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

[Julie Andreyev]

Margaretha, thank you for the thought provoking question! Coincidentally, I am traveling tomorrow to the University Art Association of Canada’s conference at the Banff Art Centre. I have been invited to present my work on a panel called “Animals in Media Art.” 

I am particularly interested in how technologies, new media forms, can offer potentials for re-seeing and re-listeing as we were discussing earlier. These processes may include slowing down high speed recordings of gestures and vocals of other beings in order to match our fairly slow temporal perceptual rate. From this modification we may be better able to interpret their communications. This worked in the past with biologists studying dog and wolf play, and with chickadee vocal communications.

 I’ve worked with motion capture methods with my dogs, for instance to capture movement that would translate into animations that could be deployed in new media performance. This initiated my interest in developing ethics for processes involving other animals. The dogs and I used methods of communication to negotiate what they were, and were not, willing to do. For instance, if the dogs refuse to do something when asked, I would modify or abandon the request.

Similarly with remote camera recording of the crows in my Bird Park, they have certain tolerances of proximity with technological devices, and they communicate these to me, either by avoiding the tech or by investigating it with curiosity. 

Perhaps I can send a more robust reply once I arrive in my hotel digs

till then…

Julie
> On Oct 11, 2017, at 6:05 PM, margaretha haughwout <margaretha.anne.haughwout at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Greetings in this soft_skinned_space,
> 
> I often find myself frustrated by theories and descriptions of cross-species communication that fit a 20th-century/ early cybernetics model of information (aka Claude Shannon's flawed model that elides the meanings of transmission and of communication, establishes information as quantifiable and able to lose its materiality).
> 
> I'm wondering -- Benjamin and Julie especially, and Elaine & others may pitch in as well -- if your work with media and animals has led you to new understandings of communication, and what theorists you look to back up your experiences and ideas.
> 
> -M
> 
> 
> 
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