About

This practice-based PhD takes a philosophical framework developed from animal behavioural studies as the impetus for the creation of a film, Pseudomorphs. The written thesis provides the critical and artistic context for the film, which was made in and around a marine laboratory studying cuttlefish camouflage and cognition.

The project is situated at the intersection of animal studies, European philosophy, film theory and artists’ moving image practice. The thesis begins with a phenomenon increasingly visible across contemporary art, curatorial discourse, philosophy and popular science: the proliferation of Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt research as a framework for thinking about nonhuman perception, often set apart from its troubled political history and conceptual specificity. Taking the contemporary circulation of this idea as a starting point rather than an operative framework, I trace how “Umwelt thinking” has been transformed through successive philosophical inheritances from solipsism to ecological assemblage.

Alongside this philosophical transformation, through close readings of moving image works by Christine Baudillon, Maeve Brennan, Carlo Nasisse, Hannes Rickli, Matterlurgy and Sonia Levy, the thesis traces a parallel movement from the individuated nonhuman perceptual encounter towards more distributed and multi-scale arrangements of life. I analyse how some of these artists enter scientific environments and treat them as contingent zones where knowledge about nonhuman worlds is shaped by the conditions of its production. I argue that these works reveal a productive tension at the limit between nonhuman perceptual expansiveness and the institutional, technological and aesthetic frameworks that render it legible. Borrowing the term "limitrophy" from Jacques Derrida, the thrust of the project is that moving images can process non-access into form, and that this processing is itself a mode of knowledge production: knowledge cultivated at the edges of a limit rather than knowledge of what it is like to be another animal.

Pseudomorphs inhabits these tensions through cephalopod perception. Filmed at a cuttlefish laboratory at the Marine Biological Association and across coastal environments, as well as using deep sea ROV footage, the film works within and against the spaces of laboratories and aquaria. It navigates encounters between human attention and cephalopod perception through a multi-voiced form shaped by processes of institutional negotiation, historical resonance, parapsychology and embodied uncertainty.