[-empyre-] Introducing a special guest, Jordan Yerman and Street Cat Photo Booth

[margaretha haughwout]

Dear -empyre- soft_skinned_space,

I have another special guest to introduce, Jordan Matthew Yerman, who will
write in about the Street Cat Photo Booth. I first learned about this
project also at ISEA this summer, and found it to be delightfully playful,
but also to raise some really important questions about the labor of
nonhumans, about the systems humans set up for them, and kinds of care that
might emerge from these systems.

Jordan Matthew Yerman is a Vancouver-based artist and writer who has worked
and created from Reykjavik to Tokyo. He explores the experiences of feral
cats as a metric of urban measurement, while assessing the embodied
practice of engaging such furtive subjects. He documents cities through the
lived experiences of their inhabitants, be they human or otherwise. He
imposes interventions upon his images to explore how those inhabitants—and
those who view them—embody the changes in their built environments. In
collaboration with Leigh M. Smith, he created Street Cat Photo Booth,
consisting of networked shelter environments scaled for feline use. These
autonomous photo booths allow urban cats to initiate their own social-media
photo shoots, recontextualizing the role these animals play in our
perceptions of urbanity and neighborhood.
Yerman’s work has been entered three times into the proceedings and
catalogue of the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA); and his
work has been published by the Vancouver Observer, APEX Experience
Magazine, Wallpaper*, Travel+Leisure, Akihabara News, Tokyo INSIGHT
Magazine, the Vancouver Sun, Daily Hive, Vancouver Courier, Gripped,
Spaced.ca, Manager Magazine, Love Meow, Canadian Avalanche Journal, and
Buzzfeed.
He partnered with Fujifilm to photograph cats across Japan, and takes
high-stakes cat photos for Vancouver Orphan Kitten Rescue, helping
abandoned cats find new homes. He studied at UC San Diego, University of
Exeter, and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.
Street Cat Photo Booth has been demonstrated in New York, Vancouver, Hong
Kong, Tokyo, and Manizales, Colombia. The Street Cat Project has shot in
Japan, Iceland, Hong Kong, Israel, Canada, Italy, Guatemala, Colombia, and
the United States.
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