The Inhabitants is a video series I began working on in 2014 that consists of over 250 recordings. These videos are made by recording unsecured web cameras that feature the lives of non-human animals in their environments. The cameras are found at sites of domesticity (the family home), scientific discovery (the lab), industrial production (the farm), and entertainment (the zoo). Each recording is done for 24 hours at 1 frame every 10 seconds and played back at 25 frames per second.
Through The Inhabitants I consider the place of the non-human both as subject and as material in the history of photography, cinema, and camera-based surveillance. Making this work attempts to bear witness to a disaster, one that cannot fully be accounted for in a single or group of images, cannot be captured as a whole but only glimpsed in fragments, and one that is, as Barthes wrote of photographs, a “catastrophe which has already occurred.”
A small selection of video excerpts can be found here.
Stills from The Inhabitants: