After premiering Bird Song Diamond in the 2015 New York Electronic Art Festival, Victoria Vesna spent a few months in Japan as artist in residence where she had an opportunity to further develop this work in the largest virtual reality space in the world. In parallel, she worked with top engineers and a physicist on the Bird Song Mimic piece that was created first for the Times Square venue. The Harvestworks Artworks and Experiences exhibition on Governors Island will show some of the most recent advancements.
Saturdays, Sundays and Holiday Mondays noon – 6 pm
May 28 – July 25th, 2016
Nolan Park Building 5B on Governors Island
June 25th BSD Experience Workshop on Saturday June 25th 3 – 5 pm [register]:
At the workshop, join Bird Song Diamond team leaders Charles Taylor, Victoria Vesna, and BirdSong Mimic sound designer Joel Ong as they reveal their interdisciplinary approaches to working with birdsong, culminating in a sound walk and field mapping exercise.
Tuesday July 19th: BIRD SONG MIMIC – An Art/Science Collaboration and a Bi-coastal bird/human communication event
LOCAL: Harvestworks @ 6 pm – 10 pm
LONG DISTANCE: Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve, Los Angeles (4pm, PST)
Phone: 212-431-1130 Subway: F/M/D/B Broadway/Lafayette, R to Prince, #6
to Bleecker
Artists Victoria Vesna and Max Kazemzadeh in NYC communicating with Charles Taylor, evolutionary biologist and artificial life expert, in Los Angeles. The artists based in NYC will connect in real time with Charles Taylor and the collective in Los Angeles for an east/west hands-on demonstration of communication and birdsong sharing. BirdSong Mimic is being presented as part of the LA: Currents Biennial (http://www.currentla.org/public-programs/ucla-art-sci/)
More information:
Bird Song Diamond is inspired by the research of evolutionary biologist Charles Taylor (http://taylor0.biology.ucla.edu) and recently was installed at the Large Space in Tsukuba(January, 2016) designed by engineer Hiroo Iwata (link to EMP Large space — announcement of the event.)
In 2011, Victoria Vesna was invited by evolutionary biologist and artificial life expert Charles Taylor to join his highly interdisciplinary research group and help with the outreach for “Mapping Acoustic Network of Birds”. It took her three full years of absorbing, learning and going along with the researchers recording and mapping bird sounds early mornings in Santa Monica Mountains to start conceptualizing the piece. She noticed that her relationship to space changed as she was hearing bird songs in open spaces, both in natural and urban environments, and became keenly aware of how we have edited this acoustic richness out of our daily experience.
By working closely with Taylor and his collaborators, most notably physicist Takashi Ikegami, the work emerged as a meditation on our relationship to birds in natural environment as well as to the ever expanding number of artificial birds – drones. After installing first versions of the installation in New York, she got an opportunity from engineer Hiroo Iwata to envision the project in his recently established Large Space – the largest virtual reality space in the world. The focus here was on creating an immersive sound and visual environment that allows a group of people to interact and influence the sound composed by Itsuki Doi and the flocking patterns programmed in Iwata’s lab. The project is envisioned to be habitat and space specific and the bird recordings used in Tsukuba were given to the group by researcher Reiji Suzuki.
More information about the ongoing project can be found here:
http://victoriavesna.com/index.php?p=projects&item=1
Additional information on the collaborators:
Victoria Vesna: http://victoriavesna.com
Charles Taylor: https://www.eeb.ucla.edu/facultyspotlight.php?FacultyKey=753
Max Kazemzadeh: http://www.maxkazemzadeh.com
Joel Ong: http://www.arkfrequencies.com
Bird Song Diamond: Project Overview from Art|Sci Center on Vimeo.