viz. - animals

“Rueful Reluctance:” An Unwitting Cat Owner’s Search for Meaning Among Memes

james.wiedner — Wed, 03 Sep 2014 03:12:19 +0000

Image Credit: "Nyan Cat-Pop Tart Cat," by Chris Torres

Last week, my neighbor stopped by to tell me that he was moving, and that pets were not allowed at his new residence. With all due histrionics, he lamented the fact that he was going to take her to the shelter, and that “unless anybody here wants to adopt her, [insert overly dramatic sigh] I guess she’ll probably be put down.”

My manipulative neighbor was playing me like a fiddle. He knew I had a soft spot for that cat; hell, I was the one to feed her on multiple occasions when her deadbeat dad couldn't be bothered to do so. The cat liked me, too. Whenever she’d enter my apartment, she’d survey her surroundings and then proceed to scratch the side of my couch like it was her job. I’d tell her to knock it off, and she would, but not without looking at me with what I swear was a bit of amusement.

When I realized that Violet had already moved my (generally) rational thinking into the land of the Pathetic Fallacy, I tried to take solace in the knowledge that I wasn’t the only one. And while I can’t fathom ever creating cat memes myself, it would be foolish to underestimate the power that felines have had over the human photographer since there were photos to take. Aside from the comedic or cuteness factors, publishing cat memes has always been a lucrative endeavor.

Around 1900, author Osgood Grover sold millions of books, one of which was 1911’s “Kittens and Cats: A Book of Tales (hyperlink below)” The image below is just one example of the many pictures of costumed cats. Many of these pictures are even replete with “quotes” of the internal monologue of the pictured cat, just as we see in the typical meme of the digital age.

Image Credit: Dan Bloom http://dailymail.co.uk

Over 100 years later, cat books are still where the money is at. In his New York Times Op-Talk interview last month (“Confessions of A Cat Guy”), author and illustrator Peter Catapano described what is known in the publishing industry as “going cat book.” Catapano says that brilliant authors that tire of having brilliant books overlooked can get rich from publishing an identical book, except with pictures of cats throughout it, “because people will buy literally anything with a cat on it.”

So, it would appear as the cat meme was here decades before us, and there’s no reason to think that they won’t be as popular as ever after we all shuffle off this mortal coil, perhaps it’s time to do away with what Catapano calls the “rueful resignation” that accompanies “becom[ing] the sort of person you had always ridiculed- in this case, a Cat Guy?” it seems high time that even those who don’t count themselves among the “Cat People” finally accept- and even learn from- what these cats and their people are trying to tell us.

Becoming Animal: Feeling Horsey

Steven J LeMieux — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: Miha Fras via we make money not art

While in Star Wars, Lonesome Dove and True Grit we saw particular examples of the relationships humans have with horses —relationships that always seem to oscillate between recognizing horses as companions and treating them as bare property. And while with Jasha Lottin (NSFW) we saw in her slaughter and photo shoot the extent to which these animals are splayed out as props for both viewers and those actually interacting with actual horses. With a piece titled Que le cheval vive en moi, May the Horse Live in me in English, and created and performed by Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoit Mangin (together they compose Art Orienté Objet) we can begin to see the emergence of a differently possible relationship between humans and horses.

Image Credit: Miha Fras via plastik

What is especially interesting about Laval-Jeantet’s transformation is that it is largely hidden from view. As spectators we can see her prosthetic hooves and her interactions with the horse. We can partially see the process she has undergone; she presents that process as a documented and material aspect of the performance, but if we consider the actual performance the intimate relationship she is building with this animal, then we must admit that not only is her transformation private but that the core of her art is too. May the Horse Live in me, then, is ultimately an unseen piece of performance art that can only be gestured toward. The action of it, her feelings, her blood, the relationship (material and immaterial both) formed between her and the horse can only be speculated at. Unlike every other piece that I’ve considered over the past several blog posts looked at where and how the horse is deliberately captured as a spectacle upon which humans act. Laval-Jeantet does not seem to capture or use the horse; instead, she only hints at her relationship with it.

Image Credit: Miha Fras via we make money not art

About the performance they note that “As a radical experiment whose long-term effects cannot be calculated, Que le cheval vive en moi questions the anthropocentric attitude inherent to our technological understanding. Instead of trying to attain ‘homeostasis,’ a state of physiological balance, with this performance, the artists sought to initiate a process of ‘synthetic transi-stasis,’ in which the only constant is continual transformation and adaptation. The performance represents a continuation of the centaur myth, that human-horse hybrid which, as ‘animal in human,’ symbolizes the antithesis of the rider, who as human dominates the animal.”( Art Orienté Objet via BuzzFeed)

By slowly taking a horse’s plasma into her body Laval-Jeantet began to engage a very particular sort of becoming. Toward forming this new sort of relationship with a horse she had to acculturate her body to the particulars of the horse’s. And even while something like 95% of the cells (by count, not weight) in a human body are nonhuman and while our DNA can hardly be called our own—so much of it matches other organisms’, and it is streaked through with the remains of viruses—the process of welcoming more cohesive aspects of another’s body—the plasma and immunoglobins in this case--is still a violent act. It’s tricky enough just transferring blood from human to human, but interspecies transfers add another layer of difficulty.

Image Credit: Miha Fras via we make money not art

So that when Laval-Jeantet began welcoming in the horse’s plasma and immunoglobins she performed a peculiar kind of autoimmunity. Looking toward autoimmunity broadly we can see an event where a body turns on its own protection and ultimately allows others entry. This occurs in cultures and institutions and bodies of all sorts. And in this case, where Laval-Jeantet underwent a months long process of slowly introducing horse immuniglobulins to her own bloodstream, rather than deliberately destroying her immune system she pulled the wool over its eyes—or, more generously, convinced it to play (nice) with the horse.

Image Credit: Miha Fras via plastik

About the entire process she notes. "I had the feeling of being extra-human… I was not in my usual body. I was hyper-powerful, hyper-sensitive, hyper-nervous and very diffident. The emotionalism of an herbivore. I could not sleep. I probably felt a bit like a horse.' (we make money not art via Centre Presse)

While Laval-Jeantet worked at an intertwined horsey becoming HumanimalAlex, a youtube user and member of the ongoing art group HumanimaL, performs a different kind of transformation. If Laval-Jeantet’s relationship with the horse seems bound in blood Alex’s is skin deep. Through a blend of exquisite full body makeup, a mask and tail, and deliberate movements Alex, rather than appearing horselike, appears to appear horselike. So that even with the tail and hooves and mask his humanness shines through (with the explicit dominance of the human being, I’m sure, purposeful). Rather than moving toward a relationship with the horse this sort of transformation invokes the horse as an inspiration for particularly human behaviors. It’s noted on HumanimaL’s website that these performances are for hire and that “this undeniably unique act is guaranteed to turn heads, no matter what the occasion so use your Humanimal to show the wild side of your event, conference, opening or launch.” Here the specter of the animal is mobilized for the distinctly human designs. Like in Lottin’s photos the horse, here blended into human forms, is reproduced as a prop. Unlike Marion Laval-Jeantet’s private relationship with the horse Alex’s is formed entirely in the public eye. And while his work turns heads Laval-Jeantet’s gives us the opportunity to imagine what a differently organized relationship might look like.

Eating the Golden Calf

Steven J LeMieux — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 21:41:37 +0000

Image Credit: Harry Ransom Center

Eric Gill’s Calf is currently on display at the Harry Ransom Center as part of their new exhibition The King James Bible: Its History and Influence. The calf first appears in the King James Bible in the following verses. “Make us gods, which shall go before us... And Aaron said unto them, Break off the golden earrings, which are in the ears of your wives, of your sons, and of your daughters, and bring them unto me...And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt (Exodus 32:1-4). In both the statue and in this chapter of Exodus we can begin to consider the relationship between these humans and gods and animals.

The molten calf, bought and paid for with the recently freed people’s golden jewelry, isn’t an idol intended for the veneration of animals. Instead, it seems as though this golden calf is taken up and used by humans just as an actual calf might be. The calf remains a beast. Derrida’s in his recently published lectures The Beast and Sovereign proposed that culturally both the beast and the sovereign have been perceived as operating outside the scope of law--the sovereign because his actions operate as the law and the beast because it is incapable of stupidity, and without the ability to respond it only ever reacts.

Image Credit: Steven LeMieux

We see this same configuration played out upon the body of the golden calf. It is rendered as both animal and god, doubly beyond the scope of the law (and it was precisely when Moses was receiving the commandments that his errant followers took up with the calf). And with both gods and animals outside the scope of the law they become null spaces. Humans then build law, desire, impetus upon their bodies. The calf is constructed not so that they might follow it but rather so that they might drive it before them. Even as they chase it its flight and footsteps are rendered as guidance. The golden calf is caught up in human use just as much as its fleshy fellows.

Image Credit: Eric Gill via 1st-art-gallery.com

Gill’s statue plays along these lines. It is both innocent and virile. The calf’s outstretched head with its slight frown and large, vacant eyes gives it the look of a newborn creature. It sees all the world in a dull wonder. The statue also prominently features its penis and set of still gilded scrotum. The statue, made of hoptonwood stone in 1912, was originally gilded. Over time, though, most of the gilding has flaked off. Gill’s involvement with the calf, though, didn’t follow the same purpose as much of his religious works. He designed the calf for the newly created avant-garde nightclub the Cave of the Golden Calf.

With this we might begin to look at the decadence heaped upon both the images of the calf and its representation in Exodus. “And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses' anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount. And he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and strewed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it” (Exodus 19-20). Moses, displeased with the tenor of the celebration surrounding the calf, forces the people to eat their calf—one use is simply turned to another. And with the calf eaten he replaced the nascent path built upon the body of the animal with his textual commandments.

Horsing Around: Inside and Out

Steven J LeMieux — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 20:49:48 +0000

Image credit Unknown via f*** yeah, wild horses

Last week I wrote about the curious dual-natured relationship we seem to have with horses. In books and film and popular media horses are situated as both friend, companion, partner and as disposable beast, object, mere chattel. Last week, too, I teased the case of Jasha Lottin and the relationship she had with a horse. Her story is surprisingly simple at first blush. Lottin and her friend bought a 32-year-old, near-dead horse already scheduled to be euthanized. They shot it in the head with a high powered rifle—apparently killing it instantly and painlessly. Then Lottin, a nudist and Star Wars fan, staged a photo shoot featuring her and the now-dead horse. Throughout the following post I’ll be discussing her pictures with the horse. They are excessively gory; there is some nudity. Discretion advised. Not safe for work content after the break.

Image credit Jasha Lottin via Seattle Weekly

Here Lottin is tucked into the now emptied out horse—Skywalker style. Its organs and blood are splayed out on the ground; she has replaced them. Her smiling face pokes out near its back legs. There’s no certainty of the horse’s sex, but in either case she takes the place of its genitals. These photos, especially those with Lottin tucked inside, trend towards neither horse nor human but instead a combination of the two. They’re, together, an inverted centaur composed upon and within the body of a horse. The combination is, as we must be sure to remember, not equal. Even though she has positioned herself within the horse, in its belly, its Lottin that consumed the horse both figuratively and literally.

Image credit Jasha Lottin via Seattle Weekly

There is something strange about these images of her eating some bit of the horse. Last week I wrote about Daenerys’ ritualistic consumption of the horse heart. She was glistening and bloody, and while she and the heart were prominent there was no horse to be seen. Lottin’s consumption, though, doesn’t have nearly the same pop, the same flare. Her bloody hands look like they were dipped in red corn syrup; the piece of horse she tugs on seems small and insignificant. The banality of her representation forces the viewer to actively recall the embodied reality of her act. These photos point toward an actual woman and an actual horse and actual death.

Image credit Jasha Lottin via Seattle Weekly

Throughout almost all of the photos Lottin wears a broad grin. Here Lottin and her unnamed friend are posing with the horse’s heart. Both grinning, they hold the heart up in what must be a pretty common hunter’s-fresh-kill-trophy pose (I’ve taken any number of such pictures while fishing). Her constant grin is one of the most intriguing aspects of these pictures. There’s no sense of gravity, no notion of sadness or remorse or really any hint that this entire event is anything but lark. It should be noted that after posting these photos Lottin was reported to the authorities; after investigating they found that she broke no laws. What I think people found so shocking, though, was her smile. Because of that smile—a fixed photo smile, unconscious, reflexive, ubiquitous—there isn’t any real room for anything but the snap acknowledgement of these photos as simple snap shots of (what many saw to be) grotesque activity.

Image credit Jasha Lottin via Seattle Weekly

Here Lottin stands naked and covered in blood, perhaps having just emerged from inside the dead horse. This photo, though, subverts any sense of hybridization or actual relationship between Lottin and the horse. She has killed the animal and eaten it and played within it, but still there’s nothing but a facile connection. The blood remains on the surface as she looks down at the dead horse as nothing more than a hollowed out prop. What is there here to separate her from the spectacle of the films written about last week? Her horse, though specifically killed in order to make the photos, is little more than a prop.

Image credit Ars Electronica 2011 via New Scientist

Next week I’ll be looking at a different kind of horsey performance. In 2011 Marion Laval-Jeantet undertook a piece of performance art that explored the possibilities of a more substantial, embodied, relationship with a horse.

Horsey Beginnings: Setting the Stage

Steven J LeMieux — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 16:34:28 +0000

Image Credit the Bureau of Land Management

In George Lucas's Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Han Solo rides a tauntaun out into the frozen wastes of Hoth; he needs to find his friend, Luke Skywalker. In George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones, Deanerys Targaryen, a princess in exile, takes center stage in a ceremony for the sake of her child-to-be. She has to eat a raw, fresh horse heart. In Washington County, a Portland woman and her friend buy a near dead horse, shoot it in the head, cut it open, and take pictures, lots of bloody pictures. The following post does not contain these images (a future post will, though).

Image Credit Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

Han Solo has to find his friend. He saddles his tauntaun and rides out into the rapidly freezing night. He's told that he won't get far. His tauntaun will freeze before he reaches the first marker. Han doesn't care. Han doesn't care about his tauntaun, and there's no real distinction made, on his part, between this living transportation and his normal mechanical means of getting around. The tauntuans are pretty strange; they look like a kangaroo-dinosaur blend. What almost instantly endears them to the audience, though, is that he saddles the animal; it has reins. Han's a real space cowboy now. He, for a moment, has a real live horse. These tauntauns, too, have perhaps the most pathos filled utterance of any creature in Star Wars. They are filled with emotion. Well, that's the case until Han cuts his now dead tauntaun open and we see that it's filled with guts. Han, as he stuffs Luke into the tauntaun, notes its stink. The tauntuan--dead, sliced open, and stuffed with Luke, is left without a shred of dignity.

Image Credit Game of Thrones via Nerdy Gamer Girl

[A slight note to the reader. While I didn't feel terrible about spoiling a thirty year old movie Game of Thrones (show and book both) are slightly more recent. So, (slight) spoiler warning.]

Deanerys, still pretty much a child, is married off to an older man, the leader of a people dependent on horses. He frightens her, but she learns to love him, and she learns to love the horses. When she discovers that she is pregnant she is taken to some elders and told to eat a horse heart to prove that she's woman enough bear her husband's child. In the book, Martin doesn't spend terribly much time describing the horse eating, but in the show they give us a lavish scene. We don't see the heart cut from any horse, and in some ways it's presented as its own object, free of any horsey connections, much as you might buy from a store. Well, not quite store like. The heart is still, seemingly, full of blood, and as Deanerys works her way through the several pounds of flesh she gets covered. The scene is hard to watch; she, covered in blood, shiny and slimy, nauseous. She chokes down every bite.

Image Credit The Searchers via Gone Movie

We don't, as a general rule, eat horses in the United States. Wikipedia has a nice run down of various historical reasons horsemeat is taboo in different cultures, but one of the most convincing reasons that I have heard for the American distaste of horse meat is that horses are looked at less as beasts and more as companion animals. People talk about cowboys and their relationship with horses as fundamentally ingrained in an American imaginary. And while I don't know if there is any particular research to back up these claims, having grown up watching westerns as a little boy they strike a chord with me. But the horse, the cowboy's companion, is always still an animal. It can be killed, but its killing, while not a damning act is at least worrisome. Horses occupy the curious double space of both means of transportation and friend.

Image Credit Lonesome Dove via American Bedu

[My post is full of spoilers today. Both Lonesome Dove and True Grit are pretty old, but with the new True Grit getting released recently I thought that I'd give a heads up for anyone that is about to watch it.]

They have personality when the story demands and none when it doesn't, and these switches seldom need justification. In Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove there are named horses and unnamed Gus cuts his unnamed horse down and uses it to hide from gunshot--neither McMurtry nor the reader skip a beat in killing the animal. A good portion of the first chapter, and throughout the rest of the long novel, Captain Call interacts with a horse; he has a relationship with the Hell Bitch. She's as tough, tougher maybe than he is.

Image Credit True Grit via The Diplomacy of Kasey Driscoll

Han's search for Luke and tauntaun sacrifice mirrors Rooster's race to save Mattie's life in True Grit. Throughout the story (equally held up in both films, and I assume the novel) horses are front and center. They're haggled over, argued about, praised. And though different characters approach them with different intensities, Mattie’s care and affection for the horses isn't played off as a little girl's whims. Her strength, throughout the story is apparent, and her relationship with her horse Little Blackie is presented as genuine and admirable. But Rooster sacrifices Little Blackie--sacrifice cleans things up too much. He brutally rides him to death. In the more recent film this point is amplified. Rooster rides Little Blackie as far and fast as he'll go, then stabs him to push him further. Once Little Blackie falls Rooster shoots him. But Mattie is saved. The climax of the film revolves around this horse. The characters are forgotten and we feel for the horse; Rooster disgusts us. Minutes after the horse is dead he is forgotten, though. The film ends firmly focused on Mattie and Rooster, neither are disgusting.

That horses are disposable and relatable for many people raised on westerns and American horse culture is why the story of Jasha Lottin is so strange. In next week's post I'll be focused on her actions and pictures.

Drawing on Pigs: Wim Delvoye's Art Farm

Steven J LeMieux — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 13:48:02 +0000

(Image Credit: Wim Delvoye)

It's pretty easy to understand (and probably join in) the outrage surrounding Wim Delvoye's work with pigs. Tattoos aren't exactly taboo in any real fashion anymore, but even as commonplace as they've become they still seem to provoke discussions about the use of bodies as writing platforms. In casual conversation clothes don't have nearly the same effect; though, it could be argued that they write on the body just as much as any tattoo. Clothes, though, seem to be commonly taken up as transient while tattoos are (mostly) permanent. I doubt there would be nearly as strong a reaction to these pigs if they were just dressed up on a daily basis.

(Image Credit: Wim Delvoye)

Of course, dressing a pig everyday would surely, almost undeniably, have a more noticeable impact on a pig's life. Clothes, no matter the degree to which a body has been naturalized to their presence, always remain external; through a thousand tiny hitches they make their presence known--they bind, sag, ride up, get caught, twist, shift, shuffle, flap in the wind. We put them on, we take them off; they are a forceful presence in our lives, but we do change them (What does this say, then, about, the 1% of America that isn’t allowed to change their prison uniforms?). And while there's lots of fun poked at animals wearing clothes (and at the people that dressed them) I don't believe there is anything near the response these tattooed pigs elicit. It's worth interrogating this difference.

(Image Credit: Wim Delvoye)

"To tattoo a pig, we sedate it, shave it and apply Vaseline to its skin" (Delvoye in a 2007 interview in ArtAsiaPacific found at Sperone Westwater). And then the pig and tattoo grow together. Grow, as Delvoyne imagines, in both size and value together. Pigs, posits Delvoye in the same interview, are largely thought of as having very little value. And even though these pigs may be spoiled they aren't co-authors in this project. Delvoyne states that "Yes, we name them; the name is often tattooed on the pig. It’s part of the personalization of the industrial product" (Delvoye). The pigs are breathing canvases. They shift and alter the tattoos they carry, but they are always still, fundamentally, written on. The pigs are eventually slaughtered for their skins. In the end they are either stuffed and mounted, or the skins are displayed.

(Image Credit: Wim Delvoye)

Wim Delvoye worked his way up to live pigs. In the 1990s he began tattooing dead pigs, just working with pig skins he acquired from slaughter houses. It wasn't until 1997 that he worked with a live animal. In the late 90s he worked with and on a number of different pigs in different places. In 2004 he moved his practice to China and subsequently established Art Farm, a pig farm where raises and tattoos his pigs. It's worth noting that the other project Delvoye is known for is “Cloaca” a 39 foot long machine he built that eats, digests and shits.

(Image Credit: Wim Delvoye)

Delvoye is a vegetarian, but he both consumes and offers these pigs up for consumption as art. He's particularly apt in describing that "I prefer to show the pigs alive. In a perfect world, I would just show the Cloaca shit machines and live pigs—eating and excreting together" (Delvoye). The constructed shitting machine and the thoroughly marked pigs are rendered equivalent, both flattened out as spectacle. The tattooed pigs are conceived as part of an industrial machine, a machine made up by human, animal, machine, and conceptual bodies. Taken together the pigs and machine reposition the viewer as also taking part, "eating and excreting" pigs and machines both.

Next week I’ll be writing on an already thoroughly inscribed upon birthday-present-pig that’s part of The Harry Ransom Center’s exhibit The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door: A Portal to Bohemia, 1920-1925.

Branding Occupy Wall Street

Steven J LeMieux — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 16:11:06 +0000

(Image Credit: Michael Nagle, Getty Images via In Focus)

During the past week Occupy Wall Street has gained increasing media attention. The movement, initially called for by the group Adbusters, began in earnest on September 17th when protesters first began to occupy Zuccotti Park. This initial act seems to have largely been met with bemused ambivalence, and while there was originally a single demand articulated by Adbusters in their July call to action—that “Barack Obama ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington” (Adbusters) –things were quite murky by the time the occupation took shape. Much of the media attention that the movement has gained, especially during this surge in participation, has focused on the apparent lack of concrete demands set forth by OWS. This confusion is misplaced. While the list of hopeful outcomes is amorphous a clear sense of oppositional branding has been developed from the wealth of signs and images created through the movement. OWS demands that we put a hold on our love affair with notions of prosperity that put us in a double bind.

(Image Credit: Adbusters)

This early poster by Adbusters does a nice job of simultaneously crystallizing and confusing the movement. By asking about a single demand it offers the possibility of a unified, concrete protest while leaving that single demand open to interpretation. And while the question broadens possibility the image suggests a possible outcome. Raising above clouds of teargas and crowds of appropriately gasmasked protesters a dancer postures serenely on the Wall Street Bull. She rides the bull when most visitors pose for pictures as they fondle the bull’s balls. The bull can be more than a system by which the 1% (to use the popular 1/99% split that the movement has espoused) cows the other 99%.

(Image Credit: David Shankbone via In Focus)

The Charging Bull, a sculpture created by Arturo Di Modica in the late 80s, has become an icon for Wall Street. Originally created to represent the “strength and power of the American people” the bull has come to stand in for the strength and power of a particular system. What Occupy Wall Street is demanding is that we stop worshiping that system. That all this symbolism has been poured into a bull makes a certain amount of sense. Bulls are domestic animals that never feel quite domestic, yet even with all their power (and perhaps because of it) they are kept under strict control by the humans that own them. Bulls have largely been turned into a tool of reproduction.

The movement has, in some ways, twice enacted a barrier around the bull. Fearful of any particular harm that could befall the icon it was quickly fenced in. The fence and the guards prevented both protestors from nearing the bull and tourists who flock to the bull daily for lucky rubs and pictures. And by enforcing the cordoning off of the bull the OWS protests have perfectly created a visualization of their message. By enforcing this barrier the bull (and, more importantly, what it has come to represent) is show to be something that we cannot access. The above video by BLUCHEEZ accurately portrays some of the frustrations inherent in this sudden distance between the bull and its followers.

(Image Credit: Erin M via Fast Company)

Gaps have value. And creating distance can be a goal in and of itself. Through this distance we can begin to recognize the multitude of relationships that are manifest between the economic and political systems in this country and the people that inhabit them.

The Decorah Eagles as Anthropomorphized Nuclear Family

ladysquires — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 13:39:02 +0000

Streaming Video by Ustream.TV

(Video Credit: Raptor Resource Project, UStream)

Over the past few months, the Raptor Resource Project has been hosting this live "nest cam" feed of a pair of eagles in Decorah, IA. As of last week, the pair became the proud parents of three babies, and the drama of their incubating and hatching eggs has become a bit of an internet sensation. The project is part of a conservation effort directed toward monitoring and understanding the nesting habits of avian raptors (eagles, falcons, owls, etc.), maintaining nesting sites, and educating the public.

As you can imagine, the behavior of the human beings observing the birds on the interenet is, in many ways, almost as interesting as the behavior of the birds themselves. The Ustream site features a social media feed, and certain conventions have sprung up among people who discuss the birds on Facebook and Twitter. Inevitably, viewers refer to the male and female eagle as "Dad" and "Mom," and as Twisty Faster of the blog I Blame the Patriarchy has noted, viewers seem to be pretty quick to ascribe gendered behavior to them:

It is remarkable that human people can look at eagles — creatures that inhabit Volkswagen-sized piles of twigs 80′ up in trees, that lay eggs, that have no hair and no boobs, that eat raw squirrels, that can fly, for crying out loud, and that in pretty much every other respect that is germane to discourse on human social structure are the very antithesis of H. sapiens — and see themselves. And by “themselves” I mean the patriarchal paradigm. In a nest of eagles.

Twisty notes that several personal acquaintances who are obsessed with the feed sometimes critique the eagles' parenting skills, as if they were watching episodes of "Kate Plus 8" (sans Jon) or "Super Nanny" rather than the behavior of creatures who are different from us in almost every perceivable way.

Then again, info-tainment television shows about animals have, in a very real way, primed us to think about animal behavior and social organization in the terms in which we understand our own. The highly popular Animal Planet show Meerkat Manor is a prime example:

So my question is, does this help or hurt? Do visual representations of animals that allow us anthropomorphize them encourage us to support conservation or do they simply lead to misunderstanding? Is our tendency to anthropomorphize inevitable or could these representations discourage it in some way?

We Like to Watch, or the Visual Pleasure of Lions, Tigers, and Bears

ebfrye — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 18:51:03 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot of Smithsonian Wild

Many of us are suckers for cute animal videos, trips to the aquarium, and documentaries featuring David Attenborough. We can now add to the list of ways to watch animals this new web feature offered by the Smithsonian, which gives us "a glimpse into an animal world that is rarely seen by anyone." The pictures are taken with secret cameras, promising the viewer a more authentic experience, one with minimal human interaction.

Image Credit: Screenshot of Smithsonian Wild

Looking at these photos causes me to think about what's implied by our visual engagement with animals. For obvious reasons, access to wild animals is limited; therefore, we regular folk are necessarily placed in the role of voyeurs (unless you're a crazy snake man in certain parts of Florida). Usually, the pleasure we take in watching animals is both excused and rationalized by our insistence that we gain from them a new sense of knowledge. Continuing in this rhetoric, Smithsonian Wild explains their mission: "Our hope is that while you are being entertained by the amazing photographs, you will also learn about the animals, their diverse habitats, and what is being done to conserve them."

Image Credit: Screenshot of Smithsonian Wild

However, with the anniversary of the death of the orca trainer at SeaWorld, I wonder if times may be changing for how we perceive the role of zoos and aquariums in our culture. I've also noted, and here I confess the time I've spent watching Animal Planet, the number of shows dedicated to what happens when people get too close. See these videos from Fatal Attractions, which offers a different sense of voyeurism.

Image Credit: Screenshot of Smithsonian Wild

Is digital access to animals the responsible way to go? Can these photographs provide a visual pleasure that replaces the guilt-inducing zoo experience? Indeed, the fact that many of these photographs were taken under night surveillance (look at those eyes!) adds an immediacy and sense of the forbidden. We're not supposed to be seeing what we do. Then again, I wonder if these photographs offer enough titilation for viewers who require a sense of shock, those who like cuteness as much as they like to be disturbed...