Between inter-speciesism and technology: the work of art as a relational space of human and animal being

In this contribution, a significant selection of interaction-centered works of art will be analyzed, which employ articulated technological equipment as a mean of communication. They set up, through digital apparatuses elaborated by artists in collaboration with teams of experts, interstitial spaces in which humans can come into direct contact with microenvironments populated by animals, producing places in which alternative patterns of social participation and moments of constructed conviviality are elaborated. The horizon of communication between different species has been explored in numerous fields of knowledge, through the adoption of heterogeneous modes of study. The technological support the artists have made use is aimed at aestheticizing the radical possibilities of an attempt of contact, capable of creating a new communicative system beyond the spectres of cybernetics, building an ideal and material bridge where humanity and animality are conjoined. The focus of the contribution is centered on a selection of artists and artworks produced since the 2000s, which have predisposed a type of sound communicative interaction between humans and animals, creating through human-machine-animal interfaces works that reflect on the possibilities of a revolutionary type of nonlinguistic bonding, also linked to reflection on political ecology and environmentalism. The art world has variously contributed in this regard, from works based on telepresence, to artists who have created sound installations where they record sounds produced by nature, to more radical operations where the living being is placed directly at the center of the installation. The paper will therefore discuss three specific cases related to the latter procedural strategy supported by technology. Amy M. Youngs has produced artworks in which living animals have been placed in microenvironments, which are activated through the formation of an interactive, sound-based bond. This work assumes the use of telepresent technology as a tool that can facilitate communication between different species. Rethinking our relationship with underwater animals has also become an issue often directly addressed by several contemporary artists as well, in an effort to uncover the veil of elusiveness that hides the aquatic world from the terrestrial world. The first work that directly engages viewers and the marine world by implying the possibility of interspecies communication is scale, created in 2010 through a collaboration between neural engineer Malcolm Maclaver and localStyle, an American duo formed in 2000 that includes artist Marlena Novak and composer and sound designer Jay Alan Yim, which with an intermedial approach explores both physical and metaphorical realms through videos, interactive installations and performances. Another work that proceeds in the same vein as the above is Antony Hall's Enki, consisting of a series of bio-interface experiments between humans and certain types of electrifying fish.