new animals

Made with generative AI.

This short film is a rendition of an imagined post-apocalyptic future in which humans have learned to live below the ocean. The protagonists of the film are descendents of humans, and have evolved to live in tandem with the sea, developing senses that help to receive and interpret information mediated by seawater. Their bodies have become more similar to familiar and unfamiliar sea creatures, with the ability to sense magnetic fields, electrical fields, infrared light, and to see via echolocation. 

This project is inspired by expansive definitions of media, including ideas in Melody Jue’s Wild Blue Media and John Durham Peters’ The Marvelous Clouds: Towards a Philosophy of Elemental Media. In these works, water and other worldly elements are interpreted as milieus that affect the ways that media is created, interpreted and transferred. In particular, a shift in milieu affects the way that the body interacts with the world and receives information, or indeed, senses anything at all. Underwater, the character of the water, including opacity, pressure, salinity, acidity, all changes how information is shared and stored. Considering through water challenges our terrestrial habits of perceiving and making media, and asks us to consider how our environment affects the way we perceive and think within them, and how we are embodied in that environment. 

This project also draws inspiration from the essay “Beyond Access: Transforming Ableist Techno Worlds” by Neta Alexander and Jonathan Sterne. In this essay, the authors point out that all media travels along different mediating apparatuses, and that our choice, as media makers and consumers, is among different species of mediation, not less or more. Alexander and Sterne also urge us to think beyond an ableist lens of how we interact with technology or information, expanding how we think about the body. This project seeks to imagine humans beyond the human body, actually embodied in unfamiliar, future, evolved bodies that sense in completely different ways than we do now. What would it be like if we could see with our skin, or hear with our fingers? What would electrical fields look like if we could see them?  

The goal of this film is to imagine the dissolution of categories between species. What would it be like to experience the world in a way that a sawfish does, or a shrimp, or a cuttlefish? I hope this piece can create a stronger sense of kinship and relation between ourselves and creatures that are seemingly very alien. As Donna Haraway says in her book Staying With the Trouble: “Making kin seems to me the thing that we most need to be doing in a world that rips us apart from each other.”