Negotiating Animal Selves Who Are You? A year prior to beginning the research and writing for this piece, I was hammering away at a body of work in my studio, trying to put out a set of images or performances that could provide some kind of resolution to how I was to think about non-human animals. What would it be like to be another animal? How would I communicate with one? How are our separate bodies different and alike—and what bearing do they have on our interior lives? Naturally, these questions swirled into the kind of infinite regress one is presented with when thinking about other minds in the abstract. Serendipity, however, provided a companion and a ground for this effort by way of a stray dog that had been living in the disused industrial lots near my studio building. Since that February, this thirty-pound adoptee has become the site of further curiosities regarding the interior lives of animals and the possibilities of human-nonhuman communication. As a stray, and as with many dogs and their humans, his life before me is entirely and eternally unknown to me. It does seem at times
to be much the same case with regards to his life alongside me as well. Our communication doesn’t happen on a leveled or uniform playing field—it happens across the stretch of negotiated speech, observation, and learned and unlearned behaviors that manifests between two sensitive young men of different species living together in a studio apartment. As much as I can learn from observation about his likes and dislikes, his fears, his habits, and his rationalities, the actual nature of his being and his personal experience remains in many ways inaccessible. Often at night after I pat the bed and he jumps up to lie down in the space next to me, I lay there wanting to know- and I’m sure I’ve asked it aloud in the dark roomWho are you?