Feral Ecologies: A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Media

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dc.contributor.advisorZryd, Mike
dc.creatorSwain, Sara Ann
dc.date.accessioned2017-07-27T12:34:46Z
dc.date.available2017-07-27T12:34:46Z
dc.date.copyright2016-09-26
dc.date.issued2017-07-27
dc.date.updated2017-07-27T12:34:45Z
dc.degree.disciplineCommunication & Culture, Joint Program with Ryerson University
dc.degree.levelDoctoral
dc.degree.namePhD - Doctor of Philosophy
dc.description.abstractThis dissertation wonders what non-human animals can illuminate about media in the visible contact zones where they meet. It treats these zones as rich field sites from which to excavate neglected material-discursive-semiotic relationships between animals and media. What these encounters demonstrate is that animals are historically and theoretically implicated in the imagination and materialization of media and their attendant processes of communication. Chapter 1 addresses how animals have been excluded from the cultural production of knowledge as a result of an anthropocentric perspective that renders them invisible or reduces them to ciphers for human meanings. It combines ethology and cinematic realism to craft a reparative, non-anthropocentric way of looking that is able to accommodate the plenitude of animals and their traces, and grant them the ontological heft required to exert productive traction in the visual field. Chapter 2 identifies an octopuss encounter with a digital camera and its chance cinematic inscription as part of a larger phenomenon of accidental animal videos. Because non-humans are the catalysts for their production, these videos offer welcome realist counterpoints to traditional wildlife imagery, and affirm cinemas ability to intercede non-anthropocentrically between humans and the world. Realism is essential to cinematic communication, and that realism is ultimately an achievement of non-human intervention. Chapter 3 investigates how an Internet hoax about a non-human ape playing with an iPad in a zoo led to the development of Apps for Apes, a real life enrichment project that pairs captive orangutans with iPads. It contextualizes and criticizes this projects discursive underpinnings but argues that the contingencies that transpire at the touchscreen interface shift our understanding of communication away from sharing minds and toward respecting immanence and accommodating difference. Finally, Chapter 4 examines a publicity stunt wherein a digital data-carrying homing pigeon races against the Internet to meet a computer. Rather than a competition, this is a continuation of a longstanding collaboration between the carrier pigeon and the infrastructure of modern communications. The carrier pigeon is not external but rather endemic to our understanding of communication as a material process that requires movement and coordination to make connections.
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10315/33424
dc.language.isoen
dc.rightsAuthor owns copyright, except where explicitly noted. Please contact the author directly with licensing requests.
dc.subjectPhilosophy
dc.subject.keywordsCommunication
dc.subject.keywordsTechnological Modernity
dc.subject.keywordsMedia Materiality
dc.subject.keywordsMobility
dc.subject.keywordsMobile Media
dc.subject.keywordsMedia Studies
dc.subject.keywordsMedia Theory
dc.subject.keywordsMedia History
dc.subject.keywordsWeb Studies
dc.subject.keywordsPhilosophy of Technology
dc.subject.keywordsPhilosophy of Media
dc.subject.keywordsPhilosophy of Communication
dc.subject.keywordsMateriality of Communication
dc.subject.keywordsCommunications Networks
dc.subject.keywordsAssemblage Theory
dc.subject.keywordsTelecommunications
dc.subject.keywordsTelecommunications Infrastructure
dc.subject.keywordsTouchscreens
dc.subject.keywordsInterspecies Games
dc.subject.keywordsInterspecies Communication
dc.subject.keywordsApps for Apes
dc.subject.keywordsAnimal Enrichment
dc.subject.keywordsGreat Ape Communication
dc.subject.keywordsAnimals
dc.subject.keywordsOctopuses
dc.subject.keywordsGreat Apes
dc.subject.keywordsOrangutans
dc.subject.keywordsHoming Pigeons
dc.subject.keywordsCarrier Pigeons
dc.subject.keywordsWar Pigeons
dc.subject.keywordsZoos
dc.subject.keywordsAnimal Captivity
dc.subject.keywordsAnimal Representation
dc.subject.keywordsWildlife documentary
dc.subject.keywordsWildlife Imagery
dc.subject.keywordsAnimals in Visual Culture
dc.subject.keywordsAnimal Ethics
dc.subject.keywordsNature-Cultures
dc.subject.keywordsMedia Ecology
dc.subject.keywordsDigital Aesthetics
dc.subject.keywordsDigital Culture
dc.subject.keywordsYouTube
dc.subject.keywordsPhotobombs
dc.subject.keywordsVideobombs
dc.subject.keywordsAccidental Films
dc.subject.keywordsCameras
dc.subject.keywordsComputer Tablets
dc.subject.keywordsTelegraph
dc.subject.keywordsTrain
dc.subject.keywordsInternet
dc.subject.keywordsCinema
dc.subject.keywordsAndré Bazin
dc.subject.keywordsJakob von Uexküll
dc.subject.keywordsUmwelt
dc.subject.keywordsFilm-Philosophy
dc.subject.keywordsCinematic Realism
dc.subject.keywordsSpeculative Realism
dc.subject.keywordsAnimal Studies
dc.subject.keywordsNon-Human Turn
dc.subject.keywordsPosthumanism.
dc.titleFeral Ecologies: A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Media
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation

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