Bricolab

Abstract: In 1903, German apothecary Julius Neubronner fitted homing pigeons with tiny dual-lensed pneumatic cameras in order to produce unmanned aerial images. In the first part of this talk, I argue that Neubronner’s experiment is suggestive of a much more substantial dovetailing of birds with the modern project of overcoming distance. In the second part, I contend that the field of media studies has overlooked the significance of Neubronner’s work. Either treated as an amusing one-off or an unwitting precursor to drone photography, this enterprise remains outside of and separate from media history. I wager that this is because the nature-culture divide continues to persist in the field, making it ill-equipped to properly address relationships between animals and media. In the third part of the talk, I turn to the concept of “feral ecologies” which I have developed in order to mitigate this stubborn nature-culture partition and recoup its historical and theoretical omissions. Tending to “feral ecologies,” I conclude, makes media studies more hospitable and inclusive of animals and the myriad of ways they are implicated in the innovation and development of media.   

Sara Swain is a writer, researcher, and educator based in Toronto. She holds a PhD in Communication and Culture from York and Ryerson Universities. She studies the ways in which non-human animals are implicated in the imagination and materialization of media technologies and our understandings of communication

Présenté en collaboration avec le laboratoire Artefact.