having-seen-snake was filmed in Pittsburgh. The film used as its starting point an encounter between the artist and a garter snake. This meeting, where the body of the artist responded by intuitively entering into a state of stillness and hyper-sensing—as one creature responding to another—and the subsequent arrival of language and with it distinctions and separations, informed the two different styles explored in the film. The first, a more surreal imprint of place and sensory experience is juxtaposed with a recording of the alcohol house at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. This footage centres around a new species of snake that herpetologist José Pardial had recently discovered in the Amazon and is accompanied by an interview with Pardial that describes the process of designating a name and what it means to transfer something from the unspoken into the realm of the spoken. The film ends with the song of the Rothschild’s mynah recorded at the National Aviary in Pittsburgh. The bird, endemic to Bali, is currently on the brink of extinction due to poaching.