“”Instead, I am looking for Marilyn Strathern’s ‘partial connections” whichare about the counter-intuitive geometries and incongruent translationsnecessary to getting on together, where the god-tricks of self certainty anddeathless communion are not an option.”
“Process and dissolution - and agencies both human and non-human, as well asanimate and inanimate - are his partners and materials, not just histhemes.”
“For example, what kind of temporal scale-making could shape labor systems,investment strategies, and consumption patterns in which the generation timeof information machines became compatible with the generation time ofinformation machines became compatible with the generation times of hum,animal, and plant communities and ecosystems?”
“Living with animals, inhabiting their/our stories, trying to tell the truthabout relationship, co-habiting an active history: that is the work ofcompanion species, for whom ‘the relation’ is the smallest possible unity ofanalysis.”
“Companion species is bigger and more heterogeneous category than companionanimal, and not just because one must include such organic beings as rice,bees, tulips, and intestinal flora, all of whom make life for humans what itis - and vice versa.”
The major point from Harroway’s introduction that I latched onto is that thehuman world and the animal/plant/microbacteria worlds are not seperable, andmore importantly that there is no hierarchy of importance. We are asdependent on our companion species as they are on us, humans do not reignsupreme in this world. Relating this to an artmaking practice: If thecreation of art is our way of framing the chaos of our world around us, whydo we not include our companion species as part of our audience? Is it aridiculous or even selfish way of making art to think of it only for humans? This made me think of Laurie Anderson’s recent work, “Music for Dogs” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38g4VzkIf14) in which she composed a scorewith canines as the intended audience. People brought their animals to theSydney Opera house and sat for a concert. The dogs appear to be happy,excited, vocal - obviously they are not thinking of it as art or even music- but the experience of sitting in a concert hall with their owners andhundreds of other dogs has to be interesting for them, and certainly outsideof these dogs everyday experiences. Animals see and hear the worlddifferently then us, but I think it might be interesting to try and figureout what kind of “art” interests other species, expanding the viewership ofour art to all of our coexisting species.
-Natalie