e-flux presents True Fake: Troubling the Real in Artists’ Films
Sea a Dog, Hear a Dog
Jesse McLean
2016
17 Minutes
Courtesy Video Data Bank, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Date
February 23–March 8, 2021
Join us on e-flux Video & Film for an online screening of Jesse McLean’s Sea a Dog, Hear a Dog (2016), on view from Tuesday, February 23 through Monday, March 8, 2021.
Sea A Dog, Hear A Dog takes its title from a sound-design maxim and uses it as a conceit to grasp the desire for connection. The work probes the limits and possibilities of communication, asking: Can ever truly communicate with a machine, with a nonhuman animal, with each other? Our anthropomorphic tendencies, our fear of replacement by nonhuman forms, even our interpersonal limitations, cannot foreclose the possibility of connection and understanding, of a great unknown sometimes called trust. Reflecting on the infiniteness of human desires and finiteness of technological capacity, McLean’s video considers the deficits and surpluses produced by attempts at communication among humans, animals, and machines.
Sea a Dog, Hear a Dog is presented here as one of four films in Part Two | Virtually Yours, the second of five programs in the online film and video series True Fake: Troubling the Real in Artists’ Films programmed by Lukas Brasiskis for e-flux Video & Film.
True Fake runs from February 9 through April 19, 2021. The films in each part will screen for two weeks. The next parts will follow bi-weekly, with new films screened every other Tuesday.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.