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Artist Statement My name is Samantha Rosenbaum and I am a senior at Bard College. Between Sunday April 14 - Monday April 22, 2013, an installation was built, opened to the public, and taken down on Ludlow Lawn at Bard College. This installation was a part of my Senior Project. It was called Dolphin Installation. I loved creating this installation. It allowed me to advocate something that I so truly believe in advocating for: the freedom of cetaceans. Cetaceans, a biological group that includes dolphins and whales, are not meant to be in captivity. Currently hundreds of whales and dolphins are imprisoned in captive facilities all around the world. The cetacean captivity industry is cruel and abuses cetaceans to generate a profit. I really wanted humans to know how awful it is for a whale and dolphin to be in captivity; thus I created an installation that mimics the experience of a captive environment found at marine facilities. By entering the Dolphin Installation I wanted humans to experience only a fraction of what it feels like to be a cetacean in captivity. I hope that after humans experienced the installation, they will join me in spreading the word about the damages caused to whales and dolphins being in captivity. Although the installation was physically built in a week, it was a year process full of research, design planning, outreach, fundraising, and much more. And although I always planned on the installation being temporary, I did not plan on how much I was going to miss working on it and having it active on Ludlow Lawn. I am sad that it is over but at the same time I am so proud that I created something that spread awareness about cetaceans being in captivity. I think art has the ability to challenge animal injustices and to notify humans about important issues. By constructing and opening up the Dolphin Installation to the public, I hope that those who experienced the installation will be more aware of the physical and ethical wrongs of keeping cetaceans in captivity. Ignorance allows cruelty to ...

Cetaceans are not meant to be in captivity. There are facilities all over the world that hold whales and dolphins as prisoners in man-made enclosures. The practice of keeping cetaceans in captivity is a major controversial issue, since many scientific and moral based arguments suggest that keeping them in confinement is inhumane and ethically wrong. There are those who can provide dozens of reasons for why cetaceans should be in captivity, including entertainment, research, or conservation based reasons. Underneath these reasons there is a larger one: a way of thinking called speciesism. Speciesism is practiced and believed by some humans towards non-human animals. Speciesism is the idea that membership in the human species is the criterion for moral standing: simply being human gives us superiority over all other beings. Among many actions, this means that humans approve and accept the concept that nonhuman animals can be placed in facilities that are not their natural habitat for our curiosity and entertainment. Captive dolphins and whales find themselves in the inhumane situations because most people have placed Homo sapiens' interest over cetaceans' freedom. Reducing a cetacean's freedom can be compared to reducing the freedom of women or racial minorities: in her book, The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery, Marjorie Spiegel writes, "The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men." Speciesism has made cetaceans into display-only-beings. When really cetaceans are individuals with self-fulfilling, purposeful, and socially engaging lives in the wild: they do not exist to be put in captivity. Cetaceans need better treatment from those who cause them the most pain, humans. Cetaceans suffer many injustices and pains from human activity, but captivity is one of the worst. The cetacean captivity industry is a villainous business. The industry involves traumatic captures, small concrete tanks, high ...