Deep Canine Topography - Where it all Began:

Deep Canine Topography Part 1:

Urban Walking:

The Beagle is the smallest of the pack-hunting hounds. It is one of the oldest of all the pure hound breeds and is certainly as essentially British as any existing canine variety (Fitch Daglish 1961)

Urban walking with Dexter can be a frantic affair. His senses seem to become overloaded; Sights, smells and sounds, must be unbearable for an animal so highly attuned to his environment. Often with his head in the air, or to the ground, sniffing and looking, he darts, anxiously back and forth, as he meets passers-by with the bright eyes of the canine gaze and a deep sniff. Pausing for the occasional exchange of olfactory data, between and amongst his beastly kin, he cocks his leg.  Meanwhile, our deterritorialized bodies become traces in the digital sphere, through the mechanisms of surveillance and our own willing GPS traces, which entangle us as a single entity in binary code. Surveillance camera technology allows for the binary distinction between crawling human and the canine form, to distinguish between dogs employed as guardians of property, or border controls, and the crawling human body intent on trespass. This is perhaps signalling a hybrid human/animal digital turn.

Hard edges

           Erected

                                    By soft tissue

                  And grey matter

                                                                     Deep wounds

                               Cauterised

  By hot sticky tar

                                                                                              Smell

 Bitumen

                                     Breath it in

                                                                                                      Deep

Deeper

                                   Bathe in its memory  

For me the smell of freshly laid hot tarmac evokes strong memories of my father’s tipper lorry, with long adventures to central London to deliver and lay the red roads of The Mall. If my inferior olfactory sensors can evoke such signs and signifiers, mental pictures and haptic sensations, then what might the coded messages of dog urine hold? 

The marks, in the image above, are Dexter’s creative response to the rather more splattered ‘painting’ on the right.  Each contain their own package of olfactory data.  A call and response, an action painting, an improvised sketch across time and space.

A communication.

A unique artistic contribution to the infinitely entangled here, now, then and to-be, histories of the canine multiverse.

Meanwhile, shops, cafes and bars become beacons of smell, butchers’ shops become beacons of bacon, and what seems like a lure to the taste buds also presents as loud and brash, a chaotic cacophony of distraction. Borders and barriers are there to be traversed, as the pull on the lead attempts to cut the most direct path to the nearest source of potential sensory sustenance, with little regard to the dangers of the strange fastmoving metal boxes that seem to dominate this space and the hard edges of the city.

Survival is the key amongst the really wild.

Deep Canine Topography Part 2:

Sub-suburban Wanderings:

Regular exercise is essential to the Beagle’s wellbeing as is proper housing. There is a world of difference between freedom and exercise. A Beagle needs both. […] as a general guide it may be said that an adult should have a minimum of one hour’s hard exercise daily with up to two hours when circumstances permit. The type of exercise given should consist of road walks on a lead and free galloping in the park or open country (Fitch Daglish 1961)

For Dexter, the suburban walk seems to operate on a lower, sensory topographical level. Nose to the ground, zigzagging from tree to lamp-post, seeking out the smells of fellow travellers. This walk is much more about territory, the familiarity of the well-trodden path. The stubborn refusal to take a turn, still transfixed by the search for food, but this time for scraps of a discarded school pack lunch or lollypop. The lure of the bread roll behind the bin and the takeaway carton. Hoovering up the mistakes and spillages of other animals. His palate less than discerning as anything will do, regardless of its state of pre-digestion or decay.

Chicken bones can kill a dog you know.

Deep Canine Topography Part 3:

Park-life:

Feeding a healthy adult Beagle is normally easy and straight-forward. Most Beagles’ are good trenchermen, eagerly clear out their dishes and thrive on one meal a day (Fitch Daglish 1961)

The park is a space of playful intent. An open space. An ‘off the lead’ space, checking first for any alfresco diners at risk of being raided. Should I risk letting him off? A test of trust and loyalty, often betrayed. Here the smells are more focused into linear tracks of animals or the zigzag of fellow canine explorers. Nose to the ground, he makes his escape, looking back to check my progress and ignoring all calls to heel. This is the risk one takes, and the game is on, as he makes a path for either the ice cream van, and its unsuspecting customers, or the compost heap, a place to bathe in sensory overload. It is at this point that the Beagle instinct takes over and the wild becomes ever present in his attempts to evade capture. Sometimes food is the trap, but often it is a waiting game. Wait until he gets bored, feigning indifference.

This is an anxious game.

Deep Canine Topography Part 4:

Wild Spaces:

Once middle age spread is established there is little one can do about it (Fitch Daglish 1961)

There are no wild spaces, not really, but those, which aspire to be wild, hold a different kind of lure for Dexter. This time the tracks are straight, a rabbit, a hare or a deer perhaps? The journey becomes more direct, more focused. The land ahead is traversed with a different kind of urgency. Tethered by a twenty-foot-long lead, slack then tense, slack then tense, he stops and barks at the air with a wild heart, pulling, leading the way across the terrain.

This is a dangerous place.

Deep canine topography part 5:

A destination, of sorts:

My drive is to make, but twitchy fingers turn to itchy feet in the walk as method. Keep moving forward with purpose.  Whilst Dexter’s drive is to explore and bathe in a rich sensory soup, not that far from the aim of the artist. To live an aesthetic life, to live in the moment, to respond to the wild, and find your own way to live. The rhizome spirit of entangled being and becoming.  In Dogs: History, Myth, Art, Catherine Johns writes, ‘In many belief systems, dogs have been associated not only with death and the journey into the afterlife, but also with healing’ (Johns, 2008, p56) Dexter is then perhaps the Dog-Star to my Orion, the hunter, hunting for the sublime.

It is at this point that our journey pauses. Dexter is getting tired, which is reflected in his gait, and we both need food and water. Using walking as a method for exploring sensory entanglement with nature and relating this to concepts and theories of the sublime, I feel I have reached a destination, of sorts, albeit a temporary one. Perhaps a bigger question here is how, as artists, can we justify our practice and place in the world, against the backdrop of the anthropocene and global crisis. Perhaps connecting with the sublime is about nothing more than connecting with our humanity.

The walk(ies) becomes a method for thinking. A method for making. An act of making physical contact with the ground, through the feet and through the paw, the mind is allowed to wander and become detached. A body in motion, two bodies in motion, many bodies in motion. The will to live, ever-present in the canine spirit and at the core of understanding the human canine entanglement. Always returning home, to the ground.

In the horizon of the infinite. – We have forsaken the land and gone to sea! We have destroyed the bridge behind us – more so, we have demolished the land behind us! Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean; it is true, it does not always roar, and at times it lies there like silk and gold and dreams of goodness. But there will be hours when you realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that has felt free and now strikes against the walls of this cage! Woe, when homesickness for the land overcomes you, as if there had been more freedom there – and there is no more ‘land ‘! (Nietzsche, 2018)

This is a sublime space.

In the end, with memories of the beginning, brings us back to the question of radical matter and mattering, entangled not only in the human canine dance but in the sense of a quantum co-dependence…

June 27th 2018:  Traveling in on the train again, a familiar set of actions, a now familiar journey and something that has produced the work that started this whole affair, the east meets west, the robot and the fly, the foxes tail, the man meets dog, the machine that stops, a sudden scream on a sunny day, the sharp and sudden force of brakes and a scattering, a disintegrated self, a casualty that quickly rose to a fatality. His or her sense of being, in that moment gone, split apart into a million fragments of matter. Radical matter. A shattered soul. An accident or a death with intent? An exit either way, a finality, an infinity, a twisted animal with no ground beneath them, a body without organs.

This action inevitably becomes entangled within the work, a work about walking, human animal kinship, surface encounters, but ultimately about the groundless ground of the cosmic sublime. We have forsaken the land and gone to sea… 

Tactile and Haptic:

The beginnings of this research idea, this speculative investigation into the walkies as something more than an entangled domesticated task, lies with the discovery of a decomposing fox.  The fox in question was discovered by the hound in this story.  An experiment that led Dexter and myself to explore familiar terrain with a new found slowness and care.  It was in this moment of discovery that Dexter disappeared from sight into a forgotten thicket of trees and hawthorn.  With some trepidation and difficulty I squeezed into a clearing to find Dexter quietly circling a body. Kin of some distant kind, 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. 

With four paws in direct contact with the ground, the canine has a more tactile connection with the surface of the earth, a surface that modernism has sought to tame to a smooth plane in the aid of rapid transit. This represents a further tactile disconnect that could be investigated through the walk.

Interruption - Intuition - Instinct – Improvisation - Imminence:

For Simon Faithful the stubbornness of the arbitrary line, formed the premise for his 2009 work, 0º0’0” Navigation, which saw the artist employ a strict directional and rhythmical protocol, The Greenwich Meridian, and the super8 cine-camera.  The Meridian was introduced in 1884, to standardise global time, in the service of dominance of colonial trade routes.  Faithful walked this imposed standardisation of time and international date lines, refusing to stray from its coordinates.

Richard Long’s now infamous A Line Made by Walking (1967), which is often seen as ground zero for walking practitioners, also utilises the straight line as a defining statement of geometry.  In contrast the canine line follows a path dictated often by olfactory readings of the landscape, interrupting the line as defined by human made separation and hard surfaces. Line, pace, rhythm are all interrupted by canine navigational preferences, challenging borders and boundaries whilst introducing new possibilities.

These navigational desires could be read by the human as driven by intuition, instinct and the senses, but in the Walkies as Method, they could equally be met with the notion of improvisation, responding to each other’s desires and anxieties as a collective choreography. In the negotiation of the walk, the human/canine hybrid utilises instinct, intuition and improvisation in its interruptions of normative flows, which can be expressed as a kind of canine counter cartography, which resists or repels the line as dictated by human design.

Sense and Sensing:

The human sensory experience is dominated by vision, as upright bipedal beings, scanning horizons, whereas the canine sensory experience is dominated by smell. Humans have around 5million scent glands, whereas dogs have an average of 200million, with Beagles topping the scale at 300million. Humans hear in a range of 45htz to 20,000htz. Whilst canines lose the lower base registers, hearing from 65htz, they gain in the upper registers by some considerable distance, hearing up to 40,000htz. Canines can therefore hear high pitched sounds and vibrations that are undetectable to human ears. Canines can also regulate their hearing, filtering out distressing sounds. As Springgay and Truman (2018 p) suggest, ‘If, as walking researchers contend, walking is a way of being in place, then walking enables researchers and research participants to tune into their sensory experiences’.

Therefore, the human/canine walking hybrid will respond to different sensory stimuli and react differently to the same stimuli. This sensory entanglement has a direct impact on the walkies as method, as both participants, although using the same basic five senses, will react and respond as a negotiated whole.

Rhythm and Repetition:

Springgay and Truman describe Rhythm as ‘described through embodied accounts of moving and sensory expressions of feet, limbs, and breath. In other instances, rhythm pertains to the pulse of the city, such as traffic, crowds, music, and other environmental phenomena that press on a walker’ (Springgay and Truman, 2018 p4)

Rhythm is a core aspect of walking, to which we often pay little attention.  Walking with an eager canine companion not only interrupts a normal human pace, shaped by boundaries, borders, enmeshed in capitalist flows and structures, but regulates pace in direct relation to the landscape, moving beyond the human autonomous being in transit, to a hybrid canine/human unit.  Urban walking, for example, takes on a steady rhythm, as four paws fall into step with two feet, interrupted by roadside stops and starts, scent marking, in the employment of transmitting and receiving olfactory signs and signifiers, whilst the park is driven by the call of wide, open spaces and the need to run, chase and play. 

Other embodied rhythms at play are the heartbeats, breathing, and tail wagging, whilst the tempo of the ambient soundtrack is punctuated by passing cars, sirens, or the elements own temporal exchanges with the landscape, and the ever-present distant roar of rubber on tarmac.

Many walking artists attend to the speed and rhythm of the landscape in an attempt to escape industrialised and more recently, digitised notions of time, to realign the body in motion with the natural rhythms of the seasons and landscape, and perhaps reach back to a more nomadic, hunter gatherer mode of being. Others deliberately seek to trouble the urban by slowing the pace to better attune the senses to the sound, rhythms and temporality of urban spaces. Morris argues that, ‘The slow, convivial, and creative attributes of the act of walking define the contours of the medium and provide a unique way for an artist to create work’ (Morris, 2019)

Henri Lefebvre's Rhythmanalysis (Butler 2012), seeks to understand everyday life through its rhythms and repetitions, in a way which seeks to privilege natural rhythms, against the mechanistic rhythms of logic and industrialised efficiency, as similar to the strategies employed by psychogeography as a way of challenging flows of capitalism in cities.

As a musician, and occasional drummer, I'm drawn to the application of rhythm-analysis as a potential methodology for recording and responding to the Walkies as Method by attending to its beats and cross beats against the counter rhythms and oscillations that go unnoticed, such as the temporal rhythms of the spinning earth, the seasons, or the minor oscillations at the quantum level.

With this in mind, the Walkies as Method, seeks to explore the playful interplay of canine-human hybridity, and its effects on time, speed and rhythm, through the act of the walk.

A Manifesto for the How:

As is traditional to the position of the artist, I have decided to begin my research with a manifesto. Not a manifesto which states a clear objective but one which sets out a framework of possibilities, creating an open space for the exploration of human/canine walking practice to shape itself to the contours of a practice that unfolds and folds in, generating new ways of being and becoming, whilst operating within a core research framework, and remaining open to the twists and turns, ups and downs, the unexpected:

The Walkies as Method- a Manifesto for the How,

• The walkies is the site of the event, a meeting of two (or more) subjective beings, with their own divergent umwelts* and interconnected cosmologies.
• The walkies is a potential sight of research, for the production of future objects – collecting experiences, collecting data, collecting materials and stories, which both inform and disrupt traditional modes of studio practice.
• The walkies is drawing in action. Drawing convergent lines through the unfolding landscape.
• The walkies is the potential site of social practice.
• The walkies is the potential site of transgression and trespass.
• The walkies is the potential site of exploration of our own animalism, well beyond the confines of the domestic ‘owner – pet’ / Master Slave dialectic. Another kind of trespass.
• The walkies is the work and should be documented as such.
• The Walkies is spontaneous.
• The Walkies is improvised.
• The Walkies is ephemeral.
• The Walkies attends to landscape as the landscape attends to the walkies.
• Perhaps most importantly, the walkies is a site of being and becoming
• The walkies just is.

Documentation and Outputs:

Each walk will be seen as a performative act, with an autoethnographic document produced. Each textural output will be augmented by a photographic, video or sonic document. Each document will stand alone as the record of the experience. Additional digital data such as GPS, accelerometer and potential biometric data (Muse headset for example) will be used to generate creative output.

*Def: In the semiotic theories of Jakob von Uexküll and Thomas A. Sebeok, umwelt (plural: umwelten; from the German Umwelt meaning "environment" or "surroundings") is the "biological foundations that lie at the very epicentre of the study of both communication and signification in the human [and non-human] animal"

The Digital Dog:

Dexter is currently wearing a PitPat monitor.  This is basically a pedometer for dogs, attached to his collar and monitored via a mobile phone app, it records and measures his movement, his down time, his walks and his playtime.  

The first thing that struck me, as I entered Dexter's details into the Pit-Pat app, was the entry of the dog into the mass surveillance of consumer culture in what Donna Haraway might describe as a canine cyborg, entering the techno-sphere, where technologies become fleshly organs folded in on the self (Haraway 2007, p249). The app encouraged me to log as many of my details as possible, which I resisted, and immediately, on entering Dexter's breed and weight details, suggested that he may be 'overweight'.  I managed to set his ideal weight at something more befitting his muscular frame, but I'm constantly being prodded by the app with a number of motivational prompts like 'it's playtime', of 'time for a walk'.  These mechanistic, algorithmic invitations to enter the logic of the machine and the constant 'moving forwards' of progress, sit at the heart of Lefebvre's rhythm-analysis, various incarnations of psychogeography, and its critique of late capitalism’s pre-determined structures, hierarchies, boundaries and borders.

My first instinct is to use this data as material for making, my second instinct is to share the Pit-Pat, wearing it myself when I'm out and about without Dexter, merging our movements and rhythms into a hybrid human-canine corruption of the data-stream. 

Digital Entanglement:

I propose to use a number of digital recording devices to record walks and use digital outputs as both documentation material. Some early experiments are imbedded within this document. 

In my previous artistic practice, I have made use of data, GPS and other data collected on walks, or from professional bodies such as urban tree reports, as a way of developing a counter-cartographic map of urban and suburban landscapes. I have even used GPS data from the Deep Canine Topology experiments to digitally weave fabric patterns. With this in mind, I have been experimenting with ways of documenting the walkies and I am in conversation with Nottingham Trent University’s Digital Textiles Research Lab.  So far, we have discussed a wearable canine accelerometer and gyroscope, which it is hoped will produce a data source that can be used as a form of drawing.  Unfortunately, GPS, although still a useful tool for mapping walks, lacks the accuracy needed to distinguish the subtle differences in paths and trajectories between human and animal walkers. As an artist who often works with sound as a material, I am also experimenting with recording binaural sound from the canine perspective, as well as using a canine mounted action camera to document walks from the canine POV. 

Equipment being explored for recording walks:

• Go-Pro action camera, human and canine harnesses
• Binaural ear mounted microphones, human and canine
• Canine GPS, tracking device
• Accelerometers, human and canine
• Proximity sensors (although current technology is expensive)
• Hand held GPS with track logging capabilities
• Smartphone
• Muse brainwave monitor
• Field recorder (hand held)
• Field recorder (Dog mounted)

Walk types, duration and frequency:

• Weekly domestic walks in urban and suburban settings - (Aim to record 100)
• Monthly managed wild walks (on and off lead) - (Aim to record 50)
• Bi-monthly extended wild/remote walks (over a couple of days) - (Aim to record 10)
•  

Outputs – Potential outputs and documentation:

• Performance
• Sketchbooks
• Audio recordings, soundscapes and sound installations
• Web based digital content
• Exhibition
• Participatory walks
• Video documentation
• Workshops
• Solo walks
• Writing
• Expositions, papers and provocations

Transgression and Trespass:

There will be some unavoidable speculative interpretation of the canine subject, from the perspective of the human subject, but this is as unavoidable as the artist’s speculation of material. If we are however to follow an Intra-Active trans-materialist approach, where human, animal and material exists within their interactions and becomings, which Barad encompasses in her concept of diffraction as a ‘tearing together apart’ (Barad 2014), which demands a dissolving of the self, or becoming animal to develop new practices of knowing, beyond representation, then traditional human/canine/material landscape boundaries are to be transgressed. Spiringgay and Truman (2018) argue that walking artists should explore such theories through the embodiment at the core of walking practices, ‘If embodiment conventionally focuses on a phenomenological and lived account of human movement, then trans theories, which rupture heteronormative teleological understandings of movement and reproduction, disrupt the notion of an embodied, coherent self. Trans theories emphasize viral, tentacular, and transversal conceptualizations of difference’.

Angela Batram’s performance, Licking Dogs, (2007), in which the artist shares sustained oral connections with four dogs, challenges, troubles and transgresses normative human canine boundaries. The work deliberately crosses a line, ruptures traditional human canine contact, moving beyond the surface encounter of the human and non-human, creating an exchange where human becomes animal, and human/canine become enmeshed within the exchange of the performance. ‘Animality and humanity collide when canine and human mouths lick, kiss or share other methods of oral exchange, and this presents a challenge to appropriate levels of intimacy across socio-biological boundaries.’ (Batram 2012 p108) thus, questioning normative social constructs of domestic companion species and the female body.

Canine Topography as Counter-Cartography:

One of the key aims of the project is to examine how humans and canines generate a counter cartographic reading of space, be it the cityscape or more suburban and wild spaces.  In this sense the map we draw together offers new insights into canine signs and signifiers, sensory perception and affect. Alexandria Horowitz argues that the canine has a good grasp of geography, ‘Should anyone claim that dogs do not know geography, we have ample evidence to the contrary. Your dog knows the way to the nearest half-dozen pet stores, by car or on foot – as well as any cafes or banks that supply a biscuit or treat on your route’. (Horowitz, 2018, p147/8)

I would argue that canine geography, operating as it does on high frequency sonic and vastly superior olfactory senses, offers greater skill in mapping than our own visually dominated readings of space.

The canine spirit, or ‘will to live’ and the canine reading of the landscape, is central to the practice.  The canine has no interest in representation, the canine responds to the world as it presents itself through the senses, the canine demonstrates empathy and a lightness of touch as s/he treads carefully through the unfolding landscape, pads always in bare contact with the earth.

On discussing such multi-species assemblages of canicross, a cross country running discipline in which humans and dogs run together, tethered by a special running harness, Stephanie Merchant offers a valuable insight into human/canine hybridity, and complementary sensory engagement with landscape, ‘Over time I have learnt that the human and the dog do not focus on the same things when running, but that through running, tethered together, both begin to appreciate to a lesser or greater degree, some elements of the experience that are important or noteworthy to the other’ (Merchant, 2019)

Bibliography:

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BATRAM, A, Between Bodies: an Artist Account of the Oral Connection Between Human and Dog: Intimacy Across Viceral and Digital Performance. Maria Chatzichristodulou and Rachel Zerihan, (2012) P108

BRAKER, S, (2013) Artist Animal. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press

BROGLIO, R, (2011). Surface Encounters, Thinking with Art and Animals. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press

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HARAWAY, D J, (2003) Companion Species Manifesto, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press

HARAWAY, D J, (2007). When Species Meet. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press

HOROWITZ, A: (2019). Our Dogs Ourselves. London: Simon and Schuster

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MANNING, E, (2009). Realtionscapes, Movement, Art, Philosophy. Cambridge Massachusetts, London, England: MIT Press

MERCHANT, S., 2020. Running with an ‘other’: landscape negotiation and inter-relationality in canicross. Sport in Society, 23 (1), 11-23

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I'm thirsty - let's rest a while: