SITUATION #46

A vast number of images and videos can be found online, and this number is increasing by the second through uploads by private individuals. Taking part in this kind of information exchange often amounts to a presentation of one’s individuality and the revelation of an intimate sphere. Especially in the case of house pets that appear on the stage of the internet, these funny and cute videos often offer a deep insight into the domestic and private surroundings of the individual. At the same time the gap between nature and civilization narrows, as animals are increasingly viewed from an anthropomorphic perspective.

The work of the female art collective NEOZOON focuses on this interface between the human and the animal. MY BBY 8L3W combines multiple amateur videos from YouTube posted by pet owners, in which exclusively women present their dogs and cats to the internet community and offer proof of their love for these animals in front of the webcam. Mother-child associations are not only underscored through synchronized behaviour patterns and sociocultural techniques of the body but are explicitly mentioned. NEOZOON manages to create a coherent, compound narrative out of these fragments, which unmask the behaviours of modern societies through the ways that people present themselves online. It is impossible to avoid the irony implicit in this perspective.

MY BBY 8L3W was also screened at Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, as part of the program Post-Internet I: Our Fetishistic Relationship with Technology, on 10 November 2016, 10.30 p.m.

More by NEOZOON: neozoon.org

A cooperation with 20. Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur.