Richard Bright: Can we begin by you saying something about your background?

Julie Andreyev: I was born in Burnaby, a municipality outside Vancouver, BC, on the unceded, traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples—the Musqueam, Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh nations. My parents were from Russian, Estonian and Polish descent. They both grew up in China, their parents having moved there during the turn of the twentieth century fleeing the communist revolution in Russia. My grandmother’s family on my mother’s side migrated from Russia and literally lived on trains for years, slowly making their way to China, the next closest country. My parents grew up in modest but diverse conditions. They lived with a community of migrants from Russia and other countries, in districts within Shanghai called concessions. The concessions were represented by European countries—the French Concession, English Concession—areas that had been conceded to these countries by the Chinese government to use as settlements. Even though they lived in the concessions, my mother always referred to her status as ‘stateless’ because her parents had fled Russia and therefore weren’t represented by a government. My grandparents experienced hardships finding employment and providing for their families. My grandfather on my mother’s side was a painter and found work in Hong Kong as a graphic artist, and my grandmother worked as a seamstress. My parents married and gave birth to my oldest brother, Alex. Then, during WWII as coastal China was invaded by the Japanese military, they were assisted by the United Nations to migrate to Australia. They left my grandfather behind in Hong Kong, and he later died there at a fairly young age. In Australia, my parents had my brothers Peter and Andrew. My father always wanted to live in the US so, while they were in Australia, they didn’t completely settle but instead focused their efforts on moving to North America. My father was trained as an engineer in China, so he put his skills to work and designed and built a house, by hand, with the aim to sell it in order to fund their move. In the late 1950s, they received permission to migrate and settle in Canada.

I’m grateful for living on the Westcoast of Canada. I believe this land has had a significant impact on my current research and practice. My father was a birder and taught me how to recognize the local birds, predict the weather and tides. He built a boat and we used to go on summer vacations around the Gulf Islands and other coastal areas. We’d swim in the ocean water and scavenge the beaches for shells and driftwood. My mother helped me develop an eye for noticing plant life and animals, and she had a attitude of respect and compassion for the natural world. As a child and young adult, I remember her being in a state of wonder for nature—trees, plants and earth forces. She’d point out interesting tree individuals, or how amazing the weather was on certain day, the smell of the air, the colour of flowers.

In my early years, I had severe asthma and allergies and was frequently hospitalized, sometimes for weeks. In the early 1960s, not much was known about treating asthma, and allergies were virtually unstudied. Treatment of the time is now questionable by today’s standards. The hospitals had pretty strict rules and my family couldn’t just come and visit any time. As a result, a lot of my time was spent alone. I remember near death experiences, and these had a profound effect on me. I had to deal with this later in life.  On reflection, I think the experience sensitized me to feeling empathy for nonhuman animals, particularly those in captivity and in situations of exploitation. I’m sure this influenced my research and practice advocating for animals.

RB: What is the underlying focus of your work?

JA: The focus is multispecies creativity through exploration of more-than-human ways of knowing. My studio practice is called Animal Lover. I call it a multispecies studio because it almost always involves respectful exploration or collaboration with nonhuman animals or plant life, ecologies. I use walking, listening, field recording, soundscape composition, sound art, video, new media installation, and land-based methods. I find a lot of joy in paying attention to and listening to wildlife and forested places around my home. I think hiking in the forest with my dogs and listening to the birds, trees and water is one of my favourite things. Being able to watch or listen to nonhuman life and ecologies like forests allows me to feel connected and at peace. The aim of my art practice is to create experiences for audiences to feel connected with nonhuman life and wild spaces.

Still from Screen Test – Tom, 2010. Photo courtesy of Julie Andreyev.

Still from video of Bird Park Survival Station showing leucistic Anna’s hummingbird. Photo courtesy of Julie Andreyev, 2020.

RB: Have there been any particular influences to your ideas and work?

JA: Yes, I mean I was influenced early on by my parents’ attitudes towards the natural world, and this carried through my early art practice in contemporary landscape painting. During and after college, I was a plein air painter, looking for my subject matter through direct experience and representation outdoors in the Westcoast region. I started focusing on interspecies collaboration around 2005 through my relationships with my late dogs Tom (2004-20) and Sugi (2005-21). Getting to know them helped me learn about the rich inner lives of nonhuman animals. This process of discovery struck me quite profoundly, both in terms of my art practice and in how it influenced the choices I made in the rest of my life. I came to understand how these canine individuals had emotions and passions, and creative capabilities, and this changed who I was and how I behaved in the world. For instance, I learned that Tom was an amazingly social dog. I called him the Miracle dog. My partner (Greg Snider) and I used to say that Tom’s job was to spread joy and happiness as we’d go for walks. People would stop us and ask to touch or pet Tom. We’d ask him to “go say hi”, and he’d let out a friendly bark, trot up to them and present his back for them to touch. Tom was a great vocalist and this influenced some of the earliest Animal Lover works where his recorded vocals were key contributions. Sugi was much more reserved and philosophical and had a kind of critical edge. He developed a way to transmit his desires to me through thought alone. He’d sit and face me with a piercing gaze and intent look. This usually happened around lunch time, or when it was time for the afternoon walk. Through these experiences of getting to know the dogs, I found myself thinking that if they had such rich inner lives, then probably other animals did too, including those in agriculture, zoos, marine parks, laboratories. This knowledge led met to a vegan practice and I became much more curious about wild-living animals, and ecologies such as rivers and forests.

During the early Animal Lover work, my collaborator Simon Lysander Overstall became part of the projects. He’s a composer and computational artist, and we’ve been working together ever since.

From contemporary culture, influences include thinkers and practitioners from critical animal studies, an interdisciplinary field that blends biology, naturalist studies, philosophy, ecofeminism and ethics of care. This field has influenced how I engage with nonhuman life. The cognitive ethologist Marc Bekoff developed a method called biocentric anthropomorphism as a form of empathy that uses knowledge from cognitive ethology to imagine the inner worlds of nonhuman animals. He describes it as a critical anthropomorphism, considering the other beings’ points of view, taking into account knowledge about their perceptual, emotional and cognitive capabilities. For example, feeling-like-a-dog or thinking-like-a-wolf was a way for Bekoff to gain a better understanding of what was going on with the individuals he was researching in the field. This approach leads to asking more ethical research questions. For example, scientists Gregory Berns and Con Slobodchikoff, working respectively with dogs and prairie dogs, developed ethical methods of engaging with nonhuman animals that involves respect for their autonomy. They learned communication modalities with the nonhuman animals involved in their research and were therefore able to understand their feelings about the situations being proposed to them. The environmental philosopher Val Plumwood and her thought on ethics of communication called for humans to learn nonhuman ways of communicating in order to build compassionate human-nonhuman relations. Eva Meijer took this further by connecting the need for communication with nonhuman beings with an ethics of autonomy; finding ways to understand what other beings are communicating in order to respect their right to refuse to participate. This ethics of communication and autonomy are key in my multispecies studio where I develop communication and respectful methods with the nonhuman beings in my processes. This involves finding noninvasive modes of engagement and respecting their right to refuse. For example, thinking-like-a-crow helped me create an unobtrusive video and sound recording system to document the creative activities of wild birds in my project Bird Park Survival Station. Through this approach, I was able to gain insight into their lives and their needs.

In terms of historical art practices, I’ve been influenced by the Fluxus movement of the 1960s-70s, as well as current field recordists and soundscape composers. Fluxus includes the instructional work of Yoko Ono, and the sound and performance work of John Cage. Some of their projects have influenced my ecological processes. For example, they integrated methods of indeterminacy to allow for emergent content in their art events. Their participatory art events, called Happenings, emerged through the involvement of audiences who co-created the events. The Fluxus methods helped me develop a way to think about multispecies involvement during artwork processes, such as in sound or video recording stages. It involves diminishing authorial (human) control during production processes, and thereby creating space for nonhuman contributions to emerge. For example, in my field recording processes, I use a simple instruction for myself to diminish my control and make room for emergent nonhuman sonic contributions. “In a calm and quiet way, set up the recording equipment. While recording, move away from the equipment and sit or stand quietly.” This instruction helps diminish my sonic presence and movement, and usually results in the calling animals resuming their activity and contributing to a great set of field recordings. I would call this is a form of creative reciprocity. It’s finding ways to communicate with nonhuman others about my intentions and making it known that I’m there in peace.

My most recent research and practice focuses on field recording, listening walks, and blending these with land-based practices. I’m particularly interested in how listening can be a place of learning nonhuman ways of knowing, and how this can lead to ecological care. I’ve been influenced by practitioners such as Bernie Krause, Hildegard Westerkamp, and Chris Watson and their ability to really hear the world. They have methods of field recording and soundscape composition that have the complexity of real world listening, and at the same time reflect the biodiversity of wild spaces.

RB: Can you say something about your body of work, Animal Lover? What are its aims and how has it developed?

JA: In the early days of working with the dogs and during our walks, I became more curious about other nonhuman life around me. I found myself paying more attention to birds and other wildlife around my neighbourhood. The dog walks were an excellent way to learn about nonhuman communities around my home, and they were a way for me to be more present in the world. Because of my early childhood PTSD, I have an inclination to worry about the future. The dog walks help me be fully present in the moment. They are a form of mindfulness during which I can find comfort. They also helped me develop a sense of ‘going with the flow’; let the event emerge. This has had a big influence on my multispecies work where the flow of engagement with nonhuman beings guides the art processes.

Still from video of Bird Park Survival Station showing the crow couple using the water dish with contact mic attached. Photo courtesy of Julie Andreyev, 2020.

Still from video of Bird Park Survival Station showing European starlings. Photo courtesy of Julie Andreyev, 2021.

Through the walks, I became more curious about my bird neighbours, including the crow couple who inhabit the territory that includes my home. As I became more interested in them, they became curious about me. My home is on a very small piece of land, so it doesn’t have a lot of outdoor space. But it does have a flat roof. So, I used the roof to build my Bird Park Survival Station project, beginning with the crows, and later involving other wild living birds. I leave water and food for them, and the crows reciprocate with small gifts. They’ve gifted a lot of objects over the years, including beautiful pieces of beach glass, little moss covered twigs, lovely pebbles, small tools, and bright pieces of trash. From the crows, I learned how objects and materials can be a way to communicate and reciprocate. In the spring, they’d leave gifts of twigs to signal that they’re building a nest. A few months later, the female crow would leave me a regurgitated pellet of food signaling that her eggs have hatched. I’d respond by leaving more food for them to be able to feed their family. In turn, they’d leave a little gift for me. Some of the gifts are quite funny, such as a found ear plug, a deck screw, a glass hash pipe.

Production photo of a salmon for Salmon People, 2018. Photo courtesy of Julie Andreyev.

The work with the birds led me to become much more interested in wildlife of the coastal region. For example, Simon and I worked with a sockeye salmon population in their spawning grounds at Adams River in the interior of British Columbia. I recorded underwater footage of them, and this led to a public new media art project called Salmon People, commissioned by Surrey Urban Screen an outdoor venue of the Surrey Art Gallery. The salmon helped me understand how they play a vital role in the health of the Fraser River, the surrounding forest ecosystems, and Pacific Ocean. It was through this expansion and growth in my research and practice that I came to refine my view on the interconnectedness of life and the creativity of organisms within ecosystems.

Photo of multimedia artwork Salmon People at Surrey Urban Screen, 2018. Photo courtesy of Blaine Campbell.

Between 2019-21, I was involved in a collaborative project called Wild Empathy that created immersive art experiences about old growth forest ecologies in the region. Some of the artwork from the project is on permanent display in Science World BC in their Search Gallery. Science World has a hollow trunk remnant of a 600 yr old Western red cedar. We created an immersive experience called they speak in whispers, inside the tree. Visitors can climb inside and hear and see an old growth forest from the point of view of the cedar. Looking up, they’ll see a virtual forest canopy and, as they listen, they’ll hear the biophony of an old growth forest. All the source material was created by the Wild Empathy team during visits to an ancient forest on Vancouver Island. The intension is to create an experience for visitors that reminds them of ancient forests, their unique biodiversity, and why it’s important to care for them.

Photo of the Wild Empathy project they speak in whispers installed in a remnant of an old growth cedar, Science World BC. Photo courtesy of Julie Andreyev, 2019.

With the dual crisis of climate change and habitat loss, the aim of my practice is to engage publics and communities to help develop respect and appreciation for wild habitats and biodiversity.

RB: Your book, Lessons From A Multispecies Studio, has the intriguing subtitle ‘Uncovering Ecological Understanding and Biophilia through Creative Reciprocity’. Can you say more about this and the contents of the book?

JA: The precarity of this moment with climate change, degradation of habitat and loss of biodiversity, and the need for change is what motivated me to write the book. I wanted to tell my stories about real-world encounters with animals, plant life, mineral beings, and forest ecosystems, and how they helped shift my own outlook. I believe that creative reciprocity is a way to learn about and gain appreciation for the wonderful planet we live on. Cultures based on colonial motivations and advanced capitalism can’t just keep taking from nature and nonhuman life. There needs to be a shift towards relationships of reciprocity, giving back to nature and nonhuman beings. This can be in the form of individual attitudes, community projects and policy, protections of wild spaces, and knowledge from indigenous ways of being. I believe art can participate in this relationship building, by modeling improved conditions.

In the book, I talk about creative reciprocity through several multispecies artworks. For instance, my project Bird Park Survival Station is a long-term tending project that involves providing food, water, plant life and perching locations for local and migratory birds and, in exchange, the birds participate in sound and video recording their activities in the park. The project has produced hundreds of short videos and an album called Bird Park Sessions. When I listen to the sound recordings or watch the videos, I learn about the birds’ needs, and I can make improvements to the Bird Park. The birds participate in the artwork, and I’m reciprocating by offering real world affordances for their needs.

Production photo of Tom for EPIC_Tom, 2013. Photo courtesy of Elisa Ferrari.

Production photo of Sugi for EPIC_Tom, 2013. Photo courtesy of Elisa Ferrari.

Production photo of Tom and Sugi doing vocal recording. Photo courtesy of Julie Andreyev, 2013.

The chapters in the book are structured in relation to the multispecies processes of four Animal Lover projects: dogs contributing lead vocals and animations for the performance project EPIC_Tom; crows co-creating a music score for Crow Stone Tone Poem; salmons co-directing cinematography for the multimedia installation Salmon People, and trees, birds, insects and frogs tuning the biophony of the soundscape for Biophilia. The chapters describe how each encounter takes into consideration the physical involvement of those beings and critically considers how they are represented in the artwork. This coupling of ethics of engagement and ethics of representation is crucial to modelling improved conditions for viewing-reading-listening publics. How the animals and plant life are treated in the production stages is key to modeling ethics of engagement, and how they are represented in the artworks is important to make evident their creative contributions for publics.

RB: In the book you use the phrase biophilic attention. What do you mean by this?

JA: In contemporary life, especially in urban environments, I think many people find it difficult to pay attention to nonhuman life. It takes conscious effort. Biophilic attention is a kind of two-eyed seeing: an outward-looking attentiveness, combined with inward reflection. For example, the Japanese practice of Shinrinyoku (Forest Bathing) involves spending time in a forest or park and using all one’s senses to experience the forest community. Biophilic attention takes this a bit further by inviting consciousness of what one is feeling. It leads to an understanding of how our senses, states of mind, feelings and emotions are co-created with more-than-human life. For instance, when I involve my students in a forest listening walk or field recording session, I ask them to reflect on their experience and what they’re feeling. They usually describe a sense of calm, relaxation and even joyfulness. They all seem to be in a good mood after these sessions. Biophilic attention involves understanding that this joy is co-created by natural systems and nonhuman beings.  It is an ecological worldview.

Production photo for Branching Songs of Ɂiy shenchu forest on the Sunshine Coast, a forest at risk of logging. Photo courtesy of Keira Madsen, 2022.

Production photo for Branching Songs of Ɂiy shenchu forest on the Sunshine Coast, a forest at risk of logging. Photo courtesy of Keira Madsen, 2022.

RB: You also use the phrase multispecies art. Can you say what this involves?

JA: All my artwork and research involves nonhuman life in some way, but declaring a multispecies studio has a different kind of intentionality. Multispecies art, as I practice it, involves creating processes for recognizing more-than-human contributions. The multispecies studio is not literally a physical indoor space like the historical understanding of an artist’s studio. Instead, it involves outdoor spaces and visiting the habitats of wildlife. It is a process and an attitude. The studio is the world, the forests, the walk, the opportunity to listen and create outdoors. The instruction I mentioned earlier that I use for my field recording sessions allows me to assume a passive and respectful role – sitting quietly and listening so that the soundscape of the forest can be recorded. The recorded results were not determined by me in advance. Instead, they’re realized through the motivations of the calling animals, the soundings of trees and other lifeforms. Using this method, the will of the human artist (me) is held in check, and the agency and creativity of nonhuman participants emerge. This multispecies process leads to a learned attitude, one of humbleness, openness, and connection.

RB: Why do you think the Anthropocentric view is wrong?

JA: The Anthropocene is a term used to describe the geological era in which we live, marked by the realization that humans have become such a force that we’re affecting the Earth’s air, lands, oceans, climate. At its core, in modern Eurocentric societies that typify this era, is an entrenched view of nature as a means to fuel global capitalist-colonial systems. The anthropocentric worldview justifies the colonization and exploitation of ecosystems and nonhuman life seen as ‘resources’ available for human expansion and prosperity, and readily available as free labour. Anthropocentric views are based on the naturalization of a false truth – that humans are naturally more valuable than other beings. Historically, this ideology derives from Western philosophical, religious and cultural beliefs regarding what it means to be ‘human’. The definition of human has shifted over time but shares a reliance on various problematic beliefs in human exclusivity with regard to reason, intelligence, soul, emotion, sentience, language, culture or creativity. This has led to the unecological worldview typified by the human/nature divide; that humans are separate and distinct from nature and have dominion over it. Anthropocentric views determine hierarchies of worth for nonhuman lifeforms and are used to justify all sorts of harms, such as in today’s meat and dairy industries, animal testing, soil degradation, monocropping agricultures, forest clear-cutting and other forms of abuse. A view that holds humans as separate and exclusive is not only ecologically problematic but evolutionarily untrue. The outcomes are tremendously detrimental to nonhuman life and consequential for human populations.

Anthropocentric views include a belief in an idealized form of the human based on the European adult male model, and this ideal has been used to marginalize individuals that don’t measure up. Not only has it been used to dominate and exploit nonhuman life and nature but also women, BIPOC, LGBTQ+ peoples, peoples of differing faiths, disabled, and children. Within recent decades, the sustainability of anthropocentric worldviews has been called into question across disciplines. Scientists have found that nonhuman lifeforms share traits previously believed to be exclusively human – reason, intelligence, emotion, sentience, language, creativity – and have diversities that are intrinsically valuable: species-specific perceptual and cognitive abilities, communications, cultures and traditions. Intersectional justice has linked the interconnected sufferings of humans and nonhumans; decolonial methodologies have critiqued colonial impulses that oppress humans and nonhumans alike; and indigenous methodologies have contested anthropocentric worldviews by acknowledging the value of more-than-human ways of knowing. In their various critiques, such forward-looking discourses call for de-anthropocentric approaches as it is now clear that the ideologies endemic to the Anthropocene can no longer hold. I believe there needs to be a shift away from anthropocentrism towards biocentrism, respect and care for nonhuman worlds.

RB: What do you think is the future role of humanity (and art) in regard to the understanding of the interconnectedness of human and non-human livelihoods?

JA: A broad cultural transformation in thought and action must take place if we are to move towards a future of holistic planetary survival. This transformation, which I think is finally happening, must include a correction in thought that rejects notions of humans as separate from nature, and accepts human embeddedness in the extensive natural systems of the Earth. The transformation includes a movement away from extraction-based capitalism and towards social and ecological justice on a planetary scale. It must include a correction in feeling through new kinship models based on empathic and compassionate relations with nonhuman life. Art can help this movement through applied approaches to help shape and evolve human outlooks, emotions and actions.

In the larger scheme of things, art can seem insignificant in relation to the scale of ecological collapse and the prospect of irreversible climate change. But it’s important to make individual and group efforts because these can provide incremental positive steps towards the crucial shifts needed to affect broader cultural viewpoints and societal norms. Individual change can involve critical reflection on choice and action, such as in the foods we eat, the consumption we choose, and the travel we undertake. It can also involve an enhancement in perceptual and emotional capabilities. And this expanded sensibility, modeled through art practice and art in the public can help with the effort. For example, biophilic attention can be a way to join with multispecies communities, creating immediately felt change in our own bodies. Individual transformations can be communicated and shared, and this can grow into grass-roots change that can inspire communities.

Simon Overstall and Julie Andreyev testing a Branching Songs performance at Robert’s Creek, Sunshine Coast. Photo courtesy of Keira Madsen, 2022.

RB: What projects are you currently working on?

JA: My current project Branching Songs involves a great team of research assistants from my university, (Emily Carr University of Art & Design) and from Simon Fraser University, in collaboration with Vancouver New Music and the Sunshine Coast Arts Council. The aim of the project is to listen to trees for the forests, and use art to draw attention to the need to conserve wild spaces. The project involves listening workshops in forested locations, composed soundscapes, and on-site sound performances in collaboration with trees. It focuses in on trees and forests at risk, such as the urban forests in Burnaby, BC being cleared for the Trans Mountain Pipeline (TMX) expansion project, and the forests on the Sunshine Coast—an area particularly hard hit by the destructive coupling of drought from climate change and intensive logging. For instance, the soundscape Hummingbird at Lost Creek (2021) commemorates the Anna’s hummingbirds who were nesting in the area when the TMX began clearing that land. Biologists found evidence of the birds’ nests and temporarily halted the logging. The soundscape demonstrates the complexity of the real-world location with the intrusion of anthropogenic forces on the biophony of the woods. We’re developing exhibitions, workshops and performances to take place in 2023 in Vancouver and Sunshine Coast.

Production photo of Andreyev and research assistants Sam Street and Keira Madsen, field recording for soundscape Hummingbird at Lost Creek, in the lands being cleared for the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion project. Photo courtesy of Leanne Plisic, 2021

Production photo of Andreyev preparing for a performance of Branching Songs. Photo courtesy of Keira Madsen, 2022.

This month, we’re testing a few Branching Songs workshops and artworks at New Adventures in Sound Art, South River, Ontario. I don’t know the forests of South River, but I’m excited to find out about them and get to know a few trees.

Art, Creativity, Ecology, Environment, Imagination, Mind, Nature, Science