Listening to birds between meetings

Dana's work is always so delicate, inspiring and challenging. Here is her WildUrban Radio. My take on it is that you just need to turn the knob to listen to a variety of birds from your area. The radio is mapped directly to your location and you can hear the smallest species directing you closer to them whether you are going North or South ....
I have ordered one of those from her and will update on my productivity level asap.

Talking with owls using mobile phones

This project explores technologies to augment our understanding of bird populations in order to allow these populations to speak to us about their habitat. In particular, in a collaboration between the MIT Media Laboratory and Maine Audubon, the researchers use cellular technology to augment the process by which volunteers collect information for an annual owl survey in Maine.

The core methodology was developed in a regional pilot census of Connecticut's owl population demonstrating that the audio quality of cell phones is sufficient for the discovery and interaction with owls.

In Maine, they plan to deploy cell nodes for calling and recording owls, and provide an interface for the public to vicariously participate in the census from the internet. They hope to gain insight into the social networking processes of collaborative interpretation and annotation of a shared database; and knowledge representation for the bird-census domain.

The cellular-based survey may also provide insights into the hearing range of owls, duplication of vocalizing individual responses in adjacent experiment sites, the response rate of owls due to current weather or human presence, and comparison between trigger-based and naturally occurring responses in surveys.

The Owl project's web site.
This work is created by Dale Joachim, Susan Gallo , Glorianna Davenport.


Posted by Cati Vaucelle
♥ Architectradure
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Modern bird houses

I could not resist, these bird houses are awesome. Birds deserve architecture too!

Design Commission’s The Modern Bird, an exhibition of designer birdhouses created by more than 20 of the top artists and design studios worldwide, will show how far contemporary visionaries have taken the traditional wooden birdhouse.
The structures—of laminated wood, plastic, clay, and even stainless steel—include several designed especially for this show. They range in size from a six-inch creation to a 2-foot birdhouse.
The eclectic mix includes Modern Birdhouses’ sleek architect-designed homes made with oil-finished teak, stainless steel screws, and sandblasted aluminum roofs. For a little whimsy, there’s even J. Schatz’s colorful ceramic birdhouses shaped like eggs. Seattle artists Erich Ginder and Toi Sennhauser are also contributing original pieces to the show.

Web site of the commission

Nina Katchadourian

Natural Car Alarms

I'm a great believer in misunderstandings as fruitful starting points for art works. Moments of confusion can be incredibly expansive mental spaces, where you hover in a kind of vastness, trying to extend this state as long as possible until some clue provides context, or some bit of information anchors you once again to what's actually going on, delineating and determining what you should be understanding about things. Most people have had the experience of sleeping in an unfamiliar place and for a moment having no idea where you are when you wake up. Standing there in the rainforest was a bit like this: I tried to stay with both interpretations of that sound for as long as I could, but I also made a mental note to remember the error for later.

Multi media artist Nina Katchadourian is interested in communication and intervenes inspired by her disorienting experiences.

Helen Mirra recommended me to look at Natural Car Alarms. Nina Katchadourian describes her experience of walking through the rainforest, feeling disoriented and suddenly hearing a car alarm. The car alarm sound was the one of a bird. She later decided to reproduce this effect in an urban setting and selected shockingly alarm-like and also distinctly still bird-like sounds that will be played by cars in the urban space.

Natural Car Alarms is a project consisting of three cars rigged with modified car alarms whose typical six-tone siren has been replaced with a similar one made only of bird calls. Some of the bird sounds are shockingly electronic in character; others are very bird-like in the quality of their sound, but very alarm-like in their patterning. The idea for the project was in fact the result of a misunderstanding’s heard a bird in the jungles of Trinidad that I mistook for a car alarm—and the project took up the severely urban car alarm as an element that was in fact completely natural to the Long Island City landscape where the piece was exhibited several times in summer and fall of 2002.

In the case of the process of this piece, it is fascinating to me how the disorientation can come from nature and the familiar from the industrial.

Buried

In this project, sensor modules are hidden within snow elements such as rocks, pavements, icy beach. Each sensor module contains pre-recorded chirping birds. Each module is composed of a set of wireless speakers and plays a pre-recorded cardinal bird - Many thanks to Cornell lab of Ornithology for their great collection of free bird sounds.

When a passerby travels through her environment, she observes her surroundings. Hearing birds coming from the snow she declares: “this is lovely”. She does not yet connect the meaning of the two. She is projected within her idealistic view of her environment, snow and birds symbolizing magic.
She tries to obtain her curious information: “I know the sound comes from the ground, but where?” In a few minutes she notices that the sounds come from the snow, and realizes the fact: this is unusual and disorienting.

This project exemplifies the disconnection between natural elements of the outside; the birds symbolizing the spring, the snow symbolizing the winter. The two are reunited in a dramatic way. I shift the location of the birds from the trees to the ground. I shift the seasonal sounds from winter to spring. In this piece I selected a large landscape, nude from anything else than a winter tree, with no leaves, just branches. I bury the sounds into the ground, in the snow.

I find that we are disconnected from reality. Aesthetic endeavors create magic, but magic that distances us from facts. I use this magic in nature, elements that are natural but yet inspire us: snow, sounds of birds. I put them together to create this aestheticised tragedy.



Project I made for the sculpture studio : outside