D o g - Human
Canis lupis familiaris
—Feral
Canis-lupus-familiaris - Cynocephali
The Dog and the Dog Headed People
Two Bodies in Motion - Surface Encounters
The beginnings of this speculative investigation into the walkies as something more than an entangled domesticated task, lie with the discovery of a decomposing body in a local park. My canine companion, Dexter, disappeared from sight into a forgotten thicket of trees, brambles and hawthorn. With some trepidation and difficulty, I squeezed into a clearing to find him quietly circling a body. A distant kindred spirit, its remaining fur a clue to its material being, a shell of diffracted, decomposing matter, its bones shaping its gaunt, taught skin. Dexter seemed to show a knowing respect, as resisting his usual instinct to roll in the decomposition of another once-was body, he stopped and stood still, looking down at the casualty of the wild. Dexter’s body seemed to sense this kinship, in a haptic sense of bodily knowing through feeling and sensing a shift in atmosphere as he slowly circled the remains of an adult fox.
This event could be said to represent contact zones on several levels. Contact between human and canine, contact between canine and wild kin, contact between fox and earth in its state of decomposition, a multiplicity with the many parasitical insects aiding its return to soil. This fleeting moment was as much an observation of canine interiority, contemplation, stillness, affect, and cognition—way beyond Cartesian automata—operating as an opening into the practice of Deep Canine Topography.
Deep Canine Topography seeks new ways of reading and engaging with landscape in an endeavour to fully engage with knowledge of the more-than-human. Ron Broglio suggests ‘[t]o think alongside animals means to distribute the body of thinking, creating a distribution of states or plural centres for valuing, selecting, and marking/making a world.¹ This collaboration lies implicitly in our collective relations through the patterns and shapes we form together as we walk, engaged in a making-with, a sympoiesis.²
This practice is not an attempt to name and tame the act of walking with a canine companion but acts as a vehicle for exploring the humble walkies as an aesthetic, artistic act of co-authorship in which canine senses are privileged and human senses and navigational priorities are troubled and disrupted.
Each walk unfolds through contact zones, trans-species communications, immanence, intuition, and improvisation. Ron Broglio invites us to take surfaces seriously, to revaluate the claim that animals have impoverished interiority. The surface of the animal, its skin and fur are points of contact; the surface acts as the point of communication. The same could be said of the landscape, its surface a point of contact and communication between human, canine, and multiplicities of the more-than-human. In this sense it could be argued that the canine acts as a conduit, a translator, or a guide to a deeper connection with wild spaces. Therefore, in our practice we seek to reposition the canine as guide, as co-author, co-creator of the walk avoiding the codifying of the animal as muse, as slave, as symbol, as sign, or as object.
Such unfolding improvised dances can be understood as operating beyond surface encounters, moving us away from the position of human exceptionalism, which privileges transcendental interiority as the panicle of knowledge. Each walk we undertake is re-framed as a site of artistic co-production built on an alliance between human and canine knowledge and our unique entangled umwelts, reading surfaces as they unfold in the moment of the here and now of the trail.
Many Bodies in Motion – Becoming Multiplicities
By combining human and canine senses we become more attuned to the dynamism of the landscape and less occupied with the spectacle of structural flows. This goes for both the urban and wild landscapes we walk together. However, there is a marked difference in the body of the canine between these two domains. Dexter will draw me to the wild every time, even in the local pocket park, where the nose becomes the dominant tool of navigation.
In an attempt to capture our adventures in Deep Canine Topography, I have employed the technologies of my artistic training—namely photography, video, and sound—to document our walks. Early experiments in binaural sound recording, stills photography, and video from the perspective of the canine body have been the most successful. Each form has its limitations but attempt in their own way to enfold human and canine phenomenologies. Our bodies become entangled with the technology we wear—becoming-human-canine-cyborg. As Haraway suggests, we are “enmeshed in hermeneutic labour (and play) by the material–semiotic requirements of getting on together in specific lifeworlds.”³ Through this practice the human, canine, and camera become inseparable as “[t]hey touch; therefore, they are. It’s about the action in contact zones.”⁴
The hope is that the documentation acts as a canvas or surface encounter, a kind of proxy contact zone, which offers insight into canine phenomenology and entanglement with the more-than-human dynamic landscape.
In the film which accompanies this text—which is co-authored through human and canine collaboration—we invite the audience to imagine a dystopian post-Covid, post-6th mass extinction future in which humans and canines have discovered a common language and adopted a nomadic existence built on mutual co-species cooperation. We may also imagine that as the human learns from the canine, the human form begins to shift—senses become more attuned, perhaps manifested in physical changes—and the human becomes Cynocephali,⁵ Dog-Human.
‘Every dog, as I do, has the urge to question. And I, like all dogs, have the compulsion to be silent.’⁶
Darren O’Brien
Artist, Researcher
—Leicester, UK
Endnotes
1. Ron Broglio, Surface encounters: Thinking with animals and art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
2. Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2016).
3. Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
4. Haraway, When Species Meet.
5. Greek mythology talks of a strange group of humans with the heads of a dogs, the Cynocephali. ‘Dog headed’ being the literal form of Cynocephaly, such creatures can be found in many mythical fables including early depictions of St Christopher, the Christian saint of travellers, in which he is shown to have the head of a canine.
6. Franz Kafka, Investigations of a Dog (London: Penguin UK, 2018).