MetroDogs: the heart in the machine
Dogs in the Moscow Metro, some say, have evolved a unique sentience: they navigate a human-scaled infrastructure and interpret human motives there. Such assertions about dogs, and encounters with them on public transit, invoke Soviet-era moral projects that wove sentiment (‘compassion’) and affect (‘attention’) through technical dreams: to erase material suffering and physical violence, to traverse the globe and the cosmos, to end wars and racisms. Dogs, after all, helped defeat the Nazis and took part in the space race. In the Metro now, their wags and barks stir debate about access and exclusion, resonating across assemblages of materials and meanings, social connections and signs. MetroDogs invite us to theorize the ways people extend connections in the moment well beyond the here-and-now.