Adam Gourlay

Skippy

Skippy the dog, an indexical sign.

“Every night, my wife and I walk our dog, Skippy, in our neighbourhood. When I call his name, he responds. He responds differently depending on the tone of my voice. He hears his own name, in varying tones, and this can carry meaning for a creature that does not know the term “Skippy”, nor the modern English alphabet, or any sign representing him for that matter. He does, however, know where we walk, and he knows around what time we walk. There is a loop that is created when we decide to walk Skippy along certain paths around where we live: we humans follow a path created by other humans and Skippy walks in this direction smelling things that are interesting to him and creating new smells for other dogs. Then every night he wants to go back to where these smell interactions occurred and to continue the process, which encourages us humans to walk this way, and so on and so forth creating semi-consistent paths through time in space. As we repeat this process, ours and Skippy’s movements through time and space are being tracked by my phone.I find it interesting how a living creature will have a symbolic sign, one that has no natural link to the creature but rather is an arbitrary link between an object and a meaning. I wanted to explore adopting a more indexical sign for Skippy, one that represents some point within some physical space where both Skippy and his sign have existed. What I drew on to make this piece were the semiotic theories of Jakob von Uexküll and Roland Barthes. Uexküll’s theories explore the notions of Umwelts and Umgebungs. Umwelt refers to a species’ perception of an environment and their response to it, and umgebung refers to an umwelt as seen by an observer. Like Barthes, I was reflecting on this theme of avoiding the confusion between nature and culture, as well as this distinction between the signifier and the signified. Skippy, the name written down, is a signifier and doesn’t exist outside language. However, Skippy, the dog himself, is real and exists outside of language and culture. Our culture’s recording of dogs (names, licences, etc.) does not exist in nature. As I was considering this project, I connected with Lippard and Chandler’s reflection that signs that convey ideas are not things in themselves but symbols of things. I think that creating a sign to represent a being in this way, that is always in flux, always changing, poses that this sign for Skippy can function as a medium, rather than an end in itself. Thus, I sought to create a more indexical sign for Skippy, basing it on my umgebung of Skippy’s umwelt, and one that would reflect more of the natural existence of Skippy in influencing his sign, rather than our culture’s arbitrary recording of his existence.”