The close interdependency of animal emissaries and new media from
early European colonial encounters with the exotic to today's
proliferation of animals in digital networks.
From cat videos to corporate logos, digital screens and spaces are
crowded with animal bodies. In Virtual Menageries, Jody Berland
examines the role of animals in the spread of global communications. Her
richly illustrated study links the contemporary proliferation of animals
on social media to the collection of exotic animals in the formative
years of transcontinental exploration and expansion. By tracing
previously unseen parallels across the history of exotic and digital
menageries, Berland shows how and why animals came to bridge peoples,
territories, and technologies in the expansion of colonial and
capitalist cultures.
Berland's genealogy of the virtual menagerie begins in 1414 when a ruler
in Bengal sent a Kenyan giraffe to join a Chinese emperor's menagerie.
It maps the beaver's role in the colonial conquest of Canada and
examines the appearances of animals in early moving pictures. The
menagerie is reinvented for the digital age when image and sound
designers use parts or images of animals to ensure the affective promise
and commercial spread of an emergent digital infrastructure. These
animal images are emissaries that enliven and domesticate the
ever-expanding field of mediation. Virtual Menageries offers a unique
account of animals and animal images as mediators that encourage
complicated emotional, economic, and aesthetic investment in changing
practices of connection.
