1522-1924 (ongoing) Collaboration with Gabriel Rosenberg

Part of an ongoing series of time-lapse animations, this multiscreen work echoes the function of the courtroom sketch where artistic depiction is still employed to illustrate courtroom proceedings. The depicted legal episodes explore the problem of animal agency as it confronts legal systems of control and together trace an arc of historical juridical episodes: rats tried in 16th century France for destroying a barley harvest; a pig served as a key witness in a bestiality trial in Colonial New England; and a 20th century mock trial held by the United States Department of Agriculture to dramatize the dangers of breeding genetically inferior “scrub” bulls. Challenging contemporary sentimental depictions of animals as innocents, devoid of desire and animacy, these scenes disclose other historical visions of nonhuman animals that has found them lively, lusty, and willful and explores what these depictions tell us about the ecological contexts that produced them. The animations in this series record the digital drawing process in timelapse. This process of animating still images imbues still bodies in these images with movement as a nod to the fragile divisions between the animate and inanimate and the ways in which the categories of human and animal have been relentlessly produced and policed.

This series of animations was developed at the max Planck Institute for the History of Science where Rosenberg and Beech were both members of the working group The Body of Animals ( 2019-21).

Gabriel N. Rosenberg is Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, Feminist Studies and History at Duke University. His research investigates the historical and contemporary linkages among gender, sexuality, race, political economy, and the global food system.