Dog Days: Superimposing the Canine

The hottest days of summer are upon us. These are the "dog days," a colloquial reference to the months of July and August when the brightest star in the night sky—the "Dog Star" Sirius—returns in the Northern Hemisphere, a seasonal shift wherein heatwaves proliferate and human activity tends to die down. Across another blistering Chicago summer, VDB TV presents Dog Days: Superimposing the Canine, a program of three video works that languish in the metaphysical and phenomenological gap between dog and man: Jesse McLean’s See a Dog, Hear a Dog (2016), Ken Kobland’s A Pee, A Poop, A Plate: Paradise (2021), and Matthew Lax’s AN ANIMATED DOG READS JOHN BERGER, HARAWAY, AND KAFKA (2024). Each video superimposes the canine and the human—by way of frame-in-frame compositing, found and shot footage, motion capture and 3D rigs—taking into consideration the technological and historical production of interspecies dynamics we often treat as naturally given. The works in this program chart liminal spaces, lived out in dog days, at the threshold between the familiar companion and the unknowable other, in the discrepancy between the well-trained model and the unruly bot, and in the conceptual parallax between a mathematically deduced cosmic harmony and an emotionally induced human melody. 

Jesse McLean’s See a Dog, Hear a Dog probes our contradictory desires for identification and distinction when it comes to both conscious machines and animals. Through diaristic capture and appropriated text and image, McLean deftly cuts across personal, technological, and domestic interfaces to explore connection in and out of sync. Ken Kobland’s A Pee, A Poop, A Plate: Paradise layers a reading of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets overtop a Golden Retriever's blissful slumber as a shared dream between filmmaker and pet unfolds. Superimposing snapshots and moving image, Kobland emphasizes a decoupling from human progress and a yearning for spiritual presence. At one point, Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) is effectively embedded into the dog’s forehead—an ode to an aspirational transcendence of linear time. Matthew Lax’s AN ANIMATED DOG READS JOHN BERGER, HARAWAY, AND KAFKA is true to its title; an animated dog reads reflections on human-dog relations as it demonstrates various actions mapped by a motion capture of the filmmaker’s body. The video structurally and visually mimics the textual experiments of the thinkers upon which it draws, playing out a tradition that deeply considers canine perspective. 

The relationship between humans and domestic animals has long been explored through religion, myth, literature, and philosophy, as is evidenced by Lax’s patchwork of references. McLean, Kobland, and Lax share a particular dog-ward gaze that resembles the scene of epiphanic encounter at the outset of Jacques Derrida’s influential philosophical text The Animal That Therefore I Am (2002). This encounter is constituted by intimate, quotidian observation between pet and owner, and a kaleidoscopic attempt to encapsulate the ethical implications of looking at animals and being looked at by animals.

When heat waves bend light in the distance and when our pets’ eyes startle us with knowing reflection, we glimpse the animals that therefore we are, in a constellation of non-human conditions that suspend and triangulate our experience, facilitating identification as and with the human. At the very same time, we communicate this embodied knowledge to our fellow humans through processes of inscription—like filmmaking—that inevitably distinguish us from dogs, turning us into “autobiographical animals” to borrow Derrida’s phrase. The artists in this program acknowledge these ironic confines with poetic reflexivity. After all, Lax's cento is meant to be exhibited as an installation, the monitor supine on the floor inside a wire dog cage.

Donna Haraway writes in her Companion Species Manifesto, “My multi-species family is not about surrogacy and substitutes; we are trying to live other tropes, other metaplasms.” In rhetoric and in biology, a metaplasm is a swapping out of terms and cells, respectively, a shifting and stuttering into alternative arrangements. The urgency of new models for interspecial relationships is made evident by the heat of our days and the decreased visibility of even the sky’s brightest stars. In 10,000 years, Sirius will have undergone a gradual, metaplasmic shift relative to the Sun, becoming visible in winter rather than summer for yet undetermined observers. The dog days, as we know them, will be over. The human and the canine may endure together, albeit in unrecognizable forms. Squinting at a sweltering horizon of technocratic futurism that privileges the logic of surviving, the works in this program grapple with a protracted present in which side-by-side thriving is centered within limits, a “becoming-with” to borrow Haraway’s phrase.

Program and notes by Elise Schierbeek, VDB Digital Collection and Media Manager.