Judith Doyle

Interdisciplinary Studies Thesis Proposal

March 10, 2004

Foxscape : Configuring Animals in Urban and Digital Geographies

My thesis investigates the representation of animals and animal practices in new media and online. Conditions of embodiment and anthropomorphic strategies using digital technologies are explored. The thesis will be presented on DVD ROM where written chapters and visual art including video and digital animation (foxscape) can be accessed through non-linear links in the form of a navigable digital geography. The thesis visual material includes images gleaned over several years when urban foxes dwelled in my elderly parent's backyard in Toronto's Beaches area. The foxes have subsequently gone, victims of a disease called sarcoptic mange, and my parents have died. Thus, the visual elements have an elegiac and spectral quality.

Urban animal contexts include zoos, shelters, (sub)urban slaughterhouses, pet stores, live-animal food markets, and the growing populations of feral domesticates and urban wildlife. Animals are represented in live spectacles (zoos, circuses), in historic and recent cinema, in art including digital media, and on the Internet. How we organize urban animals reveals human geographies, power relations and processes of othering and ordering human as well as non-human bodies.

Part One : colonial encounters and animal spectacles

The first part of the thesis provides a backdrop for the discussion of animals in cinematic and digital technologies by reviewing literature on zoos and the representation of animals in the colonial epoch.

1.1 animal classification

The zoo is a contact zone representing the space of colonial encounters (Malamud). The 19^th century popularization of zoos is rooted in natural history classification projects, the tenants of which were also applied to humans. (Davies, McClintock, Monrahan, La Tour). "The dominant uses of human-animal distinctions during the colonial epoch relied upon representations of similarity to animals to dehumanize and thus racialize particular cultural groups." (Elder, Wolch, Emil, 81)

In Carl Linné's (Linnaeus') 1735 The System of Nature, colonialism asserts its order on the surfaces of life in categories including race, gender and species. ‘Sciences’ such as phrenology and eugenics map human ‘others’ according to degrees and features of animality, and animals are also heirarchicalized with the major predators at the top of the chain.

Racisms have historically leaned on discourses of animal inferiority and subjugation, for example, the simianization of the Irish. (McClintock, Monraham)

The liberal human subject is calibrated on axes of difference against the mean standard of a Majority-subject, with racialized, engendered and colonized human others constituted as less-than-human. (Noske, Delueze, Braidotti, Davies, McClintock, Shiva).

Though live animals in zoos are subjugated, they still have agency and act in ways beyond human command; they touch sexually, curl unresponsively into corners and play out the psychological distress of captivity in repetitive pacing and head-banging. They meet or elide the spectator’s gaze. (Davies, Berger).

1.2 early cinema

Authors including John Berger, Alexander Wilson, Jonathan Burt and Akira Mizuta Lippit have written historical accounts of the emergence of motion pictures and its impact on how we see (and don't see) animals. Berger asserted an inverse relation between animals and their images - as animals disappear from our everyday lives, animal movies proliferate. Burt asserts that this "history of (animal) disappearance" is rooted in 19^th century British legislation requiring that slaughterhouses be kept away from the public gaze.

The historical concurrence of the removal of animal suffering from public view with the emergence of photographic techniques and animal representations suggests to Berger and Burt that these images serve to both regulate and compensate for animal presence. In the mid to late 1800's, animal bodies figured as key subjects of the burgeoning use of photography in science experimentation. The photographic gaze suspends motion, transforming subject into object; this transformation has been likened to death. (Lippit citing Barthes, Deleuze). The vocabulary of film language evokes animal bodies and movement. Lippit suggests that cinema encodes animal traits as a "gesture of mourning" for the disappearance of wildlife; she notes that the film term 'animation' signals a positioning of nature as animality, in film and semiotic language. Denied language, animals are turned into language. Lippit notes by the end of the 19^th century a "coalescence" of the terms - animal, photography, unconscious - for that which cannot be inhabited by the subject (animals and photographs can be seen as resembling versions of the unconscious). (Lippit 177)

Sean Cubitt contests the thesis that animal movies signal and compensate for animal disappearance. He asserts that some animal movies provoke active investigation and discovery of nature and its virtues. (Cubitt)

Part two : the Internet

This part of the thesis includes an inventory of animal representation and the representation of animal practices online. Through the figure of the animal, features of the Internet as an embodied geography are revealed.

Animal bodies are invoked, claimed, represented and anthropomorphically inhabited on the internet in such a cacophonous myriad of ways, some authors view "cyberspace" as a new wilderness, teeming with spectral non-human life in disembodied conditions that unravel the differences between speaking about, for or as animals. Such visions both suppress and rework the embodied experience of living creatures, both human and non-human.

2.1 animal practice stories and the reconfiguration of race online

This section looks at some ways that animals and animal practices are represented online, and how these representations work to reinscribe race and white privilege in a supposedly disembodied environment. Jennifer Wolch contends that in the colonial epoch, race was constructed according to regimes of animal classification and physiology and that now, in a postmodern context of global technologies, race is spoken through stories of animal practices. Stories about what we do and don't do with animals provide a context on the Internet for white privilege to assert and disguise its operations. Accounts of the origin of SARS and the People For Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) web site "MassKilling.com" are analyzed as animal practice narratives. Using the example of the slaughterhouse, the chapter asserts that humans and non-humans labour under shared conditions under global capitalism, and that this labour is calibrated by race and degrees of animality. Animal rights activism that relies on human/animal binaries and exploits racism as a metaphor for speciesism fails to account for the ways that racism is reconfigured now.

2.2 digital zoos and arks

The Internet positions the older, and increasingly unused, facades of sites of animal contact as skuemorphs in Katherine Hayles sense of the term, as design features that were functional at an earlier time. (How We Became Posthuman). There is a proliferation online of digital zoos, arks, safaris, farms, aquaria, circuses and bestiaries, where representations of animals are arranged according to classification systems and contact narratives that can be situated historically in terms of colonial narratives of race and gender. Here, the internet reprises familiar colonial tropes, in a revised disembodied form.

Digital ‘animals’ circulate in a spectral economy of images and DNA sequences. These can be managed and copyrighted. Gail Davies writes that copyright constitutes the bars and moats containing animals in the electronic zoo. As in zoos of the colonial period, online Arks and zoos contain trophies that testify to the imperial reach and mobility required to obtain the inventory of animal bodies, live or represented. Scientific description of DNA, like the photographic traces of animals, is copyrighted, institutionalizing what Shiva famously calls a neocolonial project of "biopiracy".

Animal agency is eliminated in the photographic databases of online "zoos" and "Arks". As with animatronic displays in museums and theme parks, animal behavior is programmed and predictable. Troubling images of animals are repressed.

Alternately, the contemporary art web site developed by the British collective Vivaria is a project space for critical enquiry about the economic and social features that condition our ideas of Artificial Life. As Claire Malloy writes, "The nonhuman animal body has become a contested site"; the genetic manipulation, lives and slaughter of livestock animals, for example, trouble the boundaries between bodies and technologies. Anthropomorphic hybrids and discourses unsettle anthropocentric discourses.

2.3 artificial life

This section investigates some themes of anthropomorphic projects and discourses online. One anthropomorphic theme in online discourses is that new forms of life circulate on the Internet. I assert that this claim is accompanied by a wish to join this life, to find a place for our lives beyond our own human bodies - another dimension, a spiritual and intellectual repository where we might circulate, immortal, amongst the intercessionary powers. It has long been believed that animals can travel between the worlds of the living and the dead. If "cyberspace" is an interstitial world, then we seek to become interstitial animals there. Cyberspace fulfills desires for a new wilderness where slaughter and consumption are eradicated. The desire to transcend the body's limits shares features with Braidotti's account of whiteness. It is the horror of the body, its consumptive needs, vulnerability, degeneration and death that fuel a yearning for whiteness - the body as absence and clean power, inviolable, made into mind. Similar forces fuel the desire to believe that the Internet is space, our queries are movement, and animality is transcendent.

Existing corporate and geographic hegemonies are reconfigured in cyberspace. Power and access to essentials such as food are striated by race, class and geography in the flesh world and this formation is being reproduced online. In The Cartography of Bodies, Radhika Monhanram discusses Braidotti's 'postmodern feminist nomadism' in terms of the privileged status of this strategy. She writes that "ease of movement across borders reveals the unmarked European body". (Monhanram 80)

From the onset 'cyberspace' has been regarded as a new world operating according to different rules of embodiment than this one (Davis). Life-like animal representations and creatures on the internet seem to exercise intercessionary powers. The disembodied murmurs Zizek writes of are heard as the murmuring of ghosts. Perhaps this can begin to account for the profusion of fantastic creatures and anthropomorphic hybrids on the internet.

Electronic pets are described as alive because - like domesticates - they require our attention, look cute, and have personalities we can customize. Zizek notes that these virtual pets are instruments of interpassivity, turning children into virtual murderers. The online programs described as "life-forms" include emergent programming packets (Artificial Life or AL), data-tracking and search algorithms (web crawlers and spiders) and electronic pets (neopets, game characters and helper/atavar programs with time-based features and graphical icons, often resembling animals and insects).

We call some forms of computer programming "life" because they share features with how we describe and interact with animals. Insects and microorganisms, domestic pets and mythological and spiritual creatures are paradigmatic. The human-animal bond in western urban life is modeled on human interrelations. The most plainly enacted is that of kinship. The Internet operates as a technological domesticate.

The online programs described as "life-forms" include emergent programming packets (Artificial Life or AL), data-tracking and search algorithms (web crawlers and spiders) and electronic pets (neopets, game characters and helper/atavar programs with time-based features and graphical icons, often resembling animals and insects).

In our datascapes and narratives of artificial life is an inclination to believe more and more that the essential coordinates of life are data that can be stored and replicated. Basically this is an idea of life as digital, where mind can be stored, independent of body. (Hayles) She writes, (about Thomas Ray's Tierra project) "Invariably, viewers attribute to these simulated creatures motives, intentions, goals and strategies… cheering the winners, urging on the losers, laughing at the schlemiels." (Hayles, 1) Hayles points out that these lifelike dramas and the creation of "life" are more appealing to funding agencies and investors than computer programming simulations. Hayles concludes that simple mathematical formulae here are regarded as the origin of complexity, rather than tools for understanding the complexity of life.

Part 3 : urban fox project

This part of the thesis contextualizes the DVD (its video, film, digital, hypertextual, interface design, and animation elements). I propose that the process of moving through the project, of "shimmering" opacities of time and concept, and the density of non-verbal/non-textual material provoke identifications between human and animal bodies, within digital geographies.

The DVD interface permits a sustained investigation of Berger's assertion that, as animals disappear from our everyday lives, animal movies proliferate. In this configuration, animal representation in cinema always includes gestures of mourning and reminders that life is short. Animal, photograph and unconscious are linked concepts. The navigatable digital geography permits associative drifts and an animality of movement represented by inscriptions of the body and its traces (drawing, photographs, animations, sounds). The project geography is a spectral territory, provoking mourning and memory of human and non-human bodies. However, animal images also prompt a renewed sense of discovery of nature in the world. In this configuration, animal representations provoke exploration of embodied shared life experience. The thesis proposes that, in animal representations, outcomes of mourning and discovery are not mutually exclusive. Animal representations both compensate for animal disappearance through gestures of mourning, and prompt experience of the animality of our living bodies, processes of discovery and embodied perception.

Communication with animals is often socially undervalued or declared impossible, rendering invisible the languages of touch, scent, glance, wakefulness, erotics and other embodied non-verbal non-textual languages. Writers (Malloy, Wilson) have proposed the radical possibilites of anthropomorphism as a means of identifying and finding common ground with animals. A growing body of contemporary art and theory is concerned with the question of the animal and animal representation. Anthropomorphism - storytelling that fuses animal and human bodies - can challenge too-simple binaries between human and non-human, as well as legitimizing narratives based on "human" superiority Embodied readings of technology are necessary to situate it within lived networks and local experience, and to trouble technology, to defamiliarize it.

3.2 foxscape : spectral cartography

In this cartographic project, I am exploring new ways to map home movie and documentary video into a non-linear interface. I have a great deal of footage of foxes that I shot during their two-year inhabitation of my parent's yard. I've chosen a cartographic approach of mapping the imagery back into the location where it was filmed.

Our bridging devices are drawing and animation. The use of drawing returns the project to our hands; drawing ability was an aptitude that brought me to the arts in the first place. It is a transitional device, and also a way of marking our own embodied practice into the project. Shifts from hand-drawn to video imagery compel shifts in identification and response from viewers.

The 'backyard' project prototypes an innovative way of integrating home movie/micro-documentary and experimental footage into a navigable site for reflection and analysis by viewers, in their own space/time. Developing my thesis in the DVD format will allow me to study interactive documentary production, and on a broader level, to explore the potential of interactive documentary as a means of fostering debate on public policy. The project was developed along with my long-term collaborator Paul Elia, a graduate from the Ontario College of Art and Design. I conceived, designed and structured the project, and did all the videotaping, writing and voice-over. Both Paul and I created the drawings and loops, and worked on the digital programming. We shift quickly within an array of computer applications including Final Cut Pro (video), Sound Edit 16 (sound), Photoshop 6 (images), Painter (drawing/rotoscoping), Macromedia Flash and Director (non-linear navigation and motion graphics).

Through drawing, video, opacity shifts and a non-linear interface based on a mapping of my parent's backyard, the foxscape will include a "shimmering" of time in semi-transparent layers - which is a unique feature of digital geographies (with touch interfaces). Drawing is an interstitial device that returns the project to the hands, the sense of touch which is also at play when using keyboard interfaces.

In choosing to use drawing as a transitional device, I was influenced by Alex Wilson's writing about the impact of early Disney TV shows on environmentalists, where he suggests potential for engagement through anthropomorphic and cross-species identification with animals. (We avoid a cartoon-ish look to our drawings, instead using a 19th century realist style more evocative of Audubon and nature guides.) The engagement with an urban micro-neighbourhood as a site of ecological enquiry, and our use of home-movie and micro-documentary footage, propose implications for educational and media activist strategies, also discussed by Wilson.

Foxscape will heighten embodied, anthropomorphic and associative movement through ideas and images based on specific, local, urban experience of human-animal interaction. The project challenges human/animal binaries, partly through images of human and non-human bodies (close to me) that share space and experiences (including illness, mortality). The project promotes identification with animals in Lippit's use of the term : "Identifying with the animal is part of the process of becoming-animal." (Lippit 180) Foxscape will propose its themes in temporal, visual, spatial and digital (interface) languages, not only in written form.

Animal bodies show that life cannot be subsumed into representation without loss. The quality of death, mourning and loss intrinsic in the absence of photography is foregrounded. ("Photography brings the spectator violently back to the reality of the real that appears, in the first instance, elsewhere." Lippit 180) Anthroporphism also provokes a collision with our embodiment, and prompts identification with animals through our shared animality.

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