Dogification (work in progress)
HD video (color, sound)



Logline: In a world of dogified subjects, everyday hounds work to heal, find purpose, and get the lives they want despite themselves.

Dogification is a video work illustrating a world of “dogified” subjects. The film treats psychological behaviorism and its cognitivist successors as theory and infrastructural condition - a governing logic through which subjectivity is evaluated and managed. Dogification aims to extend that logic to its limit, positioning animal-training methodologies in relation to contemporary psychological interventions and visualizing a therapeutic society where beings are corrected and disciplined towards their ultimate functions. 

The video draws from psychological cinema, including a comparative analysis of The Gloria Films through use of audio from one of the film’s three segments: the REBT model (a precursor to contemporary modalities that focus on cognitive and behavioral mangement) with therapist Albert Ellis and client Gloria. If behaviorism functions as a dominant metric for human value, what becomes of the subject who fails to perform? What happens when behaviorist frameworks are mapped onto unlikely figures? 

Inspired by a text of the same name by S. Warren, Dogification stretches the structuring logic of behavioral therapies to an absurd, inevitable conclusion.