Technical rider [PDF]

The installation consists of parallel activity and stillness and of visuals and sounds. The audience is invited to be the performer by mimicking songs of birds. What are the birds saying?

Being habitat specific, the group chose cave dwelling birds as Fort Jay at Governor’s Island is dark and cave like. In response to sound and to stillness, three layers of video emerge -- sonograms taken from Taylor’s lab, drone videos of shot imagining how birds see and drone videos of large collection of people gathering for celebration, protest or to mourn. Bird sounds overlay these bird eye views that have now become a way we view ourselves as a collective. How do the birds see us?

Parabolic dishes spatially separate the gallery space making two transceiving stations at opposite corners of the room. The parabolic shape is a subtle but important visual symbol to acoustic science fieldwork, which almost always involves the use of parabolic shotgun microphones. In each transceiving station visitors are invited into communication with the system. They make a call, and enter into conversation with the visitor at the other station.

Their sounds affect the evolution of an artificial language that is being created and replayed when there is more than 2 people joining the system. When there is only one participant the system defaults to a loop, leaving the person speaking to themselves, and the language ceases to evolve. An audiovisual organism evolves from the birdsong human-bird mimicry making grammatical structures that emerge from conversations between birdsong field recordings collected by Taylor’s group and human samples that are collected throughout the duration of the exhibition. The artificial sonic language evolves in unison with a growing diamond lattices that are projected on the floor across from one another, serving as a visual representation of evolution.