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A new humanities becomes possible once the human is placed in its properly inhuman context. And a humanities that remains connected not only to the open varieties of human life (open in terms of gender, sex, class, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, and so on) but also to the open varieties of life (its animal and plant forms) is needed, one that opens itself to ethologies and generates critical ecologies.

— Elisabeth Grosz, 2011 ​​

 

Do animals create media? This project contains not so much an answer but a proposal: To ask the question again and again, to explore the non-human universe with curiosity, and to peer through evolution and deep time. Do non-humans create media? And if so, what does this reveal about the nature of media and the creative ecology of the world? Inspired by and modeled after Bruce Sterling's Dead Media Project, this proposal suggests an imaginative, explorative, more-than-human approach to defining media, to relating to other creatures, and to the media archive. 

 

The practice of media archeology, first put forth by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka in 2011, originates from a discontent with “canonized” narratives of media culture, and aims to illuminate erased, forgotten or ignored authors. Huhtamo and Parikka have written that the practice can bring the past “to the present, and the present to the past; both inform and explain each other, raising questions and pointing to futures that may or may not be.” (Huhtamo and Parikka 15)

 

A survey of non-human made media and art has not previously been made. However, scientists and visual scholars are increasingly returning to examples of animals producing sculpture, installation, dance and music that seem to suggest an aesthetic sense that transcends scientifically understood animal motivations. These animal authors, including bower birds of Australia and orca pods of Puget Sound, bring cultural theorists and scientists into strange territories: Could it be said that a bird has a visual culture? Does the dialect of an orca pod indicate the existence of oral histories, and therefore “personhood”? Should media archeologists and art historians recognize these blank spaces in the record? 

 

In a world under the heel of accelerating human development and the systematic destruction of the natural world, all animal made media are in critical danger of being lost. Many examples of non-human media and art have already disappeared to time and to human-driven extinction. The time is ripe for an archeological dig of this kind. 

 

Our anthropocentric position has long been affirmed by our assumption that complex visual cultures are limited to our own species. As the many ways we have historically sought to differentiate ourselves from other animals fall away (tool use, body decoration, cave drawings, language), an urgency emerges to recognize our species as embedded in a larger, universal ecology. More-than-human perspectives could help us shake off our blinds of exceptionalism. If we are to understand ourselves as participants in a wider ecology, perhaps our radio broadcasts and film festivals could be at least understood to exist in the same bath as bats’ sonar and pufferfishes’ sand sculptures. 

 

This non-human made archive is, of course, ultimately for us, as humans. After all, I am sure that this website will not be too important to the authors of this particular field, from seadragons to bonobos (not to mention the extinct Neanderthal). They are probably more interested in something else that I cannot possibly name (maybe they are now lying on a pile of leaves, or using an unnamed sense to navigate in the dark). However, the suggestion is that an exploration of non-human made media could be a valuable exercise for those of us who are interested in the creation of media and the study and practice of art. 

 

The concept and prevalence of media in our society I think is an expression of our species’ particular obsession with and adaptation towards visuality, narrative, and sociality: We are primates with highly adapted eyes and visual processing compared to other animals, and, as social creatures, have a strong drive for a lot— even an excess— of social connection. Our psychological and physiological identities are expressed in our media. When we survey media made by other species, what is revealed? What can differently minded, differently embodied makers teach us?

 

Media scholars Neta Alexander and Jonathan Sterne have written that “critical disability studies return us to the lived, embodied, singular experiences of bodyminds,” pushing against the tendency of media technology to assume the participation of, and prioritize, the able, white, male, straight, cis, (human) body. Looking at and considering the position of non-human animals necessarily grounds us in our own individual bodies, as our physical forms are brought into stark contrast by the forms of other organisms. In a survey of animal media, the specter of decorporealization via “neutral” technology is replaced by a sense of identity with the physical body and species. (Alexander and Sterne 192) 

 

Animal media is by nature post- and pre-humanist. However, containing contradiction, animal media also exists on a continuum with human made media. There is, after all, no “first” human media or “last” pre-human media. Animal media emphasizes this relationality, this spectrum of kinship, linking us to other species. A flute made from the femur bone of a bear was found in the Divje babe cave near Cerkno, in modern day Slovenia, created by a Neanderthal artisan. The flute was made 60,000 years ago, 20,000 years before the first known human-made instrument. Holes carved along the flute in particular positions show a sophisticated understanding of different musical notes. A replica of the flute has been used to create haunting, non-human music. As much as we would like to differentiate ourselves from Neanderthals, who we have perceived as uncultured, violent and unintelligent, the archeological record indicates a more nuanced relationship between artistic expression and human evolution.

 

Perhaps if we dwell long enough among the songs, dances, and installation art of the animal and other non-human entities of our shared places, we will be able to “throw the self into upheaval” and head “toward unheard-of becomings,” as suggested by philosophers Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze in their seminal work A Thousand Plateaus. They have long challenged us to Devenir-animal, or become animal, as a way to shed our stale, repetitive Oedipal instincts and break free from our limiting identities: The concept of “animal” to Deleuze and Guattari seems to represent a dark, enchanting, fecund chaos. Deleuze and Guattari invoke “the effectuation of a power of the pack that throws the self into upheaval and makes it reel. Who has not known the violence of these animal sequences, which uproot one from humanity, if only for an instant, making one scrape at one’s bread like a rodent or giving one the yellow eyes of a feline?” (Deleuze and Guattari 20) Perhaps inhabiting the mind of the rodent, or the feline, or participating in the pack, they seem to suggest, will help us to find the state of mind or the knowledge of becoming-animal, where “all forms come undone.” (Baker 68)

 

However, while our own capitalist, Oedipal, racist forms may need to (and indeed cry out to) become undone, the “animal” does not always represent a topos of chaos and fear, but (like us) represents a society of individuals that make up a whole. Although it will be impossible to escape the humanist perspective in this essay, I think “becoming-animal” offers an imperative to stretch, challenge, and disrupt our humanist thinking through the avenues of imagination and art practice.

 

Perhaps the ultimate goal in this project is for the concept of media, so saturated with human desires and patterns, will dissolve, leaving us with something more shaggy, more musky, more exoskeleton-y with many legs. Ultimately, a media object is a call into the darkness, a chirrup pleading for recognition, honed by thousands of years of rampant human technological industry or billions of years of evolution. However, the evolutionary scientists remind us, we didn’t evolve from the apes— the apes have been there all along with us, evolving too, fine tuning their own, unnamed psycho-cultural-physiological expressions in the forests. So, too, have the hummingbirds and polychaete worms been testing and developing their interactions with the elements, sending messages out and receiving them with some manner of intricate organs, between species and across species. 

As we twist and turn in our studies and in our daily lives, searching for new ways to be, seeking disruptions, distortions, speculative alien futures and fabulous nostalgic pasts, plumbing the far reaches of our imaginations, there all along have been literally uncountable numbers of different ways of being, things with green blood, things with many brains, things with hundreds of tiny blue eyes. A media object, an artwork, a letter; a single bubble issuing from an undersea burrow; feces laid against other feces; delicate skin cells changing colors; some sort of animating force reaches out and receives, reaches out and receives over and over. To circumscribe human media as something sacrosanct and unrelatable, excised from the greater ecology of screams and grunts, is perhaps lacking imagination and a long memory. 

 

This site puts forth a proposal for a new conceptualization of personal expression and visual culture; a wider ecology of media, among which we are but one species among many. Please explore this site, and question if these non human creatures can be considered practitioners of art and media. 

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It follows that the time is also present for a new philosophy and archive of plant and mineral media, but that is for another project. 

 

 

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Works Cited 

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Alexander, Neta, and Jonathan Sterne. “Beyond Access: Transforming Ableist Techno-Worlds.” Technics: Media in the Digital Age, edited by Nicholas Baer and Annie van den Oever, Amsterdam University Press, 2024, pp. 187–98.

 

Baker, Steve. “What Does Becoming-Animal Look Like?” Representing Animals, edited by Nigel Rothfels. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.

 

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

 

Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art, Durham, NC, 2011, 21.

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Huhtamo, Erkki, and Jussi Parikka. Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications. 1st ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

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Sterling, Bruce. “Dead Media Project.” Website. http://www.deadmedia.org/index.html. Accessed Oct 24, 2024.