Awake in the Woods: Empathic Imagining, Deep Time, and the Archaeology of Animal Life

Abstract

This art practice-based thesis addresses the question: how might certain kinds of photographic and moving image artworks facilitate alternate ways of seeing other animals? This thesis explores how an artist’s material choices and techniques can effect specific perceptual experiences that may encourage viewers to see other animals as co-sentient creaturely others rather than as specimens, commodities, or objects. The studio component of this thesis consists of a series of photographic works titled Present, Near, and Deep and a short moving image work titled other beings. These works have been created in response to my own myriad encounters with other animals, both those living in captivity and those held as natural history specimens, and my experience of their bodies as inherently vibrant and communicative. This thesis will address the significance of the material and technical choices I made in the production of these works and how they potentially contribute to the unsettling of culturally normative views on animals. As well as addressing practical and conceptual specifics of my studio work, the written component of this thesis provides a broader theoretical context that integrates visual and theoretical analyses of artworks, twentieth and twenty-first century philosophical and theoretical perspectives and interdisciplinary concepts with relevant personal and historical accounts. Biosemiotics provides part of a conceptual framework for this thesis through which the meaning of animal bodies in artworks can be explored and understood. Phenomenology also contributes to the conceptual framework of this thesis by providing a key perspective regarding how a viewer’s embodied, perceptual experience of an artwork can produce alternate ways of seeing other animals. This thesis also adopts a phenomenological method as a means to investigate insights afforded by the first-person embodied perceptual experiences enacted through art practice.