Animal Behavior Playlist, social media installation (2011)
by Neil Chung
The Animal Behavior Playlist is a compilation of Youtube user’s uploaded videos which doucument examples of animal behavior, cognition, creativity, consciousness and agency into a Youtube playlist.

My goal is to distribute these videos through Youtube in a playlist that will automatically cycle through the choice videos. Individual users will also have the ability to recommend videos to this Animal Behavior Youtube playlist, guided by predetermined criteria set by both Youtube and myself. Sumbissions from the audience are highly encouraged as this is a participatory and interactive project.

Ideally, the Youtube playlist will continue to expand as it is viewed and shared. The idea is not to have individual videos become viral, but to have an easily accessible playlist of videos that will cultivate and broaden the online population’s thinking. This is in the hope that people will perceive animals as sentient beings, thus engaging the reconsideration of our current relationships and mentality towards animals. Other websites such as a Facebook page, and personal blog posts will be created to complement the Youtube playlist by further promoting the social aspect of this initiative.

Bio
Neil Chung immigrated to Canada from Taipei, Taiwan, at the age of ten. In contrast to his childhood in Taipei, growing up in Vancouver has cultivated his interests in nature and animals through its landscape and wildlife. During his time at Emily Carr University Neil has been working through ideas surrounding animal-human relationships, environmental concerns and the act of collection and preservation. Since completing his Bachelors in Visual Arts, Chung’s current practice is diverse and multi-disiplinary–ranging from installation, painting, sculpture, photography and video. Often Neil finds inspiration in the antics of his feline friend.

Seal Sees the Sea, video (2011)
by Marten Sims

Harbour Seal’s form an integral part of both the tourists and residents impression of the Vancouver seascape. Walking along the seawall, we humans are often surprised by the sudden appearance of seals, who seem just as curious about us. Their sudden materialisation is often just as swift as their disappearance (frequently with no indication of where they might reappear – much to the annoyance of photographers). This piece reverses the perspective by following the journey of a inquisitive harbour seal as she visits a variety of sites around the Vancouver shoreline and seawall throughout the day – watching us humans as we go about our various activities and sightseeing.

Bio
Marten grew up in Dorset, a county on the south coast of England. Living is an area of outstanding natural beauty Marten spent much of his childhood in, on, or by the ocean, and more recently has begun exploring under it. It was while volunteering and scuba-diving on the Galapagos Islands in 2008 that he found out what we – as a species – are doing to the ocean, and that it can’t continue, for all our sakes. For eight year he has worked on branding projects, campaigns and in advertising for environmental, humanitarian and sexual health organisations. In addition to his professional work, he also co-directs a non-profit ocean education organisation called‘Wake Project’ here in Vancouver. Although Marten produces work in a variety of medium’s, often his primary objective is to communicate something about his love for the sea, and to raise questions about our own actions towards this, our most precious natural resource.

Rubbernecking, video, 2010
by Paolo Pennuti in collaboration with Mirko Fabbri

Rubbernecking is an ironic combination of visual and audio snippets, recorded in a documentary style. According to the German biologist Jacob Von Uexkull, every creature lives only in its own Umwelt (its  subjective world), which is like a  single bubble of soap, pulled apart from the others. A Landscape can be imagined as a collection of individual worlds, similar to notes on a musical score; every note is relevant in itself and at the same time it is in relation to the others. Rubbernecking depicts a landscape-milieu ruled by forms of control and by the lack of individual possibilities to escape from the dynamics of a society which doesn’t consider people and animals as individuals as such, but rather as elements of the system.

Bio
Paolo Pennuti is a visual artist, living in Vancouver. His educational background is in Philosophy and in Visual arts. In 2005 he attended a Visual Arts scholarship program at New York University. He works primarily with video, sound and photography. Paolo combines visual and audio fragments, recorded in a documentary style, shifting their meaning into a new dimension suspended between fiction and reality.   His video works has been exhibited internationally in contemporary art galleries and film festivals. “Going to sleep is something absolutely certain in life”, shot in New Orleans six months after the hurricane Katrina, won the first prize at Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice. Since the beginning Paolo has developed his projects both individually and in collaboration with other artists.

Distant Air, net art project, 2006
by Myron Campbell

www.distantair.com
Distant Air is a non-linear interactive timeline that charts five vivid recollections of birds ranging from when I was a child to memories I haven’t experienced yet.

A Biography of Sorts
There are four historical events that have punctuated the undulating venation of Myron Campbell’s cerebellum which are surely responsible for his organic style of art.
The very first, was the result of a malign avian spirit who visited Myron while still in utero. This ethereal creature wrapped Myron’s psyche in ghostly feathers and saturated his developing mind in the mounting despair of the natural world. Unprepared for such a hostile nightmare, the prenatal child, still only halfway through his gestation, jolted his mother into an early labour. The profound sentiment left behind by this creature can be seen in creations such as Myron’s award winning “Fragile Circus”.
The second event would come only months after Myron’s parents discovered his unique propensity for artistry. At the age of four, and still stumbling over the grammatical formations of human language, Myron visited the Old Man River in Saskatchewan. Mythically sized rain drops twirled downward from the dark clouds, sploshing into muddy puddles all around. Myron sat at the river bank to enjoy its mystical flow.
Here Myron sank to his chin in the soaked earth while hundreds of burrowing night crawlers surrounded him in the mud. A bolt of lightning smashed into a nearby aspen and ran through the old and twisted tree, traveling from its roots and irradiating these subterranean creatures. Myron could see, wriggling beneath the ground, the tiny glowing bodies. As they crackled like cinders into dusty flecks, his spirit was infused with an organic aura. This event inspired him to become a visual artist. Later, he would graduate from the Visual Communication Program at Medicine Hat College.
The third event was traumatic for Myron. While living in Halifax, he was walking along the dockyard and a cool thick fog rolled in from the Harbor and surrounded the coast line in an impenetrable mist. Without notice, an overhead electrical cable snapped loose, and instantly vaporized Myron’s right brain. His neural cavity filled with electricity and, being of unequal pressure to the external atmosphere, vacuumed in the surrounding fog through his ear. Hence forth, Myron’s right brain would forever be a churning zapping mass of electrified neural mist.
And so, Myron packed his bags and headed for the cheery heights of the Rocky Mountains where he accepted a job at the Banff New Media Institute as a digital artist for the on-line magazine, Horizon Zero. Myron enjoyed much success in his career while in Banff, winning numerous awards for The Fragile Circus, recognition for The Flowering of Forgotten Gifts (a collaborative project for the National Film Board of Canada) and having his personal web site Notsosimpleton.com, included in the publication, Taschen’s 1000 favorite websites.
And so this brings us to the fourth and final event of significance (thus far), in Myron’s life. One day, while climbing Tunnel Mountain, he veered off the trail and rambled for hours in unintentional directions. Fatigue eventually claimed victory and Myron sat to watch the sun sink beneath the world’s edge.
As the haze of dusk rushed in and cloaked the mountains in a transparent charcoal blanket, Myron noticed a speckled Cricket. He tried to capture it, but the bug jumped on his face, and bit him on the lip, which temporarily paralyzed Myron from head to toe.
As he lay helpless, two giant slugs slid up each cheek, and wrapped his eyes in their mucus covered foot pads. Over the breadth of each iris, they placed a glowing mirror, and Myron witnessed the reflections inside of his own mind. Like Ouroboros, he fed upon himself, recycling the mind’s eternal conjuring. For hours he rested in a psychedelic trance, intoxicated by the fodder of his own imagination.
Today Myron has moved from his tiny dwelling buried in the side of a hill in Banff to Vancouver, BC still spending the great majority of his spare time collecting forgotten patterns and discarded thoughts. He is currently working as an instructor, molding minds at Vancouver Film School in the Digital Design program. He has also an MAA Candidate in the Media Arts Program at Emily Carr University of Art & Design where his current research involves animal human hybrids in mythology.  He sleeps never. Ever.
The End

0h!m1gas: scratching ants, audiovisual installation (2008-2011)
by Kuai Shen

Ants represent a matriarchal superorganism, an autopoietic machine whose patterns and algorithms humans can materialize in form, sounds and expressions. Ants accomplish the generation of bottom-up structures communicating mainly by pheromones, but they also produce modulatory vibrations, called stridulations, to call for help, to recruit nestmates for defense, to inform about the quality of the leaves, and stridulations even serve as a pneumatic mechanism to cut vegetation or dig out trapped nestmates underground. Stridulation is basically the production of vibratory sounds by rubbing two parts of the ant’s exoskeleton against each other.

0h!m1gas is an artistic research and audiovisual installation that investigates the stridulation phenomena and the self-organization in ants approaching it as a cybernetic system with emergent manifestations. It is a biomimetic stridulation environment that explores the interspecific communication between human technology and ant media translating movement, social activity and labour production of a leafcutter ant colony into scratching.

By means of contact microphones and motion tracking cameras based on computer vision algorithms, the ant colony is being video and audio surveilled. A pair of turntables responds to the changes that emerge from the colony by spinning vinyl records and producing scratching sounds, similar to the original stridulations of the ants. The emergent music created by the scratching turntables in combination with the stridulations of the ants instantiate a sound reactive space, which reveals the connection between scratching, as an aesthetical expression created by human culture, and the stridulation phenomena produced by ants as a modulation mechanism for communication.

Bio
Kuai Shen was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador. He holds a BA in digital arts and an MA in media arts with honors from the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. He has brought his work, exploring the cybernetic emergence of ants into new territories, from Quito to New York and now to Cologne. His artistic approach to self-organization and emergence is envisioned in four installations, inspired by the relations and intensities between human and ant media: “Recurrent Ant Dream #1”, “1.ant.ity”, “The Cybernetic Emergence of Ants” and “0h!m1gas: biomimetic stridulation environment”. His current research focuses on game design and theory based on his interdisciplinary artistic/scientific work with ants at the University of Applied Sciences.

This paper takes its title from a quote from Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory in which he argues
for the centrality of the animal aesthetic to modern art. However, to the German philosopher,
non-human animals only have a sort of ‘absent presence’ that rubs on a wound caused by
the marginalisation of them within modern, Western societies. That is, they are not as such
directly representable in art; instead, they continue to haunt aesthetics from within, almost like
birdsong that is appreciated for its beauty but which nonetheless fills us with wonder because
it seems ‘other’ to us. Art has recently taken an animal turn with increasing numbers of artists
investigating the appearance of animal life in contemporary culture in far more direct ways than
Adorno ever imagined. In this presentation I look at some recent artworks that all address the
notion of the ‘animal voice’ through mimicry and appropriation, but also occasionally through
non-representation and misrecognition, from Rachel Berwick’s may-por-e, 1997-present, to Peter
Callesen’s Concert for Birds, 2005, to Bill Burns’ Bird Radio, 2007, and Marcus Coates’ Dawn Chorus,
2007.

Bio
Rikke Hansen is a writer and art critic, living and working in London. She writes for the UK-based
journal Art Monthly and has hosted the weekly programme Nature Calls: Animals in Visual Culture
on Resonance 104.4 FM: London’s Arts Radio Station. Her current research centres on the interface
between animal studies and late 20th century aesthetics.

Vancouver Experimental Theremin Orchestra with Scratch Theremin by Animal Lover

For the performance at IF’11, The Vancouver Experimental Theremin Orchestra (VETO) is collaborating with Animal Lover to interpret visual scores created by Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) a composer and engineer recognized for his contributions to electronic music.

VETO was formed by the participants in a theremin building workshop held at VIVO, Vancouver, in the summer of 2011. VETO is the only theremin orchestra in Canada, and one of a few worldwide. Each member of the orchestra has a uniquely tuned instrument which contributes to the richness of the sound created by this ensemble. VETO has performed for Signal + Noise Festival, VIVO, 2011, and will be performing in the upcoming Vancouver New Music’s “Random Elements – a Celebration of Iannnis Xenakis”.

Scratch Theremin is a project by Animal Lover, a collaboration between Julie Andreyev and her two companion dogs, Tom and Sugi. For Scratch Theremin, Andreyev works with Tom using interactive software to produce a live collaborative improvisational interspecies work using human and canine gesture to create an audio visual performance.

Nereus, video, 2010
by Karolle Wall

/Nereus/ is an ode to the noon moon nuptial dance of the sea nymph — a polychaete worm that reproduces by releasing its sperm and eggs in a synchronous swarming. The Family Nereidae are drawn to light and tend to reproduce during specific cycles of the moon. Caught, too, in the camera’s light are billions of larvae and the odd pipefish, jelly, and crustacean, all accompanied by Arcangelo Corelli’s Op 6: Concerto 2:1.

Bio
Karolle Wall is a filmmaker, photographer and writer whose work reflects her passion for marine biology, environmental ethics, indigenous ecological knowledge and water. The unlikely mollusk, be it a ½ inch nudibranch (sea slug) or eighteen inch moon snail, features prominently in her films, drawing attention to our ever increasing need to value patience, caution, and primary observation as significant forms of interacting with the non-human world.

Karolle is an Associate Professor in Critical + Cultural Studies at Emily Carr University, where she teaches courses in writing, literature, film, rhetoric, and environmental ethics. She is currently collaborating with Rita Wong and others on a SSHRC grant entitled “Downstream: the poetics of water,” which will culminate in a symposium and exhibition on World Water Day 2012. Her film Imush Q’uyatl’un, made in collaboration with Penelaxuuth elder Florence James, has been shown at environmental and aboriginal film festivals around the world. She has published poetry, reviews and articles in numerous journals and exhibited her photographs and installations at various group shows throughout British Columbia. Land and ocean conservancy groups (and even dance troops) call on her to document everything from healing water ceremonies to indigenous accounts of species at risk. She believes in social activism as much as she believes in bearing witness and cherishing the beauty and fragility of the non-human life that lives in that liminal space we call the intertidal zone.

A Matter of Balance, video, 2010
by Karolle Wall

/A Matter of Balance/ captures minuscule (1.6 mm to 25 mm) Alaskan skeleton shrimp as they swing and feed amidst the sargassum (Japanese Seaweed). These “preying mantis of the sea” as they are sometimes called, remind us that whimsical, playful, extraordinary, barely visible life exists just beneath the sea’s meniscus.

Bio
Karolle Wall is a filmmaker, photographer and writer whose work reflects her passion for marine biology, environmental ethics, indigenous ecological knowledge and water. The unlikely mollusk, be it a ½ inch nudibranch (sea slug) or eighteen inch moon snail, features prominently in her films, drawing attention to our ever increasing need to value patience, caution, and primary observation as significant forms of interacting with the non-human world.

Karolle is an Associate Professor in Critical + Cultural Studies at Emily Carr University, where she teaches courses in writing, literature, film, rhetoric, and environmental ethics. She is currently collaborating with Rita Wong and others on a SSHRC grant entitled “Downstream: the poetics of water,” which will culminate in a symposium and exhibition on World Water Day 2012. Her film Imush Q’uyatl’un, made in collaboration with Penelaxuuth elder Florence James, has been shown at environmental and aboriginal film festivals around the world. She has published poetry, reviews and articles in numerous journals and exhibited her photographs and installations at various group shows throughout British Columbia. Land and ocean conservancy groups (and even dance troops) call on her to document everything from healing water ceremonies to indigenous accounts of species at risk. She believes in social activism as much as she believes in bearing witness and cherishing the beauty and fragility of the non-human life that lives in that liminal space we call the intertidal zone.

‘Imush Q’uyatl’un (Walk With Me, Be With Me Slug), video, 2010
by Karolle Wall

/‘Imush Q’uyatl’un/ is a short art film/documentary of a nudibranch (sea snail or sea slug) dancing to the drum beat and rhythm of an aboriginal, Coast Salish Song. It bears an environmental message passed on for thousands of years: If we are to save our environment, appreciate our coastal, marine ecosystems, we must pay attention and bear witness to even the smallest of creatures.

Bio
Karolle Wall is a filmmaker, photographer and writer whose work reflects her passion for marine biology, environmental ethics, indigenous ecological knowledge and water. The unlikely mollusk, be it a ½ inch nudibranch (sea slug) or eighteen inch moon snail, features prominently in her films, drawing attention to our ever increasing need to value patience, caution, and primary observation as significant forms of interacting with the non-human world.

Karolle is an Associate Professor in Critical + Cultural Studies at Emily Carr University, where she teaches courses in writing, literature, film, rhetoric, and environmental ethics. She is currently collaborating with Rita Wong and others on a SSHRC grant entitled “Downstream: the poetics of water,” which will culminate in a symposium and exhibition on World Water Day 2012. Her film Imush Q’uyatl’un, made in collaboration with Penelaxuuth elder Florence James, has been shown at environmental and aboriginal film festivals around the world. She has published poetry, reviews and articles in numerous journals and exhibited her photographs and installations at various group shows throughout British Columbia. Land and ocean conservancy groups (and even dance troops) call on her to document everything from healing water ceremonies to indigenous accounts of species at risk. She believes in social activism as much as she believes in bearing witness and cherishing the beauty and fragility of the non-human life that lives in that liminal space we call the intertidal zone.