Participatory experiment

I decided to experiment with a human interaction. I realised that the project up until this point had been a collaboration between myself and the birds. I wanted to mutate the project to form a collaboration with a human audience. I formed these collaborations working with shell shock theatre company and the forest fringe micro festivals. In Swansea and Bristol I invited the audience to "come and have conversations with birds", the audience then came out to a specific location on a patch of grass within both city centres. I then performed my bird song to the audience, then handed out paper and pens to the audience and asked them to draw the bird in their mind accompanying them with bird song as they drew, I then asked the audience to write down(in onomatopoeia) the sound that their bird made, This was followed by myself asking the audience to each read out their bird sounds.

A conversation was then commenced in which I played my recorded bird song and the audience replied with their bird song.

the video's audio is not up to scratch here but the video shows a trace of what occurred.

Traces of Participatory Projects.

Here are some photos along with some audio snippets of audience reactions to the conversations with birds participatory experiments

Some other Contemporary projects based around bird and human interaction

Marcus Coates. Utilises ancient shamanistic theory in an attempt to contact the natural world in order to better understand the human world and human psyche.



Nic Green: I am finishing an MSc in human ecology and have studied Ecopsychology as part of it. My main area of focus in this is how art as a place of agency can be a spiritual praxis, or a practice of reconnection with others and the other-than-human world.

Nic Green did a performance strictly for the birds the documented for human viewers to witness. Green became a bird table and waited for birds to land and eat.

http://www.nicgreen.org.uk/

reengaging with humans, mutating the project for human participation

So far the project has been a collaboration with the Birds, I decided the project needed to have human collaborative elements, In other projects I have been working on, I have been exploring into creativity through participatory(or interactive) projects. As such I mutated Conversations with Birds into a participatory project where a human audience took the place of the birds as collaborators for the work, exploring memory and imagination whilst working with creativity. I became a conductor for the creative output of the individuals involved.

I did the performance as usual in front of the audience/collaborators, then asked the audience to draw the bird they had in their mind, I the asked the audience to write down (in onomatopoeia terms) the sound that they thought their bird would make, using these sounds myself and the audience then engaged in a conversation, Myself with my recorded bird song and the audience with their newly acquired bird sounds

Back to a more natural environment,

I started to do more videos in a highly familiar environment for me: My parents garden, This is where the project began taking shape as i recorded and playedback the utterances of different birds that entered the garden conversations formed and i soon found myself talking to the birds, full conversations with replies from the birds,

Into the city, juxtaposing sound in the urban environment

I took the recordings that I had made in a rural countryside environment to the city, and tried my performances in this urban environment, this was a test that was a learning curve, I found that the urban environment didn't lend its self well to these performances, I felt more in the background of everyday life and it did not emphasise the birds utterances in the way i had hoped, I wanted both people and the birds to engage with it. This learning curve helped to develop the project.

First performance, February

For Conversations with Birds I started out by recording bird song and my intention was to use a P.A. system to blast the sound back into the environment, this was going o be a one off unrecorded performance. I soon changed my ideas when I realized that no one would actually know that this performance had occurred(which was my intention) but this almost introverted approach would not have worked. I decided to use a different approach by purchasing a megaphone to emphasize the recorded bird song, i then used video to document these performances.