Ediinburgh Companion of Literature and Sound Studies,, 2024
Hearing birdsong draws our rapt attention to the beauty of the natural world. The lark, the night... more Hearing birdsong draws our rapt attention to the beauty of the natural world. The lark, the nightingale, the owl, the raven: each bird’s sound carries layers of feeling, memory, place, symbolism, and experience in the human stories in which they appear. Responding to the sounds of birds through words, images and music has occurred across centuries and human cultures, conveying a wide variety of meanings and affects. The shape and vibrancy of affective and allegorical responses to the sounds of birds vastly exceeds our ability to categorise them. Birds’ utter difference from us as a species, their familiarity and proximity to all human cultures, their ties to seasons and places, their irresistible musicality, and their perceived freedom from human constraints have inspired many metaphorical, mythic, and narrative references. As Leonard Lutwack writes in Birds in Literature, birds are a ‘neighbour species of both “familiarity and transcendence, offering ‘a wider range of meaning and symbol in literature than any other animal.”’
Birds evoke mysteries of art, expression, plenitude, language, and loss as we witness their flight across our horizons. They also remind us of where we belong and how fragile that belonging is. The loss of birds appears everywhere we look and listen, so that the sounds of birds signal and resist an imminent silence.
Perhaps then, beginning with the ‘beauty’ of their song limits what listening to birds or listening to one another listening to birds might teach us. . This chapter offers an “Anthropocene reading” of some of these texts. As I will argue, the desire to create beauty through representation of birds’ nature holds a complicated relationship with the underlying metaphysics of western humanism, wherein only humans possess the capacities for language, art, beauty, and value. The urge to translate something untranslatable, like the song of a bird, into human language can conflict with an equally potent need to come closer at least in imagination to that which is fundamentally other from us, like the language of birds. These urges, simultaneous and incongruous, are powerful forces shaping narrative and expressive dimensions in western fiction and poetry of the modern period.
Relocating cultural studies: developments in theory …, Jan 1, 1993
A farmer one cold morning in winter went to his back door to holler for his pigs. It was so cold ... more A farmer one cold morning in winter went to his back door to holler for his pigs. It was so cold out that as he yelled his words froze in the air. His pigs didn't come home until his words thawed out in springthen the pigs heard it.(Halpert 1976: 183)
TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. Language English. Journal Content Search. All. Brows... more TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. Language English. Journal Content Search. All. Browse: ...
Fifteen lecturers (most of whom participated in a conference held at the University of Ottawa in ... more Fifteen lecturers (most of whom participated in a conference held at the University of Ottawa in 1991) analyse the manifold features that characterize the art/theory interchange and the effects of the current "inflation of commentary" on the market valorization and the intellectual and political legitimation of art. Among the topics discussed: theory's institutional affiliations to the academy and the museum; the influence of identity politics, cultural policies, body politics, feminism, and new technologies. Biographical notes on contributors. Circa 340 bibl. ref.
Forthcoming, MIT Press, Leonardo Books, Winter 2019.
Virtual Menageries:
Animals as Mediators i... more Forthcoming, MIT Press, Leonardo Books, Winter 2019.
Virtual Menageries:
Animals as Mediators in Network Cultures
Jody Berland
From cat videos to corporate logos, digital screens and spaces are crowded with animal bodies. In Virtual Menageries, Jody Berland examines the role of animals in the spread of global communications. Her richly illustrated study links the contemporary proliferation of animals on social media to the collection of exotic animals in the formative years of transcontinental exploration and expansion. By tracing previously unseen parallels across the history of exotic and digital menageries, Berland shows how and why animals came to bridge peoples, territories, and technologies in the expansion of colonial and capitalist cultures.
Berland's genealogy of the virtual menagerie begins in 1414 when a ruler in Bengal sent a Kenyan giraffe to join a Chinese emperor's menagerie. It maps the beaver's role in the colonial conquest of Canada and examines the appearances of animals in early moving pictures. The menagerie is reinvented for the digital age when image and sound designers use parts or images of animals to ensure the affective promise and commercial spread of an emergent digital infrastructure. These animal images are emissaries that enliven and domesticate the ever-expanding field of mediation. Virtual Menageries offers a unique account of animals and animal images as mediators that encourage complicated emotional, economic and aesthetic investment in changing practices of connection.
Jody Berland is Professor in the Department of Humanities and in Graduate Programs in Communication and Culture, Social and Political Thought, Science and Technology Studies, and Music, at York University, Toronto, and Visiting Professor at the Centre for Human Animal Studies at Edge Hill University, UK. She is the author of North of Empire: Culture, Space, Technology.
one-liner: The close interdependency of animal emissaries and new media from early European colonial encounters with the exotic to today's proliferation of animals in digital networks.
Chapter from North of Empire (2009) addressing colonial history, technical mediation and cultural... more Chapter from North of Empire (2009) addressing colonial history, technical mediation and cultural discourses contributing to Canadian representations of identity in terms of weather.
Chapter 1, Material Cultures in Canada, edited by Thomas Allen and Jennifer Blair. Wilfrid Laurie... more Chapter 1, Material Cultures in Canada, edited by Thomas Allen and Jennifer Blair. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015.
Topia: The Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 2000
Whether speaking in front of a classroom or on more formal occasions, Ioan had a remarkable eloqu... more Whether speaking in front of a classroom or on more formal occasions, Ioan had a remarkable eloquence, working simultaneously on several levels of mental and emo-tional cognition with a few well-chosen words. In this as in so many other respects, I am proud and grateful to ...
Topia: The Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Sep 1, 2008
... Various financial donors, including York, Ryerson, Wilfrid Laurier and McGill Universities, a... more ... Various financial donors, including York, Ryerson, Wilfrid Laurier and McGill Universities, and a number of individual members of our editorial board, have made generous contributions to ensure the journal's continuity until 2008; we are grateful to them for ... Jody Berland, Editor ...
Ediinburgh Companion of Literature and Sound Studies,, 2024
Hearing birdsong draws our rapt attention to the beauty of the natural world. The lark, the night... more Hearing birdsong draws our rapt attention to the beauty of the natural world. The lark, the nightingale, the owl, the raven: each bird’s sound carries layers of feeling, memory, place, symbolism, and experience in the human stories in which they appear. Responding to the sounds of birds through words, images and music has occurred across centuries and human cultures, conveying a wide variety of meanings and affects. The shape and vibrancy of affective and allegorical responses to the sounds of birds vastly exceeds our ability to categorise them. Birds’ utter difference from us as a species, their familiarity and proximity to all human cultures, their ties to seasons and places, their irresistible musicality, and their perceived freedom from human constraints have inspired many metaphorical, mythic, and narrative references. As Leonard Lutwack writes in Birds in Literature, birds are a ‘neighbour species of both “familiarity and transcendence, offering ‘a wider range of meaning and symbol in literature than any other animal.”’
Birds evoke mysteries of art, expression, plenitude, language, and loss as we witness their flight across our horizons. They also remind us of where we belong and how fragile that belonging is. The loss of birds appears everywhere we look and listen, so that the sounds of birds signal and resist an imminent silence.
Perhaps then, beginning with the ‘beauty’ of their song limits what listening to birds or listening to one another listening to birds might teach us. . This chapter offers an “Anthropocene reading” of some of these texts. As I will argue, the desire to create beauty through representation of birds’ nature holds a complicated relationship with the underlying metaphysics of western humanism, wherein only humans possess the capacities for language, art, beauty, and value. The urge to translate something untranslatable, like the song of a bird, into human language can conflict with an equally potent need to come closer at least in imagination to that which is fundamentally other from us, like the language of birds. These urges, simultaneous and incongruous, are powerful forces shaping narrative and expressive dimensions in western fiction and poetry of the modern period.
Relocating cultural studies: developments in theory …, Jan 1, 1993
A farmer one cold morning in winter went to his back door to holler for his pigs. It was so cold ... more A farmer one cold morning in winter went to his back door to holler for his pigs. It was so cold out that as he yelled his words froze in the air. His pigs didn't come home until his words thawed out in springthen the pigs heard it.(Halpert 1976: 183)
TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. Language English. Journal Content Search. All. Brows... more TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. Language English. Journal Content Search. All. Browse: ...
Fifteen lecturers (most of whom participated in a conference held at the University of Ottawa in ... more Fifteen lecturers (most of whom participated in a conference held at the University of Ottawa in 1991) analyse the manifold features that characterize the art/theory interchange and the effects of the current "inflation of commentary" on the market valorization and the intellectual and political legitimation of art. Among the topics discussed: theory's institutional affiliations to the academy and the museum; the influence of identity politics, cultural policies, body politics, feminism, and new technologies. Biographical notes on contributors. Circa 340 bibl. ref.
Forthcoming, MIT Press, Leonardo Books, Winter 2019.
Virtual Menageries:
Animals as Mediators i... more Forthcoming, MIT Press, Leonardo Books, Winter 2019.
Virtual Menageries:
Animals as Mediators in Network Cultures
Jody Berland
From cat videos to corporate logos, digital screens and spaces are crowded with animal bodies. In Virtual Menageries, Jody Berland examines the role of animals in the spread of global communications. Her richly illustrated study links the contemporary proliferation of animals on social media to the collection of exotic animals in the formative years of transcontinental exploration and expansion. By tracing previously unseen parallels across the history of exotic and digital menageries, Berland shows how and why animals came to bridge peoples, territories, and technologies in the expansion of colonial and capitalist cultures.
Berland's genealogy of the virtual menagerie begins in 1414 when a ruler in Bengal sent a Kenyan giraffe to join a Chinese emperor's menagerie. It maps the beaver's role in the colonial conquest of Canada and examines the appearances of animals in early moving pictures. The menagerie is reinvented for the digital age when image and sound designers use parts or images of animals to ensure the affective promise and commercial spread of an emergent digital infrastructure. These animal images are emissaries that enliven and domesticate the ever-expanding field of mediation. Virtual Menageries offers a unique account of animals and animal images as mediators that encourage complicated emotional, economic and aesthetic investment in changing practices of connection.
Jody Berland is Professor in the Department of Humanities and in Graduate Programs in Communication and Culture, Social and Political Thought, Science and Technology Studies, and Music, at York University, Toronto, and Visiting Professor at the Centre for Human Animal Studies at Edge Hill University, UK. She is the author of North of Empire: Culture, Space, Technology.
one-liner: The close interdependency of animal emissaries and new media from early European colonial encounters with the exotic to today's proliferation of animals in digital networks.
Chapter from North of Empire (2009) addressing colonial history, technical mediation and cultural... more Chapter from North of Empire (2009) addressing colonial history, technical mediation and cultural discourses contributing to Canadian representations of identity in terms of weather.
Chapter 1, Material Cultures in Canada, edited by Thomas Allen and Jennifer Blair. Wilfrid Laurie... more Chapter 1, Material Cultures in Canada, edited by Thomas Allen and Jennifer Blair. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015.
Topia: The Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 2000
Whether speaking in front of a classroom or on more formal occasions, Ioan had a remarkable eloqu... more Whether speaking in front of a classroom or on more formal occasions, Ioan had a remarkable eloquence, working simultaneously on several levels of mental and emo-tional cognition with a few well-chosen words. In this as in so many other respects, I am proud and grateful to ...
Topia: The Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Sep 1, 2008
... Various financial donors, including York, Ryerson, Wilfrid Laurier and McGill Universities, a... more ... Various financial donors, including York, Ryerson, Wilfrid Laurier and McGill Universities, and a number of individual members of our editorial board, have made generous contributions to ensure the journal's continuity until 2008; we are grateful to them for ... Jody Berland, Editor ...
... By 1928, the inclusion of &dquo;showstopping popular tunes&dquo; ensu... more ... By 1928, the inclusion of &dquo;showstopping popular tunes&dquo; ensures the success of sound film and leads the record industry to paradise. ... But somewhere else, it has been captured on video. 1984: music video is included in Video Culture Canada. ...
Publikationsansicht. 22306476. Writing on the Border (2003). Berland, Jody. Abstract. CR: The New... more Publikationsansicht. 22306476. Writing on the Border (2003). Berland, Jody. Abstract. CR: The New Centennial Review - Volume 1, Number 2, Fall 2001. Details der Publikation. ...
International Journal of Inclusive Education, Nov 1, 2009
Chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis (CFE/ME) is an invisible disability that force... more Chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis (CFE/ME) is an invisible disability that forces researchers to delineate new boundaries between illness and impairment, and between medical knowledge and patients' experience. As a neurological impairment, this ...
... This is an uncontrover-sially powerful dream, as it never fails to remind us. ... a number of... more ... This is an uncontrover-sially powerful dream, as it never fails to remind us. ... a number of patterns emerged which may be taken as characteristic of Canadian musicians. When asked about musical preferences and influences, 12 per cent make references to Canadian nationality ...
This article builds on McLuhan’s medium theory to address the under-theorized role of animals as ... more This article builds on McLuhan’s medium theory to address the under-theorized role of animals as mediators in network cultures. McLuhan's medium theory shares with and to some extent anticipates contemporary discussion about post humanist thought which recognizes that human perception and experience are shaped by and extended through nonhuman tools and connections. Both digital culture and the endangered status of the natural world now call upon us to elaborate less anthropocentric concepts of mediation in order to understand our interdependency with the nonhuman world. Illustrated by various moments of media change, including early coins and the first cat videos, this article argues that the proliferation of animal imagery is significant not only in the affective management of digital practices and investments but more broadly in the management of cultural and ecological risk.
Virtual Menageries
Mediologies of Animal Representation
From cat videos to corporate logos, dig... more Virtual Menageries Mediologies of Animal Representation
From cat videos to corporate logos, digital screens and spaces are crowded with animal bodies. In Virtual Menageries, Jody Berland examines the role of animals in the spread of global communications. Her richly illustrated study links the contemporary proliferation of animals on social media to the collection of exotic animals in the formative years of transcontinental exploration and expansion. By tracing previously unseen parallels across the history of exotic and digital menageries, Berland shows how and why animals came to bridge peoples, territories, and technologies in the expansion of colonial and capitalist cultures. Berland's genealogy of the virtual menagerie begins in 1414 when a ruler in Bengal sent a Kenyan giraffe to join a Chinese emperor's menagerie. It maps the beaver's role in the colonial conquest of Canada and examines the appearances of animals in early moving pictures. The menagerie is reinvented for the digital age when image and sound designers use parts or images of animals to ensure the affective promise and commercial spread of an emergent digital infrastructure. These animal images are emissaries that enliven and domesticate the ever-expanding field of mediation. Virtual Menageries offers a unique account of animals and animal images as mediators that encourage complicated emotional, economic and aesthetic investment in changing practices of connection.
Jody Berland is Professor in the Department of Humanities and in Graduate Programs in Communication and Culture, Social and Political Thought, Science and Technology Studies, and Music, at York University, Toronto, and Visiting Professor at the Centre for Human Animal Studies at Edge Hill University, UK. She is the author of North of Empire: Culture, Space, Technology.
Digital screens and spaces are crowded with animal bodies, from cat videos to corporate logos. In... more Digital screens and spaces are crowded with animal bodies, from cat videos to corporate logos. In Virtual Menageries, Jody Berland examines the role of animals in the spread of global networks. Her richly illustrated study links today's proliferation of animals on social media to the aristocratic collection of exotic animals in the formative years of transcontinental exploration. By tracing previously unseen parallels across this history, Berland shows how and why animals come to bridge peoples, territories and technologies in colonial and capitalist cultures. Berland's genealogy of the virtual menagerie begins in 1414 when Bengal sent a Kenyan giraffe to join a Chinese emperor's menagerie. It revisits the beaver's role in the colonial settlement of Canada and maps the crucial appearances of animals in early moving pictures, computing software, cell phone marketing, social media, and relaxation soundtracks. The menagerie is reinvented for the digital age, Berland shows, when image and sound designers use parts or images of animals to ensure the affective promise and commercial spread of an emergent digital infrastructure. These animal emissaries enliven and domesticate the ever-expanding field of mediation. Virtual Menageries offers a unique account of animals and animal images as mediators that encourage complicated emotional, economic and aesthetic investment in changing practices of connection.
Wherever human symbolic expression arises, animals appear. Since the earliest cave paintings of t... more Wherever human symbolic expression arises, animals appear. Since the earliest cave paintings of the Paleolithic period, since the earliest tales of the origin of the world, animals have appeared at the centre of the human imagination. Some stories and fables depict a shifting boundary between humans and animals, while others describe the human domination of the animal world as the centerpiece of creation. The stories, images and ideas attached to animals change across time and across cultures. Modern science and philosophy since the Enlightenment have emphasized qualities of the human species that separate man from beast, in particular reason, morals, and language. Today, this boundary is shifting again as a consequence of new knowledge and perception. We recognize so-called human qualities in some animals, and so-called animal qualities in some human behaviour. However you feel about animals, the concept of the animal plays an important role in the beliefs that unite a culture. Animals are also named in perceived differences that enhance social distinctions among human groups or persons. When was the last time you heard a person described as "an animal?" How have associations between people and animals helped to justify social hierarchies? Which animals do you eat, which come in the house, which can be hunted, which are chosen to survive? As central figures in media culture, animals excite both our feelings and beliefs. The ethics of human-animal relations is one of the most pressing issues of our time. This course offers a deeper sense of how and how much animals matter in human culture and how they fare in their various relations with humans.
"The main objective of the book is to shed light on the use of animals in the spread of
global... more "The main objective of the book is to shed light on the use of animals in the spread of
global communicative networks and the work those representations have done in changing social configurations. Building on the notion that animals have historically served as mediators for human interaction, the author anchors the analysis in the trope of the “menagerie”—understood as a collection of wild and exotic animals—and argues that the animal image as emissary or mediator in the launching of electronic and digital media in contemporary times can be construed as a direct parallel to the animal body
as emissary or mediator in early modern colonialism."
"Before I read Virtual Menageries, I was looking for a work that did exactly this; bridging anima... more "Before I read Virtual Menageries, I was looking for a work that did exactly this; bridging animals as mediation tools into the foray amongst other digital media tools and explaining why we’ve become gradually desensitized to their inclusion in our use and attachment with digital technologies. Not just answering though why there were so many cats on the internet but also answering why animals were so often the mediating tool going unwritten in media studies amongst film, art, digital media, computers, and more. I am happy to say it did a beautiful job. After reading the book, I felt the work accomplished exactly what it intended to do. I felt deeply affected by its challenges and urge others to read it in hopes that it provides new insights for others who would like to create positive Anthropocentric impact where they are also able. Berland’s new book is fascinating and a great entry point for those looking to begin developing new biopolitical conversations."
Studi culturali (ISSN 1824-369X) Fascicolo 2,, 2020
In menageries such as zoos or virtual bestiaries of the digital sphere, in which Berland also inc... more In menageries such as zoos or virtual bestiaries of the digital sphere, in which Berland also includes virtual hybrids, such as Pokemon, and the senselessness experiments created in the laboratory, the component of the exhibition, which also links the species and the show is fundamental, but the staging of the animal is accompanied by a process of aestheticizing de-animalization in which what is not framed has been destroyed or forgotten in animal stories, living environments, conspecifics, and power relations that have marked these stories remain forever off stage: the desire for connection with animals, which relies on the visceral-affective, reassuring and even liberating component of their appearance, is actually a symptom of a much deeper disconnection ofanimal also human from a complex ecology of relationships, of which non-human animals testify paradoxes and repressions. (Trans by Google)
trace ∴ journal for human-animal studies vol 7. , 2021
"The other concept Berland is working with, is an idea of menagerie; a collection of wild and exo... more "The other concept Berland is working with, is an idea of menagerie; a collection of wild and exotic animals that articulates its collector’s power and dominion over nature and faraway lands which these captivated animals once inhabited. Menagerie is a place where animals become representatives of power structures by losing their connections to their natural habitats. Working with this idea, Berland shows how the environment
where animals appear becomes almost as meaningful as the animal itself, and as Berland shows, digital platform and global communication networks are the places where the animals, tame and wild, are resettled.
...Berland’s book is a wonderful opening to dive deeper in the digitalized human-animal cultures and should find its way to the bookshelves or
digital databases of scholars at least from the fields of media studies, critical animal studies, postcolonial studies, or environmental
humanities." ME Niskavaara: Review of Virtual Menageries in Trace: Journal for Human-Animal Studies (Finland), Vol 7, 2021.
What do Linux, Firefox, MSN, Hootsuite, GitHub, TripAdvisor, Baidu, and Bumble have in common? Th... more What do Linux, Firefox, MSN, Hootsuite, GitHub, TripAdvisor, Baidu, and Bumble have in common? The answer: they all use animal imagery in their logos. At first, this might seem like a trivial observation. In our busy and hurried lives, we tend not to read very much into logos. We take them for granted. We assume that marketing departments merely wish to create something memorable and instantly recognizable. However, anyone who has worked in a marketing department, especially for a major corporate brand, will tell you that the thought and creativity invested into the symbolism of a logo is anything but trivial. What, then, are we to make of the ubiquity of animal imagery in the corporate logos of digital media organizations? How else is animal imagery used in the world of digital networks? What moral significance should we attach to the use of animal imagery? These are the driving questions behind Jody Berland's latest book, Virtual Menageries: Animals as Mediators in Network Cultures. Virtual Menageries marks a valiant attempt to illuminate the human-animal relationship in the era of digital capitalism. It is a highly original contribution to both critical animal studies and media theory, in which Berland brings the insights of media theory to bear on what Italian philosopher Paola Cavalieri (2002) has called "the animal question": whether and how animals matter symbolically, ethically , and politically. Drawing a critical historical link between the physical menageries of old and the "virtual menageries" of today, Berland contends that animals do matter: we rely upon them as mediators online. In making her case, Berland begins with a brief history of the menagerie, the curious animal gardens that are the ancestors of modern zoos. Menageries, she observes, were a staple of the courts of royals and aristocrats. They satisfied both a zoological curiosity and a desire for ostentatious displays of wealth and power. Menageries symbolized human domination over nature, our ability to bring the most formidable animals-lions, tigers, elephants, giraffes-under the subjuga-tion of the human gaze. These creatures, Berland points out, served as mediators between the rich and powerful.
"This is a wide-ranging book that provides a compendium of sources linking theoretical
approache... more "This is a wide-ranging book that provides a compendium of sources linking theoretical
approaches to visual representation and theory about animals. It has much to offer those working in cultural studies and thinking about animals in visual culture and screen media. I am reviewing this book within that disciplinary context although Virtual Menageries also contains selective references to animals held in historical menageries. While in some parts Berland switches rapidly between different epochs, examples and cultures, the book utilizes authoritative theorists and deftly weaves a spectrum of conceptual approaches into the discussion.
"[...] I welcome explorations of how perceptual and bodily felt responses develop in relationto viewing nonhuman animals and I was pleased to find Berland’s explanation foregrounding the emotions and affect in several places. The emotive appeal of animal species emerges from the book’s selection of engaging images and to confirm hierarchies of human attention. The book’s discursive overview effectively charts how selected animal species become virtually dominant in modes of representation ranging from photographic imagery to drawn illustration to animation such as Pokemon."
Referring to spectacle, mass media, representation, seduction, modernism, and post modernism, the... more Referring to spectacle, mass media, representation, seduction, modernism, and post modernism, the authors discuss the history of video installation and its relationship to television. Video installations by ten Canadian artists are discussed by the curators and further documented by annotated catalogue entries with artists' statements. Biographical notes. Circa 100 bibl. ref.
Referring to spectacle, mass media, representation, seduction, modernism, and post modernism, the... more Referring to spectacle, mass media, representation, seduction, modernism, and post modernism, the authors discuss the history of video installation and its relationship to television. Video installations by ten Canadian artists are discussed by the curators and further documented by annotated catalogue entries with artists' statements. Biographical notes. Circa 100 bibl. ref.
You are walking through a tree shaded path and you encounter a donkey on parade. "On parade" soun... more You are walking through a tree shaded path and you encounter a donkey on parade. "On parade" sounds noisy, but this is a quiet walk of people and animals approaching as though lifted from a time far, far away and long ago. These works are miniatures of large and vibrant lives and ideas. Bill Burns’ performance and drawings attentively observe and mediate the relationships we have created with sheep, bees, rodents, donkeys, and giraffes, and they trouble our entrapment in the world of global commodity exchange that joins and separates us at the same time. Our encounters with salt or sheep, donkeys or giraffes, and the ways we feel about them, are negotiated across complicated histories and infrastructures. They aren’t always in the passive voice. Each look, each touch, each gift, each drawing joins us with the fabric of these connections.
You are walking through a tree shaded path and you encounter a donkey on parade. The walk is ench... more You are walking through a tree shaded path and you encounter a donkey on parade. The walk is enchanting, with music, donkeys and goats, their caretakers, cooking appliances, and people preparing to sing when they reach their destination. The donkey is like a celebrity, with staff hovering nearby and people lining up for a closer look. People are starved for this kind of contact with an animal that is so unfamiliar, yet so ordinary that its presence seems like magic. The donkey is a gift, reminding us that families used to gift each other precious animals in the context of their particular rituals of the time. Bill Burns' drawings are small yet equally commanding invitations to contemplate how animals come to us and how we encounter other species on whom we rely in this late industrial age. The drawings also remind me that it is too soon to talk about a (post)industrial age. The transport of animals and people to the New World was built on a callous calculation of life in relation to death, time, efficiency, and profit. Like the donkey, the animals and animal parts shown on the drawings in this exhibition are small, gleaming fragments of life floating through and away from such calculations. These drawings are so gentle they don’t seem to belong in the same lexicon, but they remind us of the world in which lives become commodities as they suffer the ships, boats and trains conveying them around the planet. Please, the sheep say to us, and the fish, and the bees, and the donkeys: pay attention.
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Birds evoke mysteries of art, expression, plenitude, language, and loss as we witness their flight across our horizons. They also remind us of where we belong and how fragile that belonging is. The loss of birds appears everywhere we look and listen, so that the sounds of birds signal and resist an imminent silence.
Perhaps then, beginning with the ‘beauty’ of their song limits what listening to birds or listening to one another listening to birds might teach us. . This chapter offers an “Anthropocene reading” of some of these texts. As I will argue, the desire to create beauty through representation of birds’ nature holds a complicated relationship with the underlying metaphysics of western humanism, wherein only humans possess the capacities for language, art, beauty, and value. The urge to translate something untranslatable, like the song of a bird, into human language can conflict with an equally potent need to come closer at least in imagination to that which is fundamentally other from us, like the language of birds. These urges, simultaneous and incongruous, are powerful forces shaping narrative and expressive dimensions in western fiction and poetry of the modern period.
Virtual Menageries:
Animals as Mediators in Network Cultures
Jody Berland
From cat videos to corporate logos, digital screens and spaces are crowded with animal bodies. In Virtual Menageries, Jody Berland examines the role of animals in the spread of global communications. Her richly illustrated study links the contemporary proliferation of animals on social media to the collection of exotic animals in the formative years of transcontinental exploration and expansion. By tracing previously unseen parallels across the history of exotic and digital menageries, Berland shows how and why animals came to bridge peoples, territories, and technologies in the expansion of colonial and capitalist cultures.
Berland's genealogy of the virtual menagerie begins in 1414 when a ruler in Bengal sent a Kenyan giraffe to join a Chinese emperor's menagerie. It maps the beaver's role in the colonial conquest of Canada and examines the appearances of animals in early moving pictures. The menagerie is reinvented for the digital age when image and sound designers use parts or images of animals to ensure the affective promise and commercial spread of an emergent digital infrastructure. These animal images are emissaries that enliven and domesticate the ever-expanding field of mediation. Virtual Menageries offers a unique account of animals and animal images as mediators that encourage complicated emotional, economic and aesthetic investment in changing practices of connection.
Jody Berland is Professor in the Department of Humanities and in Graduate Programs in Communication and Culture, Social and Political Thought, Science and Technology Studies, and Music, at York University, Toronto, and Visiting Professor at the Centre for Human Animal Studies at Edge Hill University, UK. She is the author of North of Empire: Culture, Space, Technology.
one-liner: The close interdependency of animal emissaries and new media from early European colonial encounters with the exotic to today's proliferation of animals in digital networks.
Birds evoke mysteries of art, expression, plenitude, language, and loss as we witness their flight across our horizons. They also remind us of where we belong and how fragile that belonging is. The loss of birds appears everywhere we look and listen, so that the sounds of birds signal and resist an imminent silence.
Perhaps then, beginning with the ‘beauty’ of their song limits what listening to birds or listening to one another listening to birds might teach us. . This chapter offers an “Anthropocene reading” of some of these texts. As I will argue, the desire to create beauty through representation of birds’ nature holds a complicated relationship with the underlying metaphysics of western humanism, wherein only humans possess the capacities for language, art, beauty, and value. The urge to translate something untranslatable, like the song of a bird, into human language can conflict with an equally potent need to come closer at least in imagination to that which is fundamentally other from us, like the language of birds. These urges, simultaneous and incongruous, are powerful forces shaping narrative and expressive dimensions in western fiction and poetry of the modern period.
Virtual Menageries:
Animals as Mediators in Network Cultures
Jody Berland
From cat videos to corporate logos, digital screens and spaces are crowded with animal bodies. In Virtual Menageries, Jody Berland examines the role of animals in the spread of global communications. Her richly illustrated study links the contemporary proliferation of animals on social media to the collection of exotic animals in the formative years of transcontinental exploration and expansion. By tracing previously unseen parallels across the history of exotic and digital menageries, Berland shows how and why animals came to bridge peoples, territories, and technologies in the expansion of colonial and capitalist cultures.
Berland's genealogy of the virtual menagerie begins in 1414 when a ruler in Bengal sent a Kenyan giraffe to join a Chinese emperor's menagerie. It maps the beaver's role in the colonial conquest of Canada and examines the appearances of animals in early moving pictures. The menagerie is reinvented for the digital age when image and sound designers use parts or images of animals to ensure the affective promise and commercial spread of an emergent digital infrastructure. These animal images are emissaries that enliven and domesticate the ever-expanding field of mediation. Virtual Menageries offers a unique account of animals and animal images as mediators that encourage complicated emotional, economic and aesthetic investment in changing practices of connection.
Jody Berland is Professor in the Department of Humanities and in Graduate Programs in Communication and Culture, Social and Political Thought, Science and Technology Studies, and Music, at York University, Toronto, and Visiting Professor at the Centre for Human Animal Studies at Edge Hill University, UK. She is the author of North of Empire: Culture, Space, Technology.
one-liner: The close interdependency of animal emissaries and new media from early European colonial encounters with the exotic to today's proliferation of animals in digital networks.
Mediologies of Animal Representation
From cat videos to corporate logos, digital screens and spaces are crowded with animal bodies. In Virtual Menageries, Jody Berland examines the role of animals in the spread of global communications. Her richly illustrated study links the contemporary proliferation of animals on social media to the collection of exotic animals in the formative years of transcontinental exploration and expansion. By tracing previously unseen parallels across the history of exotic and digital menageries, Berland shows how and why animals came to bridge peoples, territories, and technologies in the expansion of colonial and capitalist cultures.
Berland's genealogy of the virtual menagerie begins in 1414 when a ruler in Bengal sent a Kenyan giraffe to join a Chinese emperor's menagerie. It maps the beaver's role in the colonial conquest of Canada and examines the appearances of animals in early moving pictures. The menagerie is reinvented for the digital age when image and sound designers use parts or images of animals to ensure the affective promise and commercial spread of an emergent digital infrastructure. These animal images are emissaries that enliven and domesticate the ever-expanding field of mediation. Virtual Menageries offers a unique account of animals and animal images as mediators that encourage complicated emotional, economic and aesthetic investment in changing practices of connection.
Jody Berland is Professor in the Department of Humanities and in Graduate Programs in Communication and Culture, Social and Political Thought, Science and Technology Studies, and Music, at York University, Toronto, and Visiting Professor at the Centre for Human Animal Studies at Edge Hill University, UK. She is the author of North of Empire: Culture, Space, Technology.
global communicative networks and the work those representations have done in changing social configurations. Building on the notion that animals have historically served as mediators for human interaction, the author anchors the analysis in the trope of the “menagerie”—understood as a collection of wild and exotic animals—and argues that the animal image as emissary or mediator in the launching of electronic and digital media in contemporary times can be construed as a direct parallel to the animal body
as emissary or mediator in early modern colonialism."
(Trans by Google)
where animals appear becomes almost as meaningful as the animal itself, and as Berland shows, digital platform and global communication networks are the places where the animals, tame and wild, are resettled.
...Berland’s book is a wonderful opening to dive deeper in the digitalized human-animal cultures and should find its way to the bookshelves or
digital databases of scholars at least from the fields of media studies, critical animal studies, postcolonial studies, or environmental
humanities." ME Niskavaara: Review of Virtual Menageries in Trace: Journal for Human-Animal Studies (Finland), Vol 7, 2021.
approaches to visual representation and theory about animals. It has much to offer those working in cultural studies and thinking about animals in visual culture and screen media. I am reviewing this book within that disciplinary context although Virtual Menageries also contains selective references to animals held in historical menageries. While in some parts Berland switches rapidly between different epochs, examples and cultures, the book utilizes authoritative theorists and deftly weaves a spectrum of conceptual approaches into the discussion.
"[...] I welcome explorations of how perceptual and bodily felt responses develop in relationto viewing nonhuman animals and I was pleased to find Berland’s explanation foregrounding the emotions and affect in several places. The emotive appeal of animal species emerges from the book’s selection of engaging images and to confirm hierarchies of human attention. The book’s discursive overview effectively charts how selected animal species become virtually dominant in modes of representation ranging from photographic imagery to drawn illustration to animation such as Pokemon."