CAPTIVITY

Captivity – Nonhuman Animals Under Surveillance. The images in this series are Photographic Stills of Live Streaming Webcams from North American Zoos (2020-2021). From March 2020 to September 2021, as the world teetered on the edge of disaster, engulfed and submerged in a pandemic of epic proportions, my research brought to light a significant increase in live streams via webcams broadcast from zoos around the world. Thousands of animal cams, streaming from all corners of the digitized world, can be freely accessed at any time. They are uncritically considered entertainment, i.e., opportunities to learn more about wildlife and climate change. Unfortunately, these photogenic, artificial habitats portray nonhuman subjects as stars in a perpetual reality show revolving around daily routines (too often performed displaying a full range of stereotypic behavior.) The current conversion of zoos to 24/7 reality shows - revolving around daily routines, too often performed displaying a full range of stereotypic behavior - is a patent invasion of the privacy of these nonhuman subjects, subjects still considered “things” by most legal standards, even as places such as New Zealand grant legal personhood to rivers, parks, and mountains. In the US, corporations are legal persons. Around the world, ships, religious idols, and holy books have been recognized as legal persons. The "Captivity" series challenges an archaic, anthropocentric, and unjust status quo that views and treats all nonhuman subjects as things with no rights. This series aims to suggest a corrective on an ethical level: a collective reflection on the opportunity to improve and expand our cultural boundaries in new directions that could not only progress to advance philosophical debates – embracing new legal categories and philosophical values – but, more importantly, to better our consideration and understanding of the subjective states of other species. It aims to provoke reflection and represents an invitation to rigorously question and subsequently improve our capacity to embrace higher standards of democratic inclusion, overcoming prejudices, and permitting actual progress for civilization and humanity through these challenging but potentially revolutionary times. "Captivity – Nonhuman Animals Under Surveillance," is a monographic chapter of "Mass Surveillance" (2011- 2022), a perpetually curated series of photos and videos created from thousands of security cameras and webcams accessible via the Internet. It questions the intricate connections between privacy rights and surveillance needs in the post- 9/11 world. This investigative documentary series comprises footage from over 50 countries and is dedicated to all the unaware victims of abusive surveillance.