Who Watches Videos for Cats? Animal Spectatorship, Media Ethology and the Future of Media

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Abstract

There is a peculiar new clade of moving images populating our audiovisual culture: videos for cats. YouTube titles like “Birds and Squirrels HD” are both inconspicuous and remarkably pervasive, both ordinary and yet strangely noteworthy. Merely naming their audience, videos for cats also performatively call into being their opposite, and by doing so signal a crisis of spectatorship. This chapter takes the notion of animal spectatorship as a point of departure to speculate about how the future of media might look like, but also as a canvas for larger questions about the scope and direction of human and non-human agentive forces and about the ways we choose to orchestrate the relationships of power in our society and environment.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationDisplay, Distribute, Disrupt
Subtitle of host publicationContemporary Moving Image Practices
EditorsWolfgang Brückle, Fred Truniger
Place of PublicationZurich
PublisherDiaphanes
Number of pages19
ISBN (Print)9783035805444
Publication statusAccepted/In press - Mar 2020

Keywords

  • animal studies
  • media studies
  • spectatorship
  • Posthumanism

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