bcox /thesisproject /abstractnew

Lea Cox, Abstract, MFA Thesis Project

Becoming Bird: Sound, Image, Movement

Becoming Bird uses sound, image, and movement to explore how birds encounter the world and how humans perceive birds. The thesis examines how we as humans might take the point of view of birds, and thereby enter a different consciousness of that world we share with this “other”, beings who were living on Earth long before we arrived. We have never known a world without birds; however, we are now implicated as the primary cause of one of the major mass extinctions of life forms on this planet, one indicator being the disappearance of bird species. Many of the extinctions and declines are not even noticed because humans are increasingly disconnected from the sounds, smells, sights, and subtle clues of the natural world, as our activities are increasingly mediated by electronic communication devices. Hearing the sound of birds is one of the ways that humans can still be awakened with wonder and delight to the world outside of human-produced electronic and mechanical sounds.

My work is a triptych, with three separate pieces unified by bird song, presented in three different modes of experience: direct experience in nature, a virtual experience on a website, and an art installation. Culturally the triptych has appeared in many forms, such as the medieval triptychs that folded inward to reveal a different image when folded than when unfolded; or the idea of a trilogy, involving a cycle with beginning, middle, and end. The number 3 also suggests the idea of the stratum, a borderline joining two discontinuous episodes, or two evolutionarily discontinuous life forms, bird and human.

The marks produced by the participants, along with video clips of interviews with the participants are placed into a website, a virtual tour of the UCSC arboretum. This aspect of my project is an example of web art, and relates to a community of participants. The direct outdoor experiences of the participants are transformed into public collaborative art.

The third experience is musical composition made of birdsongs. The birdsong composition is presented first as a concert, in an enclosed music recital hall. The three-part music composition, made up of birdsong, begins with ambient nature recording in the first movement, linked to images of the area from which the sounds were recorded. I recorded these images at dawn in June, 2007, at two different habitats in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, wetlands in Sierra Valley and forest at Yuba Pass. I have layered both the sounds and the images from these two habitats. The second section is a recording of my voice, that morphs to frequencies and tempo to mimic birdsong. The images in this section are images of birds from art history. The third section is made up of six short experimental variations of six individual birdsongs obtained by manipulating tempo, pitch, and position of bird song phrases and notes. The images show each individual bird as its song is presented. This is an evolution of birdsong to human music, using recorded birdsong and computer software as the musical instrument.

My thesis project is a unique opportunity to research both the scientific and the cultural aspects of birds, to reassemble this information into an immersive artistic synthesis of visual and sound art, direct observation, scientific knowledge and new media technology, critically but playfully questioning human-bird relationships.