Animal, Vegetable, Video: Where the Buffalo Roam (2001) video still [Enlarge in New Window]

Sam Easterson: Animal, Vegetable, Video: Where the Buffalo Roam

Armchair naturalists, be warned: Sam Easterson's videos are a whole lot wilder than your average nature program. Prepare to veer, jerk, slither, rear, and creep, because this footage is shot not from the perspective of some khaki-clad cameraman, but from that of the animals themselves--literally. Since 1998, Easterson has been strapping custom-designed cameras onto the heads of everything from millipedes to alligators, and the resulting videos show their habitats as they see them. Wild Kingdom it isn't.

"I'm interested in seeing how animals move through the landscape, how they move through space," says Easterson, who was trained both as an artist and as a landscape architect. He adds, "It's also just really funny." He's right--it's difficult to suppress a giggle as you're crashing through the underbrush tucked between the ears of an armadillo. This footage is generally presented as part of a larger installation, which typically includes taxidermy specimens modeling cameras ingeniously designed by Easterson, while video monitors display the scenes they've captured, and extension cords trail off into colorful designs resembling topographic maps.

For the latest segment in this ongoing series, collectively titled Animal, Vegetable, Video, Easterson is tackling his biggest challenge yet. Where the Buffalo Roam roams right into the center of a herd of buffalo, with each huffing, hairy beast wearing its own helmet-mounted camera. "The footage will be shown on separate monitors," Easterson explains, "so each buffalo will have its own station." To complete the sense of being caught up in a stampede, nine stuffed, camera-wearing buffalo loom large in various spots throughout the gallery. Why buffalo this time? "You know, if I'm working with a single, smaller mammal, it's all very easy," says Easterson. "This is going to push my techniques to a point where they've not been before."

Wherever that point is, Easterson feels he's prepared--or as prepared as he can be. "Something totally crazy, even catastrophic, always happens when I'm out shooting. And I like that." Before embarking on a shoot along with an animal handler and a veterinarian, Easterson tests his equipment on taxidermy specimens, fitting the cameras and then thinking of "all the things that could possibly go wrong." "Wrong" might mean something like what happened during production of A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing. His woolly subjects didn't take kindly to the cameras, so they panicked and destroyed thousands of dollars of equipment. It ended with them breaking through a fence, and Easterson and the farmer who owned them chasing them down in a Wal-Mart parking lot. The footage is priceless.

There was a time when everything was a whole lot easier. Early in his career, Easterson's camera probed the interiors of household appliances. Many recall Blowout, featured in the 1996 Whitney Biennial, in which we see the world from the perspective of a hot-air popcorn popper. While Easterson finds his current project much more challenging and engaging, he sees "a direct link" between his earlier pieces and the work he's doing now: "That link is trying to show people what they haven't seen before, trying to bring a new perspective--a real physical perspective--of how they might see things."

In recent years, Easterson's videos have begun finding their way into science museums and nature centers as well as art museums and galleries. And plans are underway for Easterson's biggest project yet: a permanent facility where "the world's most comprehensive library of animal POVs" will be housed and accessible to the public. Easterson is currently considering nature preserves and other protected lands as sites--appropriate enough, since he sees his videos as a means of protecting and preserving endangered animals and their habitats. In fact, Easterson sees this environmentalist application as central to his work. He insists, "If you're able to see from the perspective of these animals, you're far less likely to harm them or their habitats."

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Visual > Robotics | Americana | Environment | Science & Technology | California | 2001