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Dreaming of Electric Sheep
by Joe McKay
First, I asked him something about the borders between art and science in his work.
Sam: The work will always have its roots in art. It's not quantitative science. It's more like entertainment, pop-up book, and diagram science. I've had inquiries from hard-core scientists but they're really more interested in how insane I am, because they've never had the gumption to try this yet. It's not hard-core science. I want to have the company [Animal Vegetable Video] work within art and science arenas. Even in the early work I was asking myself, 'Sam, is this science?' It was a query then but now I'm pushing it consciously.
Joe: Sam, we see spy-cams all the time in art and part of that aesthetic is the voyeurism. Have you run across people who are angry that you are invading the animals' privacy?
You're the first person to bring it up. Lots of people have spy-cam issues, animal rights issues. And my response is always: I feel that any inconvenience on the part of the animals in the end is completely worth it, that people, after seeing the footage and being in that animal's shoes, will be less likely to invade its territory and not respect its rights. As to the danger to animals, I haven't come across any time when I've thought, 'I'm really doing harm to this deer and it's a bad bad thing.' It is an inconvenience to the animal, but it's really quick and it's never invasive. I never break skin and the handlers I work with are always pretty good. All the animals I've done are (hopefully) still running around free and happy.Then I asked him about the making of his video A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing (1998).
I was looking for a very pastoral setting, a classic idyllic colonial pasture. The Walker Art Center had commissioned me to outfit an entire flock of sheep with cameras, and I had never done sheep before, so I had no idea how to do it really. So we penned them all up with the handlers and the sheep dogs. In order to put the cameras on them, I had to jump on top of them and keep my weight on them to keep them still. I managed to put the cameras on all of them, but when they saw each other wearing the cameras they got all freaked out. They started jumping on top of one another, like sheep do when they're penned in, and in the process they were ripping the cameras. They were clawing and ripping and shredding them, the cameras were going everywhere.
Every time a sheep jumped on another I lost, like, a thousand dollars worth of equipment, and I was thinking, 'holy crap, I'm losing money by the thousands over the course of just a few seconds.' So I'm, like, 'Let them out, let them out!, so we can regroup!
The woman who owned the sheep opens the big door to the pen, and you can see this at the start of the video. There's one sheep left that still had its camera intact, and all the other sheep had become naked, all their cameras have gotten ripped off in the pen. Naturally, all the other sheep flocked away from the sheep that still had a camera. The camera sheep tries to chase after them and essentially tries to get back into the flock, but they don't let her, and so the video documents four minutes of pure terror on the part of this one sheep as she tries to get herself back into the flock.
How'd it turn out?
It turns out just amazing. There's a fence that surrounds the property, and the rest of the flock becomes so terrified of this sheep in its altered state that they bust through the fence, and run down the street. As I'm seeing these sheep running away at, like, 30 miles an hour, I'm thinking, 'Well, I'm done.' I knew that was it for the day. There was no way we could do that again.
So how'd the farmer take it?
She was totally pissed. We had to go down to Wal-Mart, and I'm in a rental car trying to herd this sheep into the car. I was after the one sheep that had the camera on its head, and she went after the whole flock. But I just knew that I had to get that thing back, and it was really wet and the camera was getting strewn through water. She was screaming at me but she didn't realize that I was happy with the work I'd made and I wanted to get it back, it was just a question of priorities.
Something always goes nutty when you're doing these things. The deer was the same way. This summer I'm doing a rattlesnake and I know it's going to be a wild time.
How are you going to ...
Snake handlers.
No, I mean how are you going to put ...
They have really flat heads.
Oh.
This summer Sam Easterson will be working on a feature-length Hollywood movie which he plans to release in the fall, 2001. Keep an eye out. You can reach him at anivegvideo@hotmail.com Sam's tapes can be found at Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) in New York, and at V-Tape in Toronto.
