animals

"Voyeur with Dog" was the first of many slideshow fiction works created by Richard Holeton. The text tells the story of a lonely middle-aged man, coming to terms with the potential loss of his aging, canine companion. The slides describe the behavior of the main character (simply called "The Man") after his divorce, his relationship with his dog and his struggle to connect with others. He has few relationships and spends his time dwelling on memories of his ex-wife and musing about the lives of his (female) neighbors, like the "Girl Next Door" and "Woman at the Sink." Though the Man describes his own appearance and demenour as off-putting, he notices that people, especially women, are drawn to his "beautiful" dog. In contrast to the Man, "the Dog" attracts and delights everyone without effort. Walking the Dog becomes a reprieve from solitude and a source of comfort. However, as the Dog ages and acquires health problems, the Man realizes that he will not always be able to rely on his pet for support. 

Holeton continued to experiment with the slideshow format in the works: "Custom Orthotics Changed My Life" (2010), "Do You Have Balls?" (2011) and "Postmodern: An Anagrammatic Slideshow Fiction" (2017). As with his other slideshow fiction creations, "Voyeur with Dog" incorporate elements like: bullet points, large, easy-to-read text, still images, graphs and tables, a summary of key points, and even a closing Thank You slide.

"Thirteen Ways of Killing a Scrubjay" is a prose-poem in the form of a blog that explores the theme of modern violence. The work is a "playful" response to the Wallace Stevens' poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (1954). The journal entries detail ludicrously gruesome and elaborate plans to murder the helpless birds: from poison pellets to cyanide darts to water cannons.

The blog fiction was first published online in 2007. In 2015, it was exhibited at ISEA International. 

Encyclopedia is an ecological work featuring digital and physical content. The core of the work is a text generator that creates encyclopedic entries for extinct fictive animal species. These unique entries are given away as one-off printed index cards to visitors of the exhibition. Encyclopedia aims to put a gentle focus on the state of the planet, meanwhile exploring the possibilites of digital literature and art. The textual presentations of each animal shift between matter-of-fact descriptions of habitat and feeding habits, and more poetic sentences on the characteristics of the species and its surroundings. The generator analyzes text content and additional data from EoL.org (Encyclopedia of Life), which has comprehensive information on a huge amount of species, extinct and still living. It then outputs an encyclopedic entry derived from the data, creating a fictive animal species, starting (and simultaneously ending) a new track in evolution. Each entry is unique, never to be repeated. One of the key parameters in the generator is Conservation status (as of the IUCN red list): in each micro-narrative every species is already extinct at the moment of creation – every entry ends with a description on how the animal was driven to extinction by humanity, through varying factors such as pollution, poaching, deforestation, climate change and more. This theme is mirrored in the presentation of the work, in its temporal representation: the text presentation of the generated animal is impossible to replicate. It becomes a personal, intimate message to the person on the receiving end – this species is now yours to keep, only ever existing in these few lines of text. Hopefully this will also make an ecological statement on how we view and treat this planet.

One day in 2008 in Malaysia, by chance, I videotaped two starkly ordinary events: a dying kitten and a chained monkey. Give me Your Light explores the archetypal capacity of these creatures. The archetypes are death and enslavement. The dying abandoned kitten in a parking lot stands-in for the fatally ill, homeless runaways and abandoned children. The chained monkey suggests slaves, prisoners, abductees, captives, convicts, detainees and internees. Give me Your Light is about the limits of empathy and ubiquitous complicity. The display of Give me Your Light is not a linear video, it is a set of video-clips, sounds, music and words reassembled every two minutes into a new sequence by an algorithm. Events repeat but never in the same order. Clips appear in both monochrome and colour, with music and without, with sound and silent. Contextual structure and affective content collide. (Source: http://glia.ca/2011/BNL/)