[Sam Waterson: Looking Like Animals]

Sam Waterson has been attaching tiny micro-video cameras to the heads of animals in an effort to record the world from their point of view. It's a little hard to tell whether he's an artist, a scientist or a business man--that is, if it's necessary to categorize at all. These days people are working on the interface between science and art, often creating projects that have commodity value as well. Post-modernism proclaimed our fluid identities and marketing proclaimed the strategy of "re-purposing." Waterson is simply a man of his age. He can present his work as art in one context and as science in another. And if you're a biologist, he can produce made-to-spec video that reveals, for example, how the ears of an armadillo rotate in response to changes in direction.

Waterson got his art school training at Cooper Union working with video artist Tony Oursler. That's where he first began putting cameras inside tea kettles and clothes dryers. Next he got a graduate degree in Landscape Architecture, after which he found himself working for a science museum. String together art school, meditations on landscape, and ecology interests with a pedagogical twist and you start to see where he's coming from.

Waterson's "Animal, Vegetable, Video" aspires to be a comprehensive visual database of animal perspectives. [Recall that Janet Murray proclaimed a key feature of computer logic to be its "encyclopedic" nature.] You can see short videos of armadillo, wolf, sheep and buffalo perspectives on his site. In a recent presentation at Carleton he also included a tarantula, which the camera translated as a myopic little fellow with fuzzy, determined front legs, and a tumble weed, who seems distantly related to those camera-in-the-dryer experiments from Waterson's art-boy days.

If you've played the short sheep clip, you'll notice that the camera's frame line does not include the head of the sheep itself. In the wolf and the armadillo videos, on the other hand, the ears or snout of the animal are included in the picture. Waterson has found that without including the head of the animal in the frame people aren't really convinced that his footage has not been faked. [The sheep pictures might have been taken by Stan Brakhage careening around the Rockies with a Bolex in the '70s.]

Without also seeing a bit of the animal, we tend to take our normal spectatorial position as human subjects inhabiting the camera's optical view--the old subjective camera from Film 101. That is, we attribute to the camera a human perspective rather than an animal one, which we almost never encounter in cinema. [Apart from "Pretty Pony" cartoons, that is.] We have been socialized through thousands of films to take the camera's viewpoint as human.

Waterson has found that it's easier to accept animal perspectives when the camera is placed outside the animal's body just enough to see it's head. This seems to cue our "from the perspective of" mental frame that helps us situate ourselves. But there is no small irony in the fact that we need to be outside an animal's body in order to seemingly inhabit it's viewpoint. Think animal viewpoint, not animal consciousness.

There's another thing here, too, which you'll observe in the armadillo clip. Fastening the camera to the armadillo's body means that as the animal walks the camera remains fastened to the stable platform of its frame while the world seems to rock to and fro. This is an example of the difference between the way camera and biological eyes see the world. In both humans and the armadillo [presumably], our cognitive processing of the visual stimulus in the eye corrects for the rocking gait of the perceiver. Mentally we get a rock-steady image of the world that otherwise might seem to bounce in response to our walking. All of which probably reminds us that Waterson has not projected us into animal consciousness so much as given us a glimpse of animal life from a camera perspective slightly behind its ears.

Waterson is a thoughtful guy who is not unaware of these and other ironies. From his point of view such discussions don't undermine his work, they extend it. Our questions and debates engage us in thinking about animal life and ecology from a new critical [not optical] perspective. Even if, in the end, we're still just seeing ourselves.

By the way, Waterson tells a great story about an early experiment in which he fitted out a sheep with a red backpack to carry his video recorder. [He now records with a wireless transmitter so small that his little rig can radio its signal for live playback on a laptop over a mile away.] When this new surveillant sheep tried to re-enter the flock the group decided they'd have noting to do with him. [They were no doubt members of the Electronic Frontier Foundation who had been reading about grazing on the Digital Commons.] The flock bolted, crashed through a fence, and clamored through the streets of a rural town.

Parable of the cyborg. Parable of the commons. Parable of the Other. Parable of the nature/technology nexus. Parable of...

[Animal, Vegetable, Video]

Comments

[Chuck Olsen]

Oh my gosh... so much good stuff here!
I've been wanting to see Waterson's animal head videos since reading about them in RES a year ago. I'd attach a cam to my head for a day, but it wouldn't be very interesting. And you wouldn't believe it was me unless you saw my ears.