1) One might be intrigued by the way you describe the process of communal parenting, (auto-) domestication and (self-)education are entangled. How much self-effacement is then indeed needed to make trans-species communication material, as a form of attunement? And then:
2) How can this multi-sensory and multi-modal process be made culturally apprehensible – as an image, since we humans are visual animals?
3) In how far is such a singular narcissistic experience indeed acting as a synthesizer that creates a collage of all these numerous artistic projects that have been investigating the human-dog-wolf trope before, and of which you are very much aware?
First, while image-ning (again, no escape…) your hybrid domestic interaction since you are nurturing Ada under the watchful eyes of Byron, and describing the fusional process as auto-domestication and mutual pet training, I came across the fascinating concept of ‘anthropo-zoo-genetic practices’, a practice that is supposed to construct both animal and human. In her paper The Body We Care For: Figures of Anthropo-zoo-genesis ethologist Vinciane Despret speaks of the interesting phenomenon she calls the miracle of attunement and that does not put supposed mutual empathy central, but instead the readiness for mutual bodily learning – “what the body makes (us) (others) do.” Despret is mostly interested in the intriguing and famous story of Hans the clever Horse from the beginning of the 20th century – a horse that could calculate and gesturally respond, but whose accurate responses in fact depended on the body’s position of the specific human asking the questions: “Who influences and who is influenced, in this story, are questions that can no longer receive a clear answer. Both, human and horse, are cause and effect of each other’s movements. Both induce and are induced, affect and are affected. Both embody each other’s mind.” According to Despret, this practice of mutual domestication depend on “emotional relations, made of expectations, faith, belief, trust,” a real becoming-with, performing a body that the animal can read through its micro-movements and micro- performative patterns. “Both are active and both are transformed by the availability of the other. Both are articulated by what the other ‘makes him/her make’.” Your description of smells, fluids, non-human language, licking, sucking and other modalities of intimacy more internal than any closeness seems much to correspond with such a process of attunement. And all the more I am then, consequently, wondering how to aesthetically and socially transmit these experiences if it is not the kinaesthetic way. What, then, can images do?
Since I know that you are spending the week in company not only of Ada and Byron but also of performance photographer Manuel Vason, who has been collaborating with more than 200 performance artists already and favours a strongly collaborative approach, I am extremely curious which of these kinaesthetic and intimate vectors of interaction have been proven successful to be transferred to the status of a ‘signifying surface’ (Flusser) that an image is. We know how carefully Manuel has recreated visual correspondences to such intimate and internal experiences such as Franko B.’s, Yann Marussich’s or Kira O’Reilly’s. But how can such an act of en-visioning not only comprise the human phenomenological drama but also that of the dog-ish other, including fluid biopolitics?
