Animal, Vegetable, Video

by Sam Easterson
Website: http://www.anivegvideo.com/

Reviewed by Luisa Paraguai Donati
Department of Multimedia
Institute of Arts, Unicamp, Brazil
http://wawrwt.iar.unicamp.br

luisa@iar.unicamp.br

This website is part of a larger project called the Animal, Vegetable, Video, in which the video artist, Sam Easterson, has been working for the last five years. In 1988 he was commissioned by the Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, to create a new video project. For that project he outfitted a flock of sheep with a helmet-mounted video camera. Since then he has been designing them to be attached onto animals and plants of all kinds. Micro video cameras are also placed deep inside the animals and plant habitats showing how they live, behave and move in their own environment. Therefore, the project has produced an extensive collection of video footages and created a network of an artist and scientists by developing video exhibitions for art centres and working with researchers in different scientific institutions.

The web design is simple, clean, and totally based on screens and windows with an animated movement of coloured squares on a white background to formalise aesthetically the idea of those video experiments. Web users can browse easily to get any information and video footages by clicking on the names of animals or choosing specific habitats.

Watching some of those videos, it is clear that the author is interested in "looking and in the process of looking" to conduct his process of creation. The viewer can get different references of the environment according to each animal and its characteristic rhythm, body movement, and sounds as a scorpion, an alligator, or a wolf. The perspective of captured images creates a specific visual experience by linking the perceiver and different views, the individual and the landscape. Then, the viewer is not only an observer of the scene but also the first person in the video narrative.

By thinking about new technologies and the possibility of having different perspectives to approach the world another concept can be mentioned here, "mediated presence" [1], when it is possible for participants to experience phenomenologically the "sense of being there." In some way, the participants’ presence can be projected, extended into a physical remote space through other spatial references, and according to each interface used, they can provoke, more or less, interferences on it.

Personally, another interesting point in this project is the use of head-mounted technology inserted in the animal’s body spatiality. It brings me the idea of wearable computer [2] and its use for specific tasks, becoming the "wearer" capable of enhancing physical activities and/or bodily limits. The technological mediation in the communication process has been increasingly allowing a redefinition of the limits of our action and perception and (re) modelling the realities of our body.

Notes:
[1] Marvin Minsky (1980) mentioned the term "telepresence" for the first time, inspired by Robert Heinlein’s novel,Waldo. He thought of "remote presence" those occurrences when participants can influence the form and/or content of the mediated presentation or experience as in definition. Since then, the concept of mediated presence has been extensively discussed and for Biocca (1997) can be briefly presented as consisting of two interrelated phenomena: "telepresence — the phenomenal sense of ‘being there’ and mental models of mediated spaces that create the illusion, and social presence——the sense of ‘being together with another’ and mental models of ‘other intelligences’ that help us simulate ‘other minds.’"

[2] Bass (1997) suggests five characteristics to define a wearable computer, "it may be used while the wearer is in motion; it may be used while one or both hands are free, or occupied with other tasks; it exists within the corporeal envelope of the user, i.e., it should be not merely attached to the body but becomes an integral part of the person's clothing; it must allow the user to maintain control; it must exhibit constancy, in the sense that it should be constantly available."

Bibliographical References:
F. Biocca, "The Cyborg’s Dilemma: Progressive Embodiment in Virtual Environments," Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Vol.3, N.2., N.p.

M. Minsky, "Telepresence," OMNI Magazine, (May 1980) p.45-52.

L. Bass, Conveners report of CHI '97 Workshop on Wearable Computers, Personal Communication to attendees, (1997) N.p.

L. Santaella, "Culturas e artes do pós-humano, da cultura das mídias à cibercultura," (São Paulo: Editora Paulus, 2003). N.p.