Animal Collaborators

A lot of my work in the part few years has focused on the animal as artist, or
as an artistic collaborator.
My first stint into this was with snails; using variously colored fruit and
vegetable dyes, I dripped the colors onto their shells as they made their way
across a paper sculpture, gnawing at it along the way.
The snail does not have a great sense of agency, nor of creativity. To collaborate
with them, they needed to be tricked into cooperation with treats. This is not a
particularly emotionally satisfying collaboration.
I've attempted to use my cat as a collaborator a couple times; my stop motion
animation "Snuffy" was shot with him intentionally allowed to disrupt and
interact with the frame. Unlike the snails, he didn't need to be swindled into
cooperating. He remained in the general shooting location out of willingness
to share space with me; I am grateful to him for that.
My final senior project is another animal collaboration, this time with rats.
I will be using the skills I learned in this class to assemble a website that
is intended to resemble a standard artist's residence website. My rat's enclosure
will be the residence, and my rats will be the artists. The fact that they are rats
will be under-emphasized.
The rats have a level of cognition much more similar to a cat's than to a snail's.
When supplied with random objects, it sometimes seems as though they are used for creative
expression; always with a practical leaning, but creative nonetheless.



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