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/