Filming Animals: Portable Cameras in Animal Media Practice

Creating moving images – as a specific historical mode of action and practice – always also used to imply being a human. Yet with the proliferation of lightweight, portable cameras, birds and other animals are increasingly producing moving images and taking on roles previously reserved for humans, sometimes autonomously, sometimes in their service. Animal-machine interactions have become effortless and visible to such a degree that we cannot continue to view them as an aberrant periphery to human media use. Rather, they demand to be acknowledged as a new class of media practice in its own right. Animals who operate cameras (for instance, seagulls stealing GoPros) irritate anthropocentric notions like authorship. But the implications run deeper. This chapter situates the GoPro camera in a larger field of transformations and audiovisual epistemic practices in order to show that we are witnessing not only a profound disruption of audiovisual codes, but also of human subjectivity as it is understood in relation to animals and technology.