Animal Influence I - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

32.htm (last checked March 2012)
[18] A contact lens electrode placed on the eye is measuring
the electrical activity of the retina in response to light of various
wavelengths, revealing the color sensitivity of the cone
pigments on the retina.
[19] It is not within the scope of this paper to discuss what this
transformation is if not metaphorical, but I can’t resist
wondering. Rane Willerslev, a Danish anthropologist, has an
interesting solution worth mentioning. He has worked extensively
with the Yugakirs, a people in Siberia in which the hunters, and
to an even larger extent, the shaman of the society, “take on
the appearance and viewpoint of another being,” and they
consider this transformation to be “one of the key aspects of
being a person.” (Willerslev 2007 2). Willerslev calls this process
“mimetic empathy” and the result “not not-animal.”
(Willerslev 2004 649).
[20] For a description of her experience related to Zoomorph,
see http://zoomorph.net/. Click on Allison Holt/Research:
Zoomorph Indonesia.
[21] A contemporary subculture of persons who identify
themselves as humans and one or more other species. The
other species manifest themselves through various forms of
shifting.
[22] As Jacques Derrida highlighted when he constructed the
neologism l’animot from “‘animaux”’ (French for “‘animals’”) and
“‘mot’” (French for “‘word’”).
[23] http://www.npr.org/2011/01/20/132650631/new-languagediscovered-prairiedogese
(last checked March 2012)
[24] The title of a book about the minimalist artist Robert Irwin by
Lawrence Weschler adapted from the philosopher Paul Valery.
[25]
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090916/full/news.2009.921.h
tml (last checked March 2012)
[26]
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091225220
653AAb01hF (last checked March 2012)
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread662732/pg1
(last checked March 2012)
93
Lisa Jevbratt is a Swedish born artist and professor in the Art
Department and in the Media Art Technology program at
University of California, Santa Barbara. For more than a decade
her work focused on the expressions and exchanges created
by the protocols and languages of the Internet and the web,
often manifesting as visualization software. She is now applying
her understanding of these unintentional collaborations onto
exchanges with animals of other species and their experiences
of the world around them. In her ongoing endeavor
“Interspecies Collaboration” she invites students to
collaborate with individuals of other species and her current
distributed software art project Zoomorph consists of image
and video filters generating simulations of how various animals
see. Her work has been exhibited extensively in venues such as
The Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Banff Centre for the Arts
(Canada), The New Museum (New York), The Swedish National
Public Art Council (Stockholm, Sweden), and the Biennial at the
Whitney Museum of American Art (New York); and it is discussed
in numerous books, for example “Internet Art” by Rachel
Greene, “Digital Art” by Christiane Paul and “Art + Science Now”
by Stephen Wilson (all Thames and Hudson). Jevbratt also
publishes texts on topics related to her projects and research,
for example in the anthology “Network Art – Practices and
Positions” ed. Tom Corby (Routledge). Her current project
ZooMorph is supported by an emerging fields grant from
Creative Capital.