The Compassion Manifesto: An Ethics for Art + Design and Animals

Abstract

In January 2015, an undergraduate student—I’ll call D—at Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECUAD) submitted plans for a project to be installed in the campus’ Abe Rogatnick Media Gallery. The project was to involve live captive birds. Upon hearing of the proposal, a group of faculty and staff, troubled by the birds’ captivity and their potential harm, voiced their concerns. The faculty and staff who oversaw the exhibitions for the gallery unanimously rejected the proposal. The Compassion Manifesto: An Ethics for Art + Design and Animals was written as a response to the proposal and the larger context of contemporary art and design practices that involve nonhuman animals. There are tendencies in art and design genres, such as bioart, to exploit living beings in aesthetic experiments aimed at exploring human conditions. The Compassion Manifesto critiques practices that result in captivity, harm, and death of nonhumans and proposes an ethics of care and compassion as alternatives to anthropocentric methods. The Compassion Manifesto was inspired by earlier manifestos, such as by the historical art group the Situationists International1 and the recent Animal Manifesto by Marc Bekoff.2