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Event in the context of the exhibition Ecomedia
Matthew Fuller - Art for AnimalsArt for Animals, live video lecture in english by Dr Matthew Fuller, London
Art for animals intends to address the ecology of capacities for perceptions, sensation, thought and reflexivity of animals. The capacity for art is part of the rather mobile boundary line that performs the task of annihilating the animal in human and in demarcating the human from animality. The purpose of this lecture is not so much to legislate upon the placing of this line, but rather to suggest that the sensual and cultural capacities of various kinds of being, whether ordered into species or not can be explored and to follow a few ways in which this has been done. Paul
Perry, has installed a small robotic device to spray Bobcat-urine high up a tree to stimulate an imaginary of pheremone responses. Natalie Jeremijenko makes a robotic goose, the aim of which is to set up interactions with a small group of geese, in a number of other projects she sets up devices for inter-species communication. Louis Bec attempts to set up a dialogue between two speciated parts of the same genus of fish. Anthony Hall also works on communications and perceptual reflexivity with weakly electric fish. Marcus Coates stages a series of actions with animal materials and behaviours with interaction with other species as the prime goal. Some of this work is rightfully absurdist, whimsical, self-trivialising. But all of it moves towards setting up actual, multi-scalar and imaginal relations with animals that involve a testing of shared and distinct capacities of perception.
Matthew Fuller is David Gee Reader in Digital Media at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London. His publications include: Behind the Blip, essays on the culture of software; Media Ecologies, materialist energies in art and technoculture; and the forthcoming, Software Studies, a lexicon. Research for Art for Animals is supported by the Fonds voor Beeldende Kunst, Vormgeving en Bouwkunst of the Netherlands.