I’m proposing an artwork presentation of the piece Etudes for birds for the 2025 conference "Taboo - Transgression - Transcendence in Art & Science”. It is part of my ongoing artistic research on language, translations, sound, mimicry, empathy and interspecies communication.
In the piece Etudes for birds I study language, mimicry and interspecies communication. I’m interested in translations and the knowledge that can be gained or lost in the translation process. I’m also interested in the relationship between the original and (fabricated) imitation.
One of the starting points of the work is the idea of mimicry as an interspecies pidgin language. For the piece I’ve studied bird language and spectrograms as visualizations of the bird sounds. First I’ve imitated the bird vocalizations by drawing, then translated the drawings into sounds as spectrograms and finally collected the drawn sounds into a constructed soundscape. I’ve also played the drawn sounds for the birds in the Central Park of Helsinki.
Through mimicry I try to understand the point of view of the other; I try to become someone else to feel empathy for other beings.
The sound piece can be listened with the the documentation of the piece at:
Études pour les oiseaux / Etudes for birds / Etydejä linnuille
2020
Sound installation; sound piece 2min 50 sec, a seat made of a ghillie blanket and a zine
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Hosting Institution
Supported by
Ionian University
Secretariat - Conference TTT Webteam
Tsirigoti Square 7, 49100 Corfu
Ionian Islands Region, Greece
av-ttt@ionio.gr
