Dogme Productions, with an Emphasis on the Dog: Revealing Animal Perspectives

Abstract

Examining the intersection of images, animals and affect, I claim that images created by non-human animals impact us affectively and thereby upset our human-centered perspective. Specifically, I consider how GoPro videos from social media destabilize our human perspective. I analyze how digital imaging by animals disrupts our human perspective both literally and figuratively. In this process, I examine two topics: how digital images expand human perception, and how digital images provoke an affective enchantment. Videos from the animal’s perspective provide a limited view into the lifeworlds of the more-than-human world and in the process call out to human animal bodies watching on the other side of the screen. These affective encounters have the potential of sparking enchantment, connection, and healing in an ecologically wounded world.

Animals and imaging have an intimate connection – animals dance in constellations in the night sky, haunt cave walls, and flicker on film. Now, the human animal is not the only one who does the imaging. Where dogs like Lassie and Rin Tin Tin were once canine “heroes” on the screen, ordinary dogs now put digital cameras to use to film their world. The camera presents new opportunities of imaging that is mediated through collaborative filmmaking between humans and other animals. The best publicized of these cameras is the GoPro Hero; with GoPro’s slogan of “Be the hero,” dogs, and a menagerie of other animals, are responding with films of their own that reveal the world from an animal’s point of view. The role of the animal in relation to film has been upset. In a play bow of signification, dogs have altered the cinematic meaning of “canine hero.” No longer are animals mere actors told what to do and how to perform; instead the filmic canine is also a co-creator of digital images and videos. In the process, some of these videos go viral and create a new genre of animal stardom on the Internet.

Such visual encounters engage the human audience affectively. By affective engagement, I expand on Gregg and Seigworth’s approach which explores affect not merely as emotion, but more significantly as a force of encounters: “Affect marks a body’s belonging to a world of encounters or; a world’s belonging to a body of encounters but also, in non-belonging, through all those far sadder (de)compositions of mutual in-compossibilities.”[1] Affect is a reciprocal engagement recognizing all participants as potential actants whose antics in the digital terrain touch the world of the viewer. Affect takes us to a liminal terrain which – much like the engagement between humans and non-human animals, or human encounters with images – is not quite articulate and yet conveys a glimmer of connection and understanding. Just as the non-human animal exceeds what is articulate by human standards, so too do images; both delve into the inexpressible. The nexus of images, animals, and affect reminds us of the beauty of encounters that lie outside the “articulate” domain of human-privileged expression. It is a territory to romp in without the expectation of clear explanations.

Examining the intersection of images, animals and affect, I claim that images created by non-human animals impact us affectively and thereby upset our human-centered perspective. Specifically, I consider how GoPro videos from social media destabilize our human perspective. Focusing on a short video – “Run Walter, RUN!!” – I analyze how digital imaging by animals disrupts our human perspective both literally and figuratively. In this process, I am interested in two primary questions. First, how do digital images expand human perception? Second and more importantly, how do digital images provoke an affective enchantment? Videos from the animal’s perspective provide a limited view into the lifeworlds of the more-than-human world and in the process call out to human animal bodies watching on the other side of the screen. These affective encounters have the potential of sparking enchantment, connection, and healing in an ecologically wounded world.

Animal Perspectives on Digital Screens

Ubiquitous digital images transform our relationship with imaged animals. Professional quality animal imaging was once reserved for experts with specialized equipment. Now, any human with a camera phone can record images that were once the domain of wildlife experts and professional photographers. The authority of experts like Marlin Perkins, David Attenborough, or Jacques Cousteau is challenged by contemporary image-recording technologies. In contrast to the “master narratives’ of nature documentaries, digital recordings permit amateurs to upload a constant stream of productions to the Internet. This abundance of images documenting unexpected animal encounters transforms our view of animals’ abilities. Each click on YouTube represents a potential encounter with the unexpected. A finger taps, and a solitary dog plays the piano while “singing” a mournful tune.[2] Another tap and a parrot dances happily as he keeps time to the rhythmic beat of the Backstreet Boys.[3] More taps, more videos, including the viral viewership of a crow who goes “snowboarding” on the urban peaks of a Russian rooftop.[4] Such encounters have an affective aspect to them. We encounter energies and emotions that are not our own and that impact us in unexpected, and frequently inarticulate ways.

These affective events decenter what is considered normative for non-human animals. Through social media, humans encounter visual evidence of animals behaving in ways that defy the disciplined mores imposed upon them – notions regarding how non-human animals should behave, and with whom they should interact, are upset on the digital screen. Young polar bears play with – rather than eat – Husky sled dogs.[5] A deer and a dog romp and walk together.[6] A mother cat grooms her kittens... and her ducklings.[7] Images disrupt an ossified human perspective of the more-than-human world. Cross-species behaviors, relationships, and abilities are put into question through online videos. This upheaval of perspective is itself affective. Margaret Wetherell asserts that affect “brings the dramatic and the everyday back into social analysis,” and in the process signifies a paradigm shift within the individual.[8] Everyday encounters – like those that occur through online videos of animal others – have the power to disorient the senses, evoke unexpected emotions, and unmoor understandings of the world.

In addition, the miniaturization of visual technology – like GoPro Cameras – produces a new genre of collaborative filmmaking. A human animal starts the process when placing the camera on the animal, but the animal carries the camera along their own unscripted path before returning to the human who edits and uploads the films. I am not ascribing filmic intentionality to the non-human animal as film-maker, an intentionality long ago discarded with human authors and artists, but I do assert that this is an active form of cross-species filmmaking. Likewise, I do not claim that these practices are unmediated. There are multiple layers of mediation occurring: camera lenses, the camera strapped to a body, the body carrying the camera, the body interacting with its environment, editing processes, the human watching the film, the size of the screen, the quality of the Internet connection, etc. Rather than seeing these layers of mediation as suspect, this new form of mediation – videos shot by non-human animals – presents opportunities for engagement with the non-human world. Specifically, I am interested in how the video, taken from the perspective of a more-than-human animal, changes the world and opens up new realities.[9] Human perspectives are upset where the animal capturing the images is not human: an orphaned pelican – wings spread wide – learns to fly,[10] a monkey at a temple in Bali “steals” a camera and films his world and himself,[11] an eagle captures her flight across the glacial-carved valley of Chamonix,[12] and a pig on a surfboard rides blue, Hawaiian waves.[13] These visual encounters open our eyes to new ways of seeing and sparks a form of wonder.

Such wonder would not be possible without the medium of the miniature, digital camera. Taking seriously Marshall McLuhan’s notion of the “medium is the message,” the technology of digital imaging does not simply contain a message pertaining to content. Rather, the medium itself contains a message that McLuhan provocatively claims will “massage” the viewing audience.[14] In the case of GoPro, the message not only includes that of ease or fast dissemination. Rather, the portability of the digital camera also carries with it the message of a decentered videographer. The portable camera reminds the viewer that video production is not a specialized pursuit carried out by a select few, but has instead become radically democratized. GoPro now sends the message that videography need not be carried out simply by humans, but can include the bodies of animal others who take us on unexpected visual journeys.

More significantly, when it comes to videos of non-human animals, the message of the medium reminds the viewer that there are perspectives worthy of engagement that lie outside of the human species. Too frequently, humans dwell in a digital world composed of and by other humans. These technologically generated reflections of the self serves as an enchanting but deadening narcotic, what McLuhan refers to as “narcissus as narcosis.”[15] Like Narcissus, humans mistake the pool we are looking into as an “other,” when really it is simply a reflection of ourselves. We become so enchanted by this reflection that it serves as a narcotic that deadens all other senses. In contrast, encounters with videos that are not shot from a human point-of-view, remind humans that our perspective is one of many. Rather, the human perspective is no longer adequate; creative, cross-species collaboration is possible through the use of technology and opens up opportunities to explore a limited perspective of an animal other. Such a practice opens up a form of affective entanglement where a network of colliding bodies and technologies results in unexpected productions.[16] Thus, looking specifically at the medium of the GoPro camera, it also contains the message that catching a glimmer of a more-than-human worldview is film-worthy and can produce a sense of wonder in its audience.

Given the canine’s status as the first domesticated animal, it is not surprising that they are also the primary animal who sports the new technology.[17] While the visual fidelity of these videos is excellent due to the GoPro technology which permits for 1080p60 fps, the short films maintain a decidedly primitive feeling. Specifically, the natural lighting, diegetic sound, shaky-cam movement, and disorienting angles produce a new form of Dogme cinema. This time though, the emphasis is on the “dog” in the era of YouTube. The Dogme movement that started in 1995 by Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, was a rejection of highly produced and expensive film-making. Instead, the Dogme movement made the story, acting and theme the focus, and moved the power away from the studio and back to the director.[18]

While GoPro videos shot by non-human animals are not entirely faithful to Dogme ’95,[19] GoPro video production does mirror many of the Dogme practices. Specifically, GoPro productions by non-human animals adhere to Dogme conventions like shooting on location, diegetic sound, hand-held cameras, and not crediting the director.[20] The underproduced images of GoPro videos lend a sense of “authenticity” and rawness to the medium itself and more specifically to the genre of animal point-of-view films. Where Dogme may have been revolutionary at the time, the progress of technology with its high resolution and decent audio reception make “guerrilla” film-making less novel. The novelty of dogme in the digital age is that of expanding the videographer to include the non-human. It is important to note that the camera lens only captures a mediated visual experience of the dog and that visual recording does not correspond directly to the experience of the animal who carries the camera. Humans do not see like dogs, and more importantly, we do not use our sense of smell as dogs do. Rather than seeing these species distinctions as limitations, the camera presents the opportunity to revel in the possibility of “what if.” The “if I were a dog, what small glimpse might I have into the canine world that I might understand through my own physiology?” This is not, as Ron Broglio points out, a question of what it is to run like a dog.[21] Rather, this is a question of what it is like to think and to feel with a body that is entirely not human and thus can never be fully accessed or understood. While the human audience does not get a dog’s point-of-smell, it does get a small glimmer of her point-of-view as she sleds down hills, plays with other dogs, catches a Frisbee, or lunges into the waves. A limited view into an animal-other’s world is suddenly made visible and forces humans to consider what it means to be one animal amongst a multiplicity of animals.

Walter: One Visual Voice of a Canine Lifeworld

In “Run Walter, RUN!!” the audience races with blond, athletic Walter.[22] Walter is not a human. Walter is a dog. To be more precise, he is a golden-haired Labrador Retriever. The 35-second YouTube post of Walter’s run to the sea was published on September 1, 2014, receiving over 16 million hits in less than a year, ten million of those hits occurring in the first week of the video’s posting.[23]

In the video, the audience immediately sees Walter’s blond back, shoulders, and the back of his head. The camera harness remains invisible, but based on the camera angle it is safe to assume it is closer to his midline. A human hand reaches down and releases the leash from Walter’s black collar. Walter is off! He leaves behind the barely distinguishable human voices and the only sound heard is that of running as he races down sandstone colored stairs that are bordered by white walls overflowing with Mediterranean vegetation. He comes to a short wall flanked by a garden gate that is ajar. Rather than slow his pace to maneuver through the gate and the sanctioned pathway, he instead leaps effortlessly over the wall and a momentary silence dominates as his airborne body flies through the air. Feet hit the ground, the diegetic soundtrack resumes, and he continues down a set of stairs. Walter charges straight ahead, ducking lithely beneath trees that would have altered the pathway of a human.

Fig. 1: Walter’s release from human discipline.

Fig. 2: A pathway that need not be adhered to.

At fourteen seconds, there is a fleeting glimpse of Walter’s destination: wide, expansive water, a Labrador retriever’s literal wet dream. From a cinematic perspective, this view of the sea is perfectly framed. The camera, attached to Walter’s body, lies almost in the center of the frame. Moving up his body, his two ears fly wide with the force of his run, and on either side of his ears are large agave plants which mimic the erect turgor of his momentarily outstretched ears. Peeking over the top of Walter’s head lies the expanse of blue water and endless sky. For another six seconds Walter and the camera batter the earth, turning one way down a set of stairs, then another, and then back again in a disorienting pathway that is dizzying to the human viewer, but is clearly well-known to his canine body.

Fig. 3: Water’s body and ears frame the surrounding landscape and reveal the sea ahead.

The terrain shifts from that of clearly designated pathways to that of open possibility. At twenty-one seconds Walter’s paws pound on a rocky terrain no longer maintained by human hands. The camera angle appears slightly askew, but it is not clear if this cockeyed alignment is due to the camera actually shifting on his back, or if it is simply the angle with which Walter navigates the rock-strewn terrain. In the distance there is a hint of human forms, while in the foreground the inhospitable terrain dominates. That is, it would prove inhospitable terrain for a human running. For a canine body running at top speed, it is simply another path. With his steady four legs and low center of gravity, Walter deftly navigates the rocks and boulders. His speed and confidence are almost unsettling for the human viewer as his body – that almost seems to fly – races through a passageway of large boulders. Never breaking stride, he charges through a group of humans gathered together on a small patch of sandy beach. He does not pause or even glance at these “animal others” who surround his canine body and whose inarticulate voices seem to be miles away in comparison to the steady soundtrack generated from his own paws (see Figure 5). Walter does not falter in his fidelity to his destination. He continues his heart-pounding run and flies into the water, a plunge that occurs after only 30 seconds of footage. His body dives under the waves and back up again. The immersion in the waves disorients the auditory experience as his body bobs first above and then below the sea’s surface.

Fig. 4: Walter moves from paths neatly maintained by humans, to a rocky terrain maintained by water, wind and sun.

Fig. 5: Walter flies through a group of human animals, never wavering in the focus of his end destination.

Fig. 6: Walter takes the plunge!

Fig. 7: A visual plunge of disorientation.

Becoming First Person: Visual Disruptions and Affective Openings

Not only do media transform our perspective of how humans see animals, they also upset notions of what it means to be human and to be animal. The blurring of perspectives in digital media gives the human viewer a sense of “being there,” without actually being there. Indeed, they even blur our own sense of identity. The act of a human animal looking at animal others may momentarily relinquish a sense of a “bound” human identity and can instead enter into a space of alterity. Our seeing self, the self who watches Walter run on the screen, is always partial, what Donna Haraway identifies as a self “stitched together” and “therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another.”[24] This incomplete vision provides gaps and openings where tenuous connections can be made that reveal an alterity that radically challenges the sameness of the vision bound to our own body. In the case of “Run Walter, RUN!!” Water is still a dog and the viewer is, most likely, still a human. But, for a fleeting instance, the two merge through a sense of visual movement.

Certain videos have an immersive quality to them. Like all great film-making, the audience briefly forgets the banality of the everyday world and enters into the world of an “other.” Momentarily, bodies are unmoored and the line between self and other is destabilized. The speed, the unsteady camera movement, and the unexpected pathway of Walter make his video an immersive experience. In response to Walter’s video, YouTube member Lammerts, captured this notion when he said, “I felt like I was watching a dog FPS but with a more refreshing end boss.”[25] Referencing popular video games through the FPS – First Person Shooter – as well as an “end boss” battle, this comment performs some interesting moves. First, it demonstrates that the genres and techniques of video games now inform our visual grammar of perception and can be applied to other genres. Second, and most importantly, the “first person” reference by the commenter suggests a personhood for a non-human animal. This slippage of genres and of what language is permissible across species unsettles carefully maintained boundaries.[26]

The video’s fragmentation of genres and identities represents not just a poststructural twist, but also opens up points of exploration. Specifically, images can evoke empathy and affect. Focused on a subjective, embodied experience that defies definition and categorization, affect is prelinguistic, precognitive, prerational, preconscious and a-signifying.[27] Affect, applied to both images and to animals, opens up conversations involving alterity. While human animals cannot make definitive claims regarding the cognitive, rational, or linguistic abilities of other animals, all animals do share affective experiences.[28] Where Heidegger considered the world of the animal to be closed to humans, affect serves as a potential gap in the closure, an “active connection” between humans and all other animals.[29] Likewise, there is something about the image that resists the imposition of meaning or of understanding.[30] Visual images, both moving and still, are foremost an affective experience and occur in relation to other beings, as well as a living, breathing cosmos. Thus, visual encounters with animals become an affective performance where the stories of animals act upon us–through the conjuring of images on the digital screen.

The affective experience of humans in relation to film and non-human animals is an opening up, an act of vulnerability where the audience is potentially touched by an “other.” This “touch” hits human bodies in ways that are inarticulate, while also revealing the absences and the deficiencies of our engagement with the world. The act of looking at an “other” has the potential of becoming what environmental philosopher David Abram refers to as a “sympathetic relationship.”[31] Where Rene Descartes holds a ball of wax in his hands and asserts a claim to knowledge regarding the wax, Abram holds a bowl in his hands and reminds us that while he is touching the bowl, he is also being touched by the bowl. More importantly, the presence he has of the bowl is limited – he is never fully aware of the bowl as it is always hiding parts of itself from perception.[32] The bowl resists. Rather than lament the desire for full-knowledge characterized by Descartes, Abram relishes the alterity of the world. Similarly, Broglio, sees such surface representations as sites for engagement: “...our understanding of the animals and their worlds comes from contact with the surfaces of such worlds – the site where the human and animals worlds bump against each other, jarring and jamming our anticipated cultural codes for animals and offering us something different.”[33] The engagement with such surfaces reminds us of the great chasm that is beyond our reach, but can spark a sense of wonder.

Walter’s run to the sea – as captured by a camera, and perceived by a human audience – presents a partial encounters with alterity. While the human audience cannot know directly what Walter is experiencing, the audience can imagine the grit of the smooth tiles underfoot, the force of air moving past an airborne body, and the sound of waves in the distance. These empathetic connections provoke an affective consciousness marked by a felt awareness, an intuition, of a shared connection.[34] This consciousness is not pure presence itself, but a thrilling, obscured glimpse into a lifeworld of an “other.” It is a glance – like all vision – that is filled with marked gaps. Rather than lament these gaps, John Durham Peters celebrates them as “vistas to be appreciated or distances to be respected.”[35] Attempts to fill in the gaps of understanding would not only deny the alterity of the other in an attempt for full comprehension, it would also drain the affective world of all of its enchantment.

Affect and enchantment have deep affinities. Indeed, a turn to affect “keeps its wonderments in revolution.”[36] Just as affect denies rigid definition, enchantment, according to philosopher Patrick Curry, also resists the constraints of linguistic discipline. Enchantment, for Curry, is “embodied,” “mysterious,” and “unmasterable.”[37] Enchantment blurs perceptions regarding boundaries; domestic and wild do not remain neatly compartmentalized. The visual enchantment humans have with more-than-human animals can be seen in Walter’s run. There is not a mastery over Walter. Rather, there is an inarticulate visual wonder that touches us and momentarily enchants us. It becomes a moment of visual shock that wakes the human body and allows for the possibility of chance encounters between humans and the more-than-human world.

Walter’s race to the sea embodies pre-rational spontaneity and abandon – he did not carefully contrive how he would navigate his pathway. Walter reminds his human audience that being in the world sometimes means forgetting there are boundaries in the world. When transferred to the digital image on the screen, his own embodied experience expanded that of the human viewer. He was not simply “dog,” but was “dog-path-scent-sea-joy-run-...” The viewer runs with Walter and in the process encounters a new visual vocabulary that does not perceive constraints but opportunities. The garden wall that serves as a barrier to the human body is a threshold to Walter’s body as he leaps over it. British writer Robert MacFarlane points out that when it comes to our human relationship with the living planet, our vocabulary has become a “blandscape,” losing the richness of words like crizzle, landskein, and roarie bummlers.[38] One almost forgotten word is smeuse – the gap at the base of trees that animals take. While humans may have forgotten this word, seeing Walter move through space serves as a visual vocabulary that calls to the forgotten word smeuse and reveals how animals make their own ways in the world. Similarly, videos taken from the perspective of the animal revives seeing outside of the tired visual genres dominated by a human point-of-view. Just as early cinematography destabilized the viewing audience’s expectations regarding edits, cuts, and close-ups, so too does imaging from the perspective a non-human animal. Upsetting the visual “normal” impacts us first affectively, and can then lead to a form of enchantment with the “other.” Humans may simultaneously image and imagine the lifeworld of an “other.” No longer is the human the only “first person.”

Expanding our Perception: Sensing a Virtual Umwelt

Walter’s race to the sea disrupts the ossified human center by revealing new ways of seeing. Rather than serving as simply another gadget to entertain us, the GoPro technology opens up the opportunity for some prosumers to consider the world from the perspective of a different species. The technology engages with Jakob von Uexküll concept of the umwelt, the “self-world” each animal inhabits and makes meaningful through biosemiotic interpretations of environments. Uexküll, a German biologist of the early 20^th century, invites humans to consider the world not from our naturalized perspective, but from the perspectives of other animals. In doing so, we find not a singular world, but infinite worlds where landmarks, scents, and chemical processes that bear no significance for the human animal, are of major significance to animals like the bee, bear, or tick. For Uexküll, the significance of individual environments can be likened to a spider: “As the spider spins its threads, every subject spins his relations to certain characters of the things around him and weaves them into a firm web which carries his existence.”[39] It is as if, asserts Uexküll, all animals climb into their own individual soap bubble the interior of which represents a world filled with perceptions that the animal alone knows.[40] Uexküll’s approach forces humans to consider what it means to be an animal amongst a multiplicity of animals. Likewise, Haraway asserts that the technologies surrounding vision remind us that “all eyes, including our own organic ones, are active perceptual systems, building on translations and specific ways of seeing, that is, ways of life.”[41] Thus, the very technologies that permit us to see assert their own presence and remind us that we are never fully seeing, but are instead encountering incomplete visual productions.

Social media present unique avenues to consider these multiple umwelts. The scopic nature of social media speaks to umwelt of the human animal and the privileging of our visual sensory experience. Watching Walter from the perspective of the camera, the viewing audience can imagine what it’s like to be Walter, or to inhabit the same space. One YouTube user, sarah holt, posted, “Love this. Big smile every time I watch it...and so jealous. I wish I was running right behind Walter dog.”[42] Yet, even if holt were to follow behind, the world she would encounter would be dramatically different, and not simply because it would not be the perspective that is conveyed by the camera. Though both dog and human could both feel the warm, Mediterranean breeze, could hear the quiet hum of the water in the distance, and smell the tang of salt, they inhabit different worlds. Not only can the dog’s body move through space differently due to his height, size and four-legs, he also sees, hears, and smells the world in ways that fall outside the sensorial capacity of the human, and outside of the capacity of the camera itself. Watching a video evokes a limited sense of wonder of what it is like to be an “other.” And yet, the video still thrills despite its limitations. Indeed, it may demand more of the viewer through imaginative feeling with.

The always imperfect presence of the visual medium reveals gaps in the experience of the humans watching Walter run. Haraway reminds us that vision only provides us with “partial perspectives.”[43] These partial perspectives remind us that the world we see and engage with is never full and never actually “objective.” What humans can only imagine in the video – the smells – was Walter’s primary sensory experience. Walter’s virtuosic snout smelled the sea long before he saw it.[44] The camera can never capture Walter’s way of “seeing” the world; the visual landscape for the human is a smellscape for the dog. And yet, the mediation of the camera can evoke a form of synesthesia in the human viewer, what Massumi refers to as a “lived diagram based on already lived experience, revived to orient further experience.”[45] Seeing the world from Walter’s perspective has the potential of reviving other sensory experiences. Specifically, the imagescape of the video can become an affective event that transforms and revives a smellscape. The smellscape of salt, flotsam, suntan lotion coating human animals, and decaying fish collide in Walter’s nose creating a bouquet that converse with him, and potentially with his human audience. Watching from the other side of the screen, humans may sympathetically imagine similar olfactory sensations. A disrupted point-of-view can also spark a disrupted point-of-smell.

This affective engagement, heightened through synesthetic feeling, is always a mere glance into an alternative world. Watching Walter, it is easy for the human viewer to have a sense that all of humanity is merely “canine minus.” Indeed, Walter’s race produces a lament at the physical limitations of our gangly, bipedal forms which in comparison seem awkward. In Walter, one catches a glimmer of the joy he feels as he takes his human audience on a visual whirlwind that exhilarates, disorients, and produces a sense of joy, excitement and yearning. Across species, across continents, across time, and across the digital screen, Walter’s body speaks to our own animal body. While audio and visual may be the dominant sensory experiences in video, it does not remain there. One YouTube user – Zex Konjina – commented, “And that sound when he jumps into the sea....it’s incredible. Just that underwater sound is enough for me to smell and taste the sea. You know that strange feeling in the nose when you hit the water :).”[46] Indeed, all sensing experience becomes a synaesthetic experience where one sound, or one image will conjure a multitude of scents, textures, tastes, and feelings.[47]

Human bodies connect with a fleeting flicker from Walter’s world, an in the process become painfully aware of the impoverishment of the human umwelt. Walter sparks an “itch” in his human audience regarding physical and cultural limitations. Walter’s run filled with a sense of reckless abandon is almost incomprehensible to his audience due to the human symbolic order we carefully construct and adhere to. How many human animals outside of young children could run through a crowd of people without incurring some anger and without even glancing at their looming presences, or noting the power poses like those exhibited by the man in the speedo speaking to the bikini-clad woman seated on the sand? Walter’s symbolic world differs radically from the human symbolic world. Walter’s race to the beach makes palpable the limitations of our human bodies, as well as the constraints of cultural constructions. Walter possesses a certain fearlessness, a jouissance that acts in the purity of the moment. Gone from Walter are the self-conscious constraints the human animal accrues like shackles. More importantly, it is not simply Walter who reminds us of the beauty of the moment, it is the act of seeing Walter on the screen that evokes these empathic responses. The combination of film and animal reminds us that there is something worthy of our attention. By turning our body towards the imaged animal we encounter new ways of being in the world. The image touches and transforms.

Openings, Not Conclusions: Affective Enchantment on the Digital Screen

Videos from the animal’s perspective provide a limited view into the lifeworlds of the more-than-human world. This shift in visual perspective re-enchants our relationship with imaging and in the process calls out to our own animal bodies watching on the other side of the screen. Walter races, and invites the human audience to follow along. We do not keep up, nor can we even process everything Walter experiences. But instead of simply lamenting our own lack, we might also relish the sense of joy that emanates from his canine body via the video. Affectively, Walter provokes a sympathetic pleasure, imagining what it must feel like to follow behind and plunge into the sea. These affective encounters enchant us and weave their way into our visual grammar of the world. Without even re-watching the video, one can imaginatively return to Walter’s run and sense the feeling of excitement it produced upon viewing it for the first time. We are incapable of articulating precisely why the video of a running dog moves us – a topic that superficially seems quite banal – but somehow it does. Filmic encounters serve as artifacts that remind us of the affective power of the visual medium. Just as the non-human animal exceeds what is articulate by human standards, so too do images; we are always trailing after something that is “just beyond us” and that evokes a sense of the inexpressible. These chases serve as points of hope, a reminder that there is always something more there that exceeds us and enchants us. Such visual encounters with the more-than-human world remind us that we are one of many ways of being in the world. Affective encounters based out of the joy of an “other” simultaneously provoke wonder and humility.

Perhaps it is this sense of humility that is most important when considering the affective enchantment of images, in this case, images of animals produced by animals. Humility based in sympathetic relationships reminds us that who we are in the world is always based on a connection with other beings – and these connections mediated through digital video do more than simply convey something powerful to us. We are ourselves conveyed, and in our ride with Walter we are humbled by the prospect of other lifeworlds that defy rational articulation. We do not “know” them, but their bodies reach out to our own bodies and in that glimmer in between, we sense an affective connection that demands a response.

Fig. 8: Swimming and splashing after Walter.

Author Biography

Natasha Seegert is an Assistant Professor (Lecturer) in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah. Dr. Seegert’s research and teaching focus on visual rhetoric with an emphasis on environmental communication and popular representations of the environment in new media. Specifically, her research explores the intersections and relationships between human animals and the multitude of more-than-human animals who puncture our everyday worlds through appearances on the digital screen.

Notes

1. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 2.

2. KennedyFamily99, Tucker Piano Dec 7’2010.wmv, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiblYasnzWE.

3. Nell Greenfieldboyce, “Parrots Join Humans on the Dance Floor,” Parrots Join Humans on the Dance Floor: NPR, April 30, 2009, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103629651.

4. Russia Today, Crowboarding: Russian Roof-Surfin’ Bird Caught on Tape, accessed January 13, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dWw9GLcOeA.

5. Robert Krulwich, “Polar Bear Flip-Flop: People Hated, Then Loved These Photos. What Changed?,” NPR.org, accessed December 30, 2015, http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/03/01/283993033/polar-bear-flip-flop-people-hated-then-loved-these-photos-what-changed.

6. ctvvi’s channel, Dog and Deer Share Unusual Lovestory, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nzs_8oUIE68.

7. Graham D, The Cat & The Ducklings (Animal Odd Couples), 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=570khFoaE4s&feature=youtube_gdata_player.

8. Margaret Wetherell, Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding (London: SAGE Publications Ltd, 2012), 2–3.

9. Engaging with animals and the decentering of the human perspective is not a new topic in visual imaging. Steve Baker in Postmodern Animal and Ron Broglio in Surface Encounters perform close readings of artists who seek to destabilize the human perspective and display their artistic productions within the institutionalized space of the gallery or museum. Artists like Beuys and Jaschinski include animals in their artistic performances and productions and thus place the more-than-human animal in the role of artistic co-creator. More frequently, as is the case with Dion and Hirst’s work, the animal is an imaged or taxidermied prop about the topic of animal alterity. In contrast, GoPro animal videos on YouTube are not only co-created with animals, they also fall outside of the sanctioned space of the gallery. Where images in galleries invite the gaze, YouTube encourages the glance. In many ways this is a more accurate consideration of the animal’s world for we are only permitted a limited glance of an animal other. Rather than experiencing a deep encounter, the audience instead leaps into a glimmer of a world that is not entirely familiar.

10. GoPro, GoPro: Pelican Learns to Fly, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YEyzvtMx3s.

11. GoPro, GoPro: Monkey Stole My GoPro, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woeT8ZEpbjc.

12. Freedom, Flying Eagle Point of View #1, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3QrhdfLCO8.

13. GoPro, GoPro: Karma the Surfing Pig, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgQPyU3J0P0.

14. Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (Berkeley: Gingko Press, 2001), 25.

15. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, n.d.), 41.

16. Wetherell, Affect and Emotion, 19.

17. O. Thalmann et al., “Complete Mitochondrial Genomes of Ancient Canids Suggest a European Origin of Domestic Dogs,” Science 342, no. 6160 (November 15, 2013): 871, doi:10.1126/science.1243650.

18. Jan Simons, Playing the Waves : Lars Von Trier’s Game Cinema, Film Culture in Transition (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), 33.

19. Specifically, films produced by Von Trier and Vinterberg pre-dated Internet sites like YouTube or Vimeo and were meant for theatrical release. In addition, GoPro videos provide the videographer with more power than that of the director (though the act of strapping a camera to a non-human animal is itself a practice of serendipitous, free-form directing with a directorial performance of relinquishing control of the direction of the film).

20. Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, “Dogme 95 - The Vow of Chastity,” in European Cinema Reader, ed. Catherine Fowler (New York: Routledge, 2002), 83.

21. Ron Broglio, Surface Encounters: Thinking with Animals and Art, 1st edition (Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2011), xv.

22. sciu89, Run Walter, RUN!!, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UowkIRSDHfs.

23. Like many viral videos, other media sources highlighted Walter’s run. The video made it to the front-page of new sites like Reddit, was cited on countless blogs, and was referenced by mainstream news in the United States and Europe. In addition, Walter’s success on social media was “legitimated” by GoPro who within five months of the original video posting on YouTube, reproduced the video and made it part of its official GoPro video channel, complete with a new title, “It’s Always Sunny in Walter’s World,” a catchy soundtrack, and foleying.

24. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 586, doi:10.2307/3178066.

25. sciu89, Run Walter, RUN!!

26. While some videogames have incorporated the first-person perspective of non-human character like cyborgs, robots, and monsters, these shifts are merely nominal. Rarely do these non-human perspective disrupt a normative, bipedal human body. When the cyborg moves through space, it follows the conventions of how a human body moves through space. Such shifts are merely window-dressing and do not alter the perspective or the agency of the character.

27. Marco Abel, “Intensifying Affect | Electronic Book Review,” Electronic Book Review, October 24, 2008, n.p., http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent/immersed.

28. While it is certainly impossible for any individual to accurately understand the experiences of any other individual, to assume that only humans have emotions is an outdated notion that is slowly being abandoned in the sciences. For examples, see the work of Marc Bekoff, The Animal Manifesto: Six Reasons for Expanding Our Compassion Footprint, and Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved.

29. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, First Edition edition (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2002), 39.

30. W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 10.

31. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Random House, 1996), 54.

32. Ibid., 50–51.

33. Broglio, Surface Encounters, xix.

34. Brian Massumi, What Animals Teach Us about Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2014), 78.

35. John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 59.

36. Eugenie Brinkema, The Forms of the Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2014), xvi.

37. Patrick Curry, “Enchantment and Modernity,” PAN: Philosophy, Activism, Nature 9 (2012): 78.

38. Robert Macfarlane, “The Word-Hoard: Robert Macfarlane on Rewilding Our Language of Landscape,” The Guardian, February 27, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/27/robert-macfarlane-word-hoard-rewilding-landscape.

39. Jakob von Uexküll, “A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds,” in Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept, ed. Claire H. Schiller (New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1957), 14.

40. Ibid., 6.

41. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 583.

42. sciu89, Run Walter, RUN!!

43. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 583.

44. A dog’s sense-of-smell is estimated to be millions of times more sensitive than that of humans. Dogs constantly breathe in multiple worlds. Through a complex muscular system, dogs draw in “air-based odorants” which displace present odor-filled air deeper into the dog’s nose.

45. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 186–87.

46. sciu89, Run Walter, RUN!!

47. Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 125.