Symbiogenesis and the pursuit of "Otherness"

This is not the usual video from me. Instead it is an essay about our relationship with dogs that I put together for graduate school. Consequently, it may not be exactly what you are looking for. But I promise to circle back to my essays about life in Norway, soon.

For most owners, a dog is an essential part of everyday life. On any day, on most any street, you can observe what biologist Lynn Margulis called symbiogenesis -- the cooperation between species in order to increase their survival. Pet, owner; animal, human; canid, hominid … two species brought together in in daily life.

When you watch the co-habitation of space and time between a dog and owner, there is communication. Through touch, gesture, sound, and motion dog and human have a conversation that is in neither dog-space nor man-space. It is a alternative “shared space” where they meet in the middle. Donna Haraway describes these relations as “significant otherness”. Dogs and owner occupy this otherness without knowing how to describe it. Which begs the question, can technology provide insights into the patterns of this incongruent translation between a dog and human? What is the role of computers in unlocking these partial connections?