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DARREN O’Brien

Visual Arts, Nottingham Trent University

Thesis title:

Deep Canine Topography: Re-connecting with the wild through the practice of walking with companion species

Deep canine topography explores canine navigational skills as an invitation to follow the nose, to engage in a more-than-human exploration of place, space, and time through sensory entanglement. As a practice it asks that we abandon upright, bipedal ocular-centric human points of view and embrace vibrant, chaotic space-time-mattering’s through affect, immanence, and playful improvisation. In this thesis I propose, perform, and reflect upon the practice of deep canine topography. In doing so I bring together walking as a contemporary artistic medium, by exploring psychogeography and the score as a critical generator of practice; And critical animal studies in art, as an exploration of human and more-than-human collaborative practice. I will do this by attending to the contact zones between human and canine, by positioning the walkies as a shared, co-authored art practice, which re-connects the human with more-than-human landscapes through a number of actions/events. In doing so I propose that through such collaboration the position of the human is troubled and destabilised, leading to the emergence of new radical cartographies, and human-more-than-human alliances. Deep canine topography explores affective connections, precognitive, and pre-linguistic flows and forces between bodies and objects. Here subjectivity is troubled, becomes fluid, as human-canine and landscape merge through what I refer to as hybridity. The artistic methods employed in deep canine topography seek to experiment with human-canine-landscape hybridity through to explore relational ontologies and sensory synaesthesia. Such radical cartographies enable a positive shift in human-canine-landscape encounters which challenges philosophical humanist concepts of the animal and the sublime.

Research Area

  • Visual Arts

Publications

Two Bodies in Motion - Surface Encounters, part of a multimedia presentation as part of the Becoming Feral 2 pubication. November 2021:

Becoming Feral 2

From Watling Street to Elsware: Creative Centre for Fluid Territories (CCFT) - NEW FLUID TERRITORIES: NOMADIC ONLINE DIALOGUE 2 - displacement: Buffer Fringe Festival, Nicosia, 2021: 

https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1304585/1304586

Deep Canine Topography: Captive-Zombies or Free-Flowing Relational Bodies?

MDPI Arts, Special Issue "Art and Animals and the Ethical Position"

https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12020068

Conferences

Forth World Congress of Psychogeography:

04-06/09/2020

https://www.4wcop.org/

It's ok they're friendly, Workshop on collective Deep Canine Topography and Q and A.

Life With and Without Animals:

07/11/2020

University of Derby.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=focS5Kl004c&feature=youtu.be

Paper - Further Adventures in Deep Canine Topography, and Q and A 

WARP Walking Research Conference:

29-30/09/2022

University of Amsterdam

https://asca.uva.nl/programme/workshops/warp/warp.html

Paper - Deep Canine Topography, Reconnecting with the wild through the practice of walking with companion species – a reflection on research.

Posthuman Bodies & Embodied Posthumanisms:

12-14/10/2022

University of Warwick and Nottingham Trent University

https://posthumanbodiesconference.wordpress.com/

Paper - Deep Canine Topography: Reconstructing radical cartographies and sensory entanglement through the use of the canine mounted action camera.


Not Quite King Not Quite Fish:

08-11/11/2023

Research Symposium at the Vilnius Academy of Arts: 

Presentation of A Year With The Meadows (working title) video work and live canine led walk performance.

https://sodas2123.lt/en/not-quite/

Other Research Interests

Fine Art Practice

Walking Art

Human Geography

Critical Animal Studdies

Animal Rights

Posthuman Philosophy 

Memberships

Member of Two Queens Gallery Leicester