Technologies of the Picturesque: British Art, Poetry, and Instruments
1760-1830. Part of Bucknell Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture Series, Bucknell University Press, Spring 2008.

This book examines how art and technology mutually align their representations of nature in order to transform land into intelligible landscapes. The author has selected three technological fields burgeoning in 18th century Britain whose influence on the picturesque aesthetic has been overlooked: cartography, meteorology, and animal breeding. Technologies of the Picturesque traces how these scientific fields influence the works of Wordsworth, Gilpin, Constable, Gainsborough and other key figures of the period. Technology and interior experience of the poetic subject overlap in their means and methods of removing the viewer from nature while presenting the land as a comprehensible object. With each chapter archival research is paired with a phenomenological critique of how representation abstracts from the lived engagement with the land and how artists are both complicit with such objectification of nature and at other moments work toward a more vivid connection to the environment. Book Reviews.

On the Surface: Thinking with Animals and Art.
Forthcoming University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Chapter outline.

Art remains at the service of the human even as it tries to undo previous definitions of humanism to arrive at a "becoming" that is in affinity with animals. My own project takes a tangential approach to that of Steve Baker's exemplary Postmodern Animal. I am interested in the way sart reveals the world of the animal as a necessary lacuna in human knowledge. That is, art reveals the inability to articulate the world of the animal. Art sets a limit, a blindness to our insight, while at the same time providing us with the palpable biotopic zones of interaction where the  boundaries of worlds jostle one another. These places of meeting or "contact zones" become  the productive surface of human-animal interaction.

Dairy Diary for Critical Media Lab and Render Art Gallery University of Waterloo
Exhibition December 11, 2009 and project ongoing.

The question I'm posing for investigation by the Critical Media Lab and Render is how we might imagine a different frame for cattle; how might we render them differently? More specifically, given the technological enframing of cattle as efficient meat and dairy machines, how might we turn technology to undo such positioning of the animal? With these questions I am not seeking solutions but rather sites of production and possibility to be pursued while in residency at the Lab and Render.

Dairy Diary is a technological interventions into the dairy production process. While current production of meat and dairy use technology as a means of distancing human contact with animals, this project is intended to connect consumers with the animals as producers and product. The project will allow consumers to access images of cows which correspond with milking dates of the milk being consumed. Consumers are linked back to the sites of production and the techno-animal nexus of production. Furthermore, the images spark consumer interest in the history of production of their neatly packaged products. Such images render in new ways the ideology of the farm and images of the pastoral. The animal is given a face. 

Beasts of Labor

This is my current historical project addressing peasant poetry, the pastoral, and biopower. The work will look at the poetry of Robert Bloomfield, John Clare, Stephen Duck, and Elizabeth Hands (among others), illustrations of animals and human-animal hybrids by Thomas Rowlandson and Henry William Pyne, and the natural history illustrations of George Stubbs and Thomas Bewick alongside natural history texts. I intend to examine the complex series of connections in the pastoral between agricultural laborers and evasive depiction of animal death. The machinery of biopower at work on the material, biological, and political body of the agricultural laborer can be read through the figure of animal death. More potently, human life and labor functions in the same manner as the life and labor of livestock. Human bare life and animal life are interconnected. Using a variety of art, poetry, and agricultural treaties, I propose to develop how the logic of biopower as explicated by Foucault and Agamben can describe the human-animal relationship of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Furthermore, and most pressingly, linking the role of the laboring subject to that of animals allows us to think of human fragility alongside other species. It is this opportunity to think by way of our own fragility which makes this mode of reading meaningful. Such a mode of embodied thinking stands in contradistinction to the empire of reason used as a tool for blunting our relationship to the nonhuman.

Animality

Animality has been a prototype film only partly produced. It was designed to reveal the creative process which artists undergo in developing and making their work.The complexity is both heightened and made more visible in this film by focusing on artists who work alongside each other rather than alone and who work with the wild card willfulness of animals. Animality investigates three established artists’ partnerships: Steve Baker and Kate Downhill, Olly and Suzi and Snaebjornsdottir/Wilson.
The conversations and exchanges of ideas by means of words, gestures, and the manipulation of materials allow thought to be made palpably visible and thus, captured on film. Viewers watch thinking and art evolve as each group takes a work from initial concept to a final gallery show. Baker describes the task as "trusting in the process of what was being done, which of course involved botching a lot of stuff along the way, and was itself the manner in which the work was emerging." Rather than simply have artists discuss their finalized work, the film reveals the fragility and adventure of art as it unfolds.