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| Alumni Association Home > Minnesota Magazine > Past Issues > 2005 > September-October 2005 | ||||||||
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9/6/2005
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As a graduate student in landscape architecture at the University of Minnesota, Sam Easterson (M.S. '99) read that sheep and cows once were commonly used to mow lawns-a mundane fact to most of us, perhaps, but to Easterson the germ of an exciting idea.
For as long as Easterson can remember, he has wanted to know how things looked from the inside out, from the topside down, from a different perspective. Landscape drawings, architectural plans, topographic maps-anything with a bird's-eye view intrigued him. Phones, TVs, cameras-he'd disassemble any gadget, not so much to see how they worked as to wonder how the world might be perceived from in there. He wanted to understand the world one viewpoint at a time. He had even-in his days as a video artist, before the landscape architecture-rigged video cameras inside household appliances. How does the world look from inside a clothes dryer? Or a popcorn popper?
So, sheep as lawnmowers? Easterson pitched an idea to Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. And then he set about finding a pastoral landscape. And sheep. And video cameras to strap to the heads of the sheep. “In my mind, my sheep project really became an extension of my appliance studies,” Easterson says. “It's just that the 'lawnmower' was now alive.”
Since 1998, Easterson has mounted video cameras on animals as large and exuberant as bison, as small and slow-moving as millipedes, as inanimate as pitcher plants. His “animal and plant point of view” videos are quirky, entertaining, and sometimes illuminating. The footage has appeared in Europe, Asia, Australia, and more than 40 museums in the United States. The venues have been as diverse as the Yale University Peabody Museum of Natural History and the Walker. “I do feel as though the videos are art,” Easterson says, “but I also think they are science and entertainment.” In August 2004, he appeared on Late Night with David Letterman to show his video clips.
Nato Thompson, curator of an Easterson show at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, recalls the first time a clip of Easterson's video popped up on his computer screen. “It was one of those experiences where you just start grabbing people who are walking by: 'You gotta see this!'” Thompson says. “It translates really quickly. And he chooses such great animals too. The armadillo-I'm looking at its ears. It cracks me up. I love that the wolf spends most of its time with its nose in the dirt.”
“It's such a hybrid crossover project,” says Douglas Fogle, the Walker curator who commissioned Easterson's first animal-video project, A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing. “He's just as happy showing it in a science museum as an art gallery.”
The video clips are entertaining and irresistible-perhaps because they're honest, unpredictable, and unrehearsed. But they're more than that. By presenting such exclusive views of the world-not often provided in the realm of either natural history or art-the videos generate greater
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| A still from Sam Easterson's first animal cam film. Images courtesy of Sam Easterson |
“I think my footage helps disarm people,” says 33-year-old Easterson. “It can make them smile. Once their guard is down, then you can get them to start thinking about more serious environmental issues. I do believe that if people can see from the perspective of animals and plants, then they will be far less likely to harm them or their habitats.”
But those thoughts came later-after Easterson confronted a skittish herd of sheep in a Connecticut pasture. “Quite frankly,” Easterson says, “I had no idea what I was doing on this first shoot.”
Raised in suburban Connecticut, Easterson hardly grew up among animals. He had come to Minnesota with an interest in video and a bachelor's degree from Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City. He enrolled in landscape architecture because “I was looking for a profession that could accommodate a wide range of activities, from design to research to public art.” He had an interest in horticulture (he now runs a small landscape design company in Los Angeles), and he somehow wanted to incorporate many of his interests in a single discipline.
“You can do things in design that you can't do in art, especially in terms of scale,” Easterson says. “This appealed to me. I really began to see landscape research and landscape design as highly effective arenas for testing new art ideas.”
He found a farmer, a friend of a family friend who raised sheep on a hobby farm. “I think because of this friend connection, she felt a little bit obligated,” Easterson says. In no time Easterson was trying to strap cameras on a penned flock of about eight sheep. In seconds all but one camera fell off. Easterson decided to release the flock into the pasture anyway.
“I immediately noticed that the one sheep wearing the helmet cam was not being accepted into the flock,” Easterson says. “In fact, the others tried to distance themselves from her. This made her try even harder to be accepted, and eventually she started chasing the entire flock around the pasture.”
The sheep stampeded through a fence. As the farmer herded them back onto the property, Easterson picked up broken video equipment strewn about the pasture. “Luckily, all the sheep were fine and the footage that I captured also survived,” Easterson says.
Easterson came away with two lessons. First, he needed lighter, sturdier equipment. Second, sheep were more complicated than he imagined. “The preconceptions that I had had about sheep, and animals in general, were all wrong,” he says.
Since then, he's made adjustments in equipment. Easterson now buys miniature cameras designed for law enforcement and surveillance. “I guess that means drug busts and nanny spying,” he says. “At least that's how they're marketed.” He strips off all extraneous plastic housings, often leaving only a circuit board and lens. The cameras are so light that often a piece of tape or rubber band are sufficient
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| Some of Sam Easterson's video stills, like "Cricket," are exhibited as fine art photography. |
Still, his greatest challenge is figuring out how to attach a camera to an animal. “I used to work at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles,” he says. “It was great because I had access to hundreds of taxidermy models. Sometimes, before a shoot, I would just climb into the dioramas and take the measurements I needed. This would help me to design a better helmet cam for the live animal.” Now, he reads and consults animal experts to anticipate problems in the field. “I try to get as much information as I possibly can before I step onto the landscape.”
He says he has never used tranquilizers to subdue an animal before shooting. Nor have people complained that his use of animals is cruel. In fact, he has shot videos of a cow and pig on a model farm run by an animal-rights group.
With his lightweight cameras, Easterson has amassed video from about 50 organisms, including a chicken, goat, pig, cow, frog, white-tailed deer, bat, box turtle, tarantula, slug, and even a tumbleweed.
Easterson says his most difficult subjects were buffalo, even though the animal that carried the camera was an Oreo-munching creampuff named Cody, who appears in movies, commercials, and public promotions. “Just being around an animal that large is alarming,” Easterson says. “You're trying to focus on your work-on adjusting a miniature camera one or two millimeters in one direction or another. Meanwhile, that camera is sitting on a 2,000-pound animal.” During the shoot, Cody escaped his pasture in Houston, in southeastern Minnesota, and ran down a road to a neighbor's front door. “I made sure to save that footage!” Easterson says.
The final video shows a between-the-horns view as Cody comes to a pond, where he seems to consider his own reflection, and then drinks with belching and snorkeling sounds. Viewers then go along for the ride while Cody grazes on grass, hooks horns with other bison, and runs with the herd.
Other animals posed different challenges. The alligator was docile. With the help of a handler, Easterson taped its mouth shut and strapped a camera built inside a glass-and-aluminum tube to its head. But the environment was difficult. “We were in a pretty remote area and getting a snakebite was a legitimate concern.”
The wolves, part of a captive pack in Colorado, were wary. “It was dangerous because I had no idea how to move or act around wolves,” Easterson says. “They didn't trust me at all. I relied heavily on my handler on that shoot.” Among the highlights: As the “video wolf” stalks through grass, it steps on a snake. In other footage, it snaps and interacts with other wolves. “I have a feeling it will screen quite a bit in the coming years,” Easterson says.
“Sometimes the most unassuming animals can yield the best footage. I placed a video camera on a scorpion and had some amazing results. The scorpion's 'walk cycle' was so efficient. He was like a little robot. All
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| "Alligator Blowing," "Armadillo Running," and "Leopard Frog." |
Easterson's subjects also include plants. A camera in a water-filled pitcher plant captured the death struggle of a cricket. A tumbleweed seemed an ideal place to stash a camera. “I brought it to the desert and sat in my rental car and waited for the wind to move it along. I tracked it in the car when the wind picked up.”
Easterson endeavors to create the world's largest library of video footage shot from the perspective of plants and animals, but some situations he has declined to film. For example, a large production company asked him to mount cameras on animals for a show about predator and prey. “I didn't want to put a camera on an animal that I knew was going to be killed,” Easterson says. “I was uncomfortable with that, to say the least.”
Most requests for Easterson's video clips come from television producers, museum curators, and other filmmakers, who license video use through Easterson's Animal Vegetable Video. Art collectors also buy limited editions of the videos and stills.
“I just collect the footage and then distribute it,” Easterson says. “I leave narrative and context to producers, curators, and editors. That's part of the fun. I just let people find their own applications for the footage. In that way, the work can remain agile. The footage can play on Letterman one day and a few days later it can screen at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. . . . It should be free to roam the cultural landscape.”
While Easterson's wife, Kristin Solid, works as an animator for Peter Jackson on his upcoming movie King Kong in New Zealand this year, Easterson hopes to hop over to Australia to try a kangaroo cam. Otherwise, he plans to shift focus to different kinds of creatures. He's been filming insects for Buggin' with Ruud, a new Animal Planet series with New Zealand entomologist Ruud Kleinpaste, and recently received a grant for a bird-cam project. He also has an idea for catfish and octopus cams.
In the meantime, he has been commissioned by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa to outfit a herd of sheep with helmet cams. The footage will be featured in a permanent exhibit on the New Zealand landscape.
Easterson says his videography has opened up the world to him. “My appreciation for the natural world, and more specifically for the landscape, increases every time I go out on a shoot,” he says. But documenting animals' points of view has also yielded unanticipated perspective. “I think that in the process of attempting to learn what it is like to be an animal or plant, I learn more about what it means to be human.
“There's this scientific view that animals don't have feelings and they aren't sensitive,” Easterson says. “But I think they do have feelings and are sensitive. Animals have secrets.”
Greg Breining (B.A. '74) is a freelance writer and author who writes about wildlife and travel. He lives in St. Paul.