years
worth of beard to avoid tripping over it is almost compelled to immobility.
This, disciplinary automatism masked up as a holy stillness allows it to
position itself as a meta-discourse towards which all other fields, not simply
philosophers, must meaure their orbit and meet their judges. Art is in a
certain way equally ambitious, it will admit of no limits. But only in so far
as it provides a means by which, in a deeply amateur way, by means of the art
methodology of unreadiness, it comes into composition with other techniques of
working. Whilst other discursive frameworks cannot by these means become
mastered, they can always be used. Whether this capacity really does extend to
the sensual, semiotic and world making capacities of animals is something too
that needs to be left outside, to see what happens.
© Matthew Fuller 2007 m.fuller@gold.ac.uk
Bio
Matthew Fuller is David Gee Reader in Digital Media at the Centre
for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London. His
publications include: Behind the Blip, essays on the culture of software; Media
Ecologies, materialist energies in art and technoculture; and the forthcoming,
Software Studies, a lexicon. Research for Art for Animals is supported by the
Fonds voor Beeldende Kunst, Vormgeving en Bouwkunst of the Netherlands.
Bibliography
Alterne, ‘ARAPUCA’, in, Alternate Realities in Networked
Environments, online at
http://www.alterne.info/node/42
Steve Barker, The Postmodern Animal, Reaktion Books, London, 2000
Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago, 2000
Louis Bec, Explications sur le fonctionnement matériel et logiciel
des stimutalogues.
Exemple avec le gnathonemus petersii. Nd
Jerome Bruner, Alison Jolly, Kathy Sylva, Play, it’s role in
dvelopment and education, Penguin, London 1976
Marcus Coates, Journey to the Lower World, Alec Finlay ed.,
Platform projects, Morning Star, Film London, London, 2005
Marcus Coates, Marcus Coates, Grizedale Books, Ambleside, 2001
Peter Coe and Malcolm Reading, Lubetkin and Tecton, architecture
and social commitment, The Arts Council of Great Britain, London 1981
Frans Ellenbroek, The Biological Evolution of the Arts,
Natuurmuseum Brabant, Tilberg, 2006
Matthew Fuller, ‘Towards an Ecology of Media Ecology’, x med a,
experimental media arts, Okno / Foam / Nadine, Brussels, 2006
Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies, materialist energies in art and
technoculture, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2005
Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson, Animals in Translation, the
woman who thinks like a cow, Bloomsbury, London, 2005
Thomas Geissmann,: ‘Gibbon songs and human music from an
evolutionary perspective,’ in, The Origins of Music. Wallin, N.; Merker, B.
& Brown, S. (eds.), , MIT Press. Cambridge, 2000pp. 103-123
Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul
Sutton, Athlone, London, 2000
Félix Guattari, Cartographies Schizoanalytique, Editions Gallilée,
Paris, 1989
Anthony Hall, Human to Fish Interface project – Image gallery,
September 2006, http://www.variableg.org.uk/main-pages/eod2006.htm
Donna Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto, Prickly Pear Press,
Martin Herbert, ‘Tales of the Unexpected’, Frieze, no. 106, April
2007, pp.106-113
Louise Lippincott and Andreas Blühm, Fierce Friends, artists and
animals 1750-1900, Merrell, London 2005
Barbara C. Matilsky, Fragile Ecologies, contemporary artists’
interpretations and solutions, The Queens Museum of Art, New York 1992
Thomas Nagel, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, The Philosophical
Review, Vol. 83, No. 4. (Oct., 1974), pp. 435-450.
Jacob Von Uexküll, ‘A stroll through the worlds of animals and
men’, trans. Claire H. Schiller, in Wolfgang Schirmacher ed., German Essays on
Science in the 20th Century, Continuum, New York, 1996, p171-178
Pliny, Natural History, books 33-35, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb
Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2003
Shigeru Watanabe, Junko Sakamoto, and Masumi Wakita, “Pigeons’
Discrimination of Paintings by Monet and Picasso”, Journal of the Experimental
Analysis of Behaviour, no.63, pp165-74
Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites, American culture, the discourse of
species and posthumanist theory, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2003
1 Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, cited in, Sibyl
Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy, experiment in totality, 2nd Edition,
MIT Press, Cambridge, 1969, p.87
3 Pliny, Natural History,
books 33-35, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University
Press, Cambridge, 2003, p.309 (book XXXV, section XXXVI,)
4 Notable examples would be Jannis
Kounellis’ installation, Horses, Rome, 1969, in which a dozen
horses were stabled in the Galleria L’Attico, setting up a situation in which
the physical presence, movement, smell and palpability of the horses goes
straight to matter conjugated by the multiple kinds of expectation and viewing
accentuated in art systems. Paolo Pivi’s work follows somewhat in this
trajectory but with an emphasis on exoticism and absurdist conjuncture, an
alligator covered in whipped cream, zebras transported to a snowy landscape, a
leopard prowling amongst plastic replica cappuccino cups
6 The development of such
architectural work in the London Zoo was at the initiative of Julian Huxley,
then secretary of the Zoological Society. Lubetkin also worked later at Dudley
Zoo, which, almost in reverse of OOZ (for the birds) provided
a miniature example of modern town planning.. For an analysis of the
development of the architecture of London Zoo, see Hadas A. Steiner, ‘For the
Birds’, Grey Room no.13, pp.6-31. The Penguin Pool was eventually
abandoned after about seventy years of occupation, with the penguins being
moved to a more ‘organic’ site with various kinds of surface and housings. It
remains standing as a grade one listed building, but, as of this writing,
(April 2007) remain unused.
8 Gerttrud Købke Sutton, ‘David Nash,
The Language of Wood’ in, Art and Design no.36, p.28-73. The
Sheep Spaces sculptures were made in 1993 as part of the TICKON Project,
Langeland, Denmark. The same exhibition also included an oversize thatch
beehive by Jan Norman.
10 Elizabeth Demaray, Elizabeth Demaray’s set of plastic
casings to substitute for shells for hermit crabs being a further example of an
artist producing habitations. A problem with this work, or perhaps the rhetoric
that accompanies it, is that it is predicated on a supposed dearth of suitable
sea shells. As a design project however, this work failed to take into account
the full range of variables that it changed. A radical variation in the
colouring, weight, aquadynamic qualities, digestibility and crushability of the
shells used by these crabs creates a significant set of changes, amongst others
not listed, in their fitness landscape. ‘The Hand Up Project: Attempting to
Meet the New Needs of Natural Life-Forms’,Cabinet Magazine, Issue 13
Spring 2004http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/13/demaray.php/
Another artist Nina Katchadourian, in a series of work calledMended
Spiderweb Service, (1998) has added cotton threads to broken spider webs in
an attempt to repair then. Whilst these are visually interesting – she uses red
cotton and photographs hem against a dark background – they lack any sense of a
real attempt to modify her repair practice, the materials used in a way which
might actually be accepted by the spiders and incorporated into their webs.
Such an approach would of course be unlikely to succeed but would be a mark of
some attempt to address the spiders rather than produce interesting pictures.
The additions to the web are removed by the spiders.
http://www.ninakatchadourian.com/uninvitedcollaborations/spiderwebs.php
11 Robert Morris, ‘A Method for Sorting Cows’, in, Kynaston
McShine ed.,Information, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1970. Hans
Haacke, Ten Turtles Set Free, 20 July 1970, St. Paul-de-Vence,
France, 1970. Haacke’s intervention consisted of buying ten turtles and
releasing them into the wild. The methods of the Animal Liberation Front have
by and large improved on such approaches.
12 see for instance: Jospeh Beuys, I Like America and
America Likes Me(1974) a durational performance in which a room was shared
with a Coyote. Bonnie Sherk’s , Public Lunch (1971) was held
at the Lion House in San Francisco Zoo, during which the artist would introduce
herself to the Lion’s enclosure during feeding times.
13 Shigeru Watanabe, Junko Sakamoto,
and Masumi Wakita, “Pigeons’ Discrimination of Paintings by Monet and
Picasso”, Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behaviour, no.63,
pp165-74
14 See for example, Peter Fuller, The
Naked Artist, art and biology, Readers and Writers, London, 1983. In more
recent work on similar themes, another writer advances participation in art as
a quasi-christian liturgical comfort food.
17 Frans De Waal, The Ape and
the Sushi Master, cultural reflections of a primatologist, Basic Books, New
York, 2001, p.55
18 Linda Geddes, “Unleash your inner
bloodhound – start sniffing”, New Scientist, 17 December 2006,
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/dn10810-unleash-your-inner-bloodhound–start-sniffing.html
19 Paul Rozin, ‘About 17 (+/-2) Potential Principles about
Links between the Innate Mind and Culture, preadaptations, predispositions,
preferences, pathways and domains’, in, Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence,
Stephen Stich, The Innate Mind, vol.2, Culture and Cognition,
Oxford University Press, 2006
20 Carl Zimmer, At the Water’s
Edge, macroevolution and the transformation of life, Free Press, New York,
1998.
21 Julian Huxley, The Courtship
Habits of the Great Crested Grebe, (1st ed. 1914), Jonathan
Cape, London 1968
and, Templeton, C.N. & Greene,
E. “Bilingual birds and eavesdropping: Nuthatches respond to subtle
variations in “chick-a-dee” alarm calls”,Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0605183104.
23 Gordon M. Burghardt, The
Genesis of Animal Play, testing the limits, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2005,
p386
24 Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh
Tomlinson, Verso, London, 1994, p.184-5
25 Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Brain is the
Screen’, interview, in, Two Regimes of Madness, texts and interviews
1975-1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mark Taormina,
Semiotext(e), New York, 2006, p.289
26 Félix Guattari, The Three
Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, Athlone, London, 2000p.37
29 This work is a photograph by Man Ray
of the reverse side of Duchamp’sThe Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors,
Even (1915-1923). It shows the glass in 1920 after having accumulated
a landscape of dust.
31 OOZ, Inc. (for the birds) Infrastructure and facilities for
high-density bird cohabitation on the roof of Postmasters Gallery installed at
the Postmaster’s Gallery, September 7 – October 7, 2006.
33 Hans Waanders, another artist living
along the Maas would often make perches for Ijsvogel, Kingfishers by setting a
stick into a riverbank. Some of these are documented in his book, Perches,
published by Morning Star in 2002.
34, see, Anthony Dunne, Hertzian
Tales, electronic products, aesthetic experience and critical design, Royal
College of Art Computer Related Design Research, London, 1999.
35 see i.e., the PigeonBlog project
in which tame pigeons are fitted with environmental pollution data-gathering
equipment, http://www.pigeonblog.mapyourcity.net/
36 i.e. at the Culturally Embedded
Computing research group at Cornell University, http://cemcom.infosci.cornell.edu/
38 Whilst it might be imagined that the
robot is clunky relative to a goose, a number of parallel experiments in animal
behaviour, including birds, suggest that devices of this sort can be extremely
useful in establishing communication. For a survey of such work, see Emma
Young, ‘Undercover Robots Lift Lid on Animal Body Language’, New
Scientist, 6 January 2007, pp.22-23
39 Dawn Chorus was first
shown at the Baltic in Gateshead in Febrary 2007. It takes part in a thread of
work in contemporary art involving animal imitation such as Lucy Gunning’s
video of people imitating horses, The Horse Impressionists, 1994
40 documented in, Marcus Coates, Journey
to the Lower World, Alec Finlay ed., Morning Star, Newcastle upon Tyne,
2005
41 Louis Bec, “Squids, elements of
technozoosemiotics, a lesson in fabulatory epistemology of the scientific
institute for paranatural research”, in, Joke Brouwer, Carla Hoekendijk,
eds, Technomorphica, V2_organisatie, Rotterdam, 1997, pp279-311
42 Louis Bec, “Arapuca”, in,
Alterne, Creation and Technology Proposals, EU IST proposal
no.39575, July 2003
43 Gerhard von der Emde, ‘Non-visual
environmental imaging and object detection through active electrolocation in
weakly electric fish’, Journal of Comparative Physiology, A 192,
2006, pp.601-612
44 One aspect of the project which is
not covered here is that Hall works informally with an acupuncturist to apply
galvanic skin response sensors to places on the human body with the suggestion
that the fish might respond to different currents from the human subject.
Additionally, the kind of electrode used is important, carbon electrodes give a
soft profile, metal ones, a very hard edge, quite distinct from anything they
might encounter in the wild.
45 In sense, this distinction
recapitulates the difference between lab based cognitive psychology work with
animals and ethology’s insistence on observation of animals in their habitats.
46 Gergory Bateson, “Form, Substance
and Difference”, in, Steps to An Ecology of Mind, p.466. See
also, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, Bantam, New York, 1979
49 A summary of possible divulgations of aesthetics by means of
this approach is given in, Dario Martinelli, Liars, Players,
Artists, a Zoösemiotic Approach To Aesthetics, online
at, http://www.zoosemiotics.helsinki.fi/
July 2007
