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 language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Display, Distribute, Disrupt |
| Subtitle of host publication | Contemporary Moving Image Practices |
| Editors | Wolfgang Brückle, Fred Truniger |
| Place of Publication | Zurich |
| Publisher | Diaphanes |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9783035805444 |
| Publication status | Accepted/In press - Mar 2020 |
Keywords
- animal studies
- media studies
- spectatorship
- Posthumanism