Artists have been at the forefront of exploring the challenges of exploring human animal interactions in the age of risk. Documenting two major international art exhibitions, Exhibiting Digital Animalities demonstrates the significance of contemporary art as a site for rethinking and restaging human-animal relations.
The conversations within this volume between participating artists and scholars offer models for understanding new possibilities provided by new technologies, critiques of implicit tendencies in the workings and organizations of these technologies, and classifications and frameworks for orienting ourselves to these new possibilities.
Loosely organized under two major tendencies presented in the works, the exhibitions presented complementary experiences of the evolving space of animality in contemporary digital culture. At the John B. Aird Gallery, the theme of Mapping brought together works by Julie Andreyev and Simon Lysander Overstall, Jonathon Keats, Gwen McGregor, Neozoon, Ken Rinaldo, Lou Sheppard, and Donna Szoke that suggest how new cartographies organize and orient us. At the CONTACT Gallery, the theme of Rendering brought together works by Sara Angelucci, Ingrid Bachmann, Maria Fernanda Cardoso, Wally Dion, and Aki Inomata that reveal digital technology’s ability to scan and re-assemble aspects of reality. Edited by Matthew Brower, Exhibiting Digital Animalities explores how digital technologies have been reshaping human understandings of animals and transforming the possibilities for human-animal relations.
Exhibiting Digital Animalities is published by PUBLIC Books and distributed by Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Matthew Brower is a writer, curator, and educator and has taught at the University of Toronto, York University, and Wilfrid Laurier University. He has curated numerous exhibitions of contemporary art including Threatened, Endangered, Extinct (Open Studio); Mediated Memory (National Art Museum of China) for the Beijing Biennale; Yonder (Koffler Gallery), and Suzy Lake: Political Poetics (University of Toronto Art Centre). He is the author of Developing Animals: Early North American Wildlife Photography (University of Minnesota Press) as well as articles and reviews in Antennae, the Journal of Visual Culture, History of Photography, Photography and Culture, and Society and Animals.

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