[-empyre-] Has mediated natures changed your ideas of what communication is?

[Jordan Matthew Yerman]

My work has mostly presented urban feral animals to a human audience in a similar dynamic to a celebrity sighting: a sort of informational comet that human observers, unable to speak directly to the subject, can only speculate about. I find that communicating with the animals themselves only happens in slow, small exchanges of physical activity, usually me adopting different poses in approaching them (for example with my back turned, eyes closed and only briefly opening to broadcast trust). 

I also experiment with the texture of the floor of the structures I introduce to their environments, with the animals responding by either entering or not entering.

I don’t have a theoretical background on this, but have learned from established feral-cat behaviorists, some of whose work with trap-neuter-release organizations translated reasonably well to my own practice.