First Tortoise POV's

The tortoise cam videos represent the continued collapsing of the spatial scope over the course of the experiments. I already analyzed her paths over the entire apartment and her decision making process in my "pentagon of stimuli", now i sought to get even closer and even embody the subject. I feel that one of the inherent flaws of the other experiments is that they still show the tortoise reacting to our world. Perhaps to best understand the creature it would be necessary to visualize the space as the tortoise reacting to her world. Instead of labeling rooms like, "kitchen" for instance, perhaps i should have taken a more tortoise centered approach and referred to it as "big white smelly, warm room."

I desired a way to represent world from the tortoise's perspective so that maybe, when examining the environment from this novel point of view new truths would be uncovered revealing her inner motivations.

One way to accomplish, this task was to create a set of cameras which would allow a viewer to intimately follow along with the tortoise on her voyage around the apartment. One of the cameras would be offset and directed towards Vanya to permit the monitoring of her every movement. The other would be mounted directly onto her shell to give the experience of almost looking through the tortoise's eyes.


The "first tortoise" perspective was achieved by mounting a bullet camera and tiny microphone atop a soft velcro harness on the tortoise's shell. This tiny camera fed video through a lightweight wire to my larger camera which acted as a recording device.

Ideally these videos would have been created using a wireless camera so that i would not have to follow her around, but i was able to stay about 5-6 feet away from her, and I do not think she noticed. Also it would have been good to be able to mount a camera directly to her head so that you would be able to see whatever she was actually looking at, but cameras aren't quite small enough to not horribly encumber the tortoise.