Still Life With Animated Dogs

Paul Fierlinger was born March 15, 1936 in Ashiya, Japan. The son of Czechoslovakian diplomats, he created his first animated film from a flipbook at the age of 12. In 1955 he graduated from the Bechyne School of Applied Arts. He worked as a book illustrator and cartoonist, and has created more than a thousand films ranging from 10-second station breaks to full-length feature films. Fierlinger escaped Czechoslovakia in 1967 and moved to the United States in 1968.

This film – about “dogs and other things of a divine nature”, premiered on PBS on. March 29, 2001.  If won the Golden Gate award in San Francisco, took 1st Prize at the International Festival of Animation in Zagreb and won the Peabody Award in 2002.

Odd Links

Feral dogs in Moscow adapt to a commuter  lifestyle from English Russia via natureblog.  Go to the link at English Russia for some fascinating information on how these dogs are adapting to changing urban conditions.

Via DogArtToday, disturbing but beautiful Bird Dog sculptures from Australian artist Emily Valentine.

 

Old news but new to us – The UK’s Telegraph reported back in 2007 that a miniature wire-haired dachshund named Daisy dug up the leg bone from a woolly mammoth when her owner took her for a morning walk while on a beach holiday in Suffolk.

The dog’s owner, Dennis Smith, 69, dug it out of the sand and later showed it to a geologist who identified it as part of a leg from a mammoth that probably roamed the area up to two million years ago.

The 13 in bone is believed to have been uncovered by heavy seas that battered the Suffolk coast and washed away sand that may have covered it for centuries.

Yesterday the Telegraph reported this story about a retired doctor who has trained wo generations of wild foxes to stand up and beg for food.  Cute – but not a particularly good idea.  Taming wild animals all too often leads to unneccessary troubles for two- and four-leggers.

 

Melancholy, Memory and Magic

From ZooToo:

HARTSDALE, NY — A pet cemetery near New York City is receiving international attention after being ranked as one of the world’s best places to rest alongside the Taj Mahal in India and the Great Pyramids of Giza in Egypt.

Hartsdale Pet Cemetery sits perched on a hill about 20 miles north of the Big Apple in Westchester County, NY. It’s a place that, to some, has long seemed like an unofficial “wonder of the world,” because of its size and significance.

Now the Lonely Planet guidebook company included it in its “2009 Best of Travel” book, one of the “Top 10 Places of Rest” around the world.

Here’s a bit of video on Hartsdale from youtube:

While Hartsdale Pet Cemetery does hold a certain Goreyesce cherm, I’m not sure why Lonely Planet selected it for their ‘best of’ series.  If you’re looking for the ultimate goth dead pet fix, you absolutely must go to France to see the Paris Dog Cemetery (pouting that I don’t currently have the time or money to do so myself).  The Paris Dog Cemetery or Le Cimetière des chiens d’Asnières-sur-Seine is not only the world’s oldest public pet cemetery, it may also be the most fascinating graveyard of any type in France.

Located just outside the city of Paris, the cemetery was born after an 1898 law was passed requiring that all dead pets had to be buried in hygienic graves a minimum of 100 meters from the nearest dwelling.  Before the law, most deceased pets were tossed out with the trash or dumped into the Seine.

Le Cimetière des chiens is a situated in a long, narrow plot along the Seine where you can get lost among neat rows of tombstones and monuments dating from the late 19th Century to the present.  It’s an eerily beautiful place made up of melancholy, memory — and if this video is any indication — magic.

Did Lucy Know Audie?

Lucy Dawson is one of the best known dog artists of the early twentieth century.  Dawson,  (who worked under the pseudonym of ‘Mac’) worked in pencil, pen, ink and oil, but was best known for her pastels.

The portrait above bears an eerie resemblance to a shepherd dog mentioned frequently in this blog.

Thurber’s Dogs

James Thurber is known for his cartoons and short stories.  His wit encompassed a variety of genres, including autobiography, fiction, children’s literature, and commentary as well as several books on dogs.  Thurber loved dogs.

“On the lawns and porches, and in the living rooms and backyards of my threescore years, there have been more dogs, written and drawn, real and imaginary, than I had guessed before I started this roundup.”

Celebrating Thurber and his love of dogs, the Ohio State Lantern reports today that:

In 1994, the ProMusica Chamber Orchestra began a collaboration with Thurber House to commemorate the 100th birthday of celebrated Columbus author James Thurber. They sought to create a musical arrangement that would honor his life and pay homage to his work.

This weekend, the Columbus community witnessed what has grown out of that partnership.

[...]

In it’s initial production, Thurber’s Dogs images were projected as ProMusica played their symphony.

However, this year, imagery for the show was revamped and illustrated with the help of OSU students.

Students from Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design created 3-D animations of Thurber’s famous dog drawings for a performance of “Thurber’s Dogs-Suite for Orchestra.” The animated segments were sequenced with Schickele’s music.

They did a lovely job. The music and animation have a sense of humor and simplicity very much in keeping with Thurber’s work.  You can see storyboards here and  excerpts of the Quicktime video segments here.

Augmented Animals

Today we can modify the appearance of our canine companions by docking their tails, cropping their ears, chalking them, tattooing them, giving them dental implants and pumping them up with neuticles. 

As controversial these methods may be, they may represent just the first step in the re-molding of the canine species.

Artist James Auger wonders if evolution might not be improved with the help of technology.  His controversial and sometimes unsettling new book, “Augmented Animals” is an exploration in how technological enhancements might be used to help animals survive in modern environments or just to lead more comfortable lives.

One of Auger’s projects is an LED light that can translate tail wagging into English.  The device would fit on a dog’s tail and flash text messages as the tail waves through the air.  Auger reportedly plans to have a working product ready to display by September of this year. 

It’s an interesting idea – but based on the bit of information provided on Auger’s and MOMA’s websites, the device appears to simply be based on the speed that a dog’s tail wags. Current research and common sense tell us that a dog uses much more than just the rate of wagging to provide information.  The height of the tail and the degree to which left or right wagging predominates also provide information – as do an entire constellation of other postures associated with the wag. 

Auger has also designed an augmented dog hackle.  He wrote that, “The natural ability to raise the hair along the length of his back when confronted with dangerous situations has been lost in many domestic breeds.  This proposal suggests automated hackles.  Either heart rate variation monitoring registers change in the dog’s autonomous nervous system activity automatically activate the mechanism or the dog’s owner sensing confrontation in the park activates the mechanism by remote control.”  He adds that he has tested this device at a park and stated it worked to scare other dogs away.

Huh? This fellow may be a technological guru and a talented artiste, but methinks he’s no expert on dogs.  First, heart rate is not a good predictor of arousal in dogs.  Again, we must note that emotional reactions are part of a constellation of physiological and sensory mechanisms in living beings.  One can not simply choose one, simple to measure, physiological parameter and arbitrarily use it to measure emotion.  Second, dogs don’t raise their hackles to scare other dogs off.  Hackles are raised as part of arousal reactions.  Dogs can be aroused in many situations that don’t involve fear or the need to drive intruders away.

Auger has also proposed development of a canine respirator to protect dogs from “unpleasant” odors.  O-Kay.  But I want to know who defines what “unpleasant” is.  Dogs adore the smells of feces, trash and rotting dead things.  We don’t need to protect them from that.  I sincerely hope that Auger’s doggy respirator is designed to filter out the distasteful odors of such things as Chanel No. 22 (one of my favorites), Febreeze, potpourri and baths.  I do think that dog’s might find that useful.

So, do these items this simply represent an artistic statement?  Were they designed to make us think about the state of animals in an urban world?

Auger states that “I’m serious about the ideas behind these products, I think the fact that some of them could be realized means that as concepts they tread the scary line between fact and fiction and therefore are taken a little more seriously.”

Seriously?  Please.  Considering the time, money and effort that would have to go into anything even remotely resembling mass production of this junk, the money and time involved would provide a much more dramatic and meaningful result if they were simply applied to measures like resource conservation and education. 

Sorry Mr. Artiste, but technology is NOT the answer to all of the world’s problems.  I know that it’s dirty and it’s ugly and it doesn’t provide much in the way of publicity, but simply using less and appreciating it more has the potential to make a much bigger and more long-lasting positive impact on the world than designing and making more stuff.

I’m not the only one who thinks that fitting animals with expensive, invasive experimental gadgets is unethical.  Jeffery R. Harrow, author of “The Harrow Technology Report” doesn’t like the idea either.

“Any time we mess with nature’s evolutionary process we run the very real risk of changing things for the worse since we have very limited scope in determining the longer term results,” Harrow says. “With the possible exception of endangered species and probably not even those because our modifications would by definition change the species, we must be exceedingly careful or we might change our biosphere in ways later generations might abhor.”