An Octopus Takes a Turn with the Camera: Spontaneous Animal Videos as Multispecies Collaborations

This article explores the political significance of “spontaneous animal videos” through the example of “Octopus Steals My Video Camera and Swims Off with It (While It’s Recording)” (Victor Huang, 2010). These videos create opportunities to re-examine and reflexively engage with human–animal dynamics and responsibilities in the space of the filmmaking encounter. Produced inadvertently by nonhuman animals seizing cameras of their own volition, these videos are distinct from other kinds of multispecies imagery circulating on the Internet. They are multispecies achievements: something humans and animals accomplish together. However, the animals’ involvement in their making remains underexplored. It is argued that these instances of playful resistance are concealed as an aesthetic effect that promises to incite transformations only in the human viewer. Returning to the circumstances of their creation, the article uses Sara Ahmed’s framework of “the strange encounter,” to argue that animals are encountered and reproduced as strangers, especially when a camera is present, and when the animal in question is an octopus. By seizing control of cameras, animals are redefining the terms of their own representation. In this case, an uncooperative octopus turns a disruption into a creative act. Incorporating themself into the footage, the octopus claims a subjective position in it, and the story of its making. At once playful acts of resistance and collaborative cinematic practices, spontaneous animal videos nudge us to expand the domain of politics and reflect on the composition of the social from which it develops. Finally, it is argued that they visualize a creaturely solidarity that not only is possible but is already under way.