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Available for Exhibition - email: admin AT brighter DOT org
Birds of America is a short videotape which shows the opening and closing of a series of drawers in a cabinet containing specimens of rare and extict birds. The actions of the human protagonist are methodical, the soundtrack eerie.
Prior to colonisation by Europeans birds such as the now extinct Passenger Pigeon and Carolina Parakeet were common in North America. Whatever the precise reasons for the extinction of particular species it is clear that in the process of incorporation into human knowledge objects, creatures and phenomena undergo various transformations. In botany and zoology it is expected that individuals will perish in order that science can register the existence of the species. Even in the age of video recording newly discovered species (eg. the Antpitta discovered in 1998) are scientifically 'affirmed' via the preservation of dead individuals; almost certainly in ignorance of the extent of the living population at the time of discovery.
The tens of thousands of 'study skins' preserved in the bird collection at Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences bear testimony to these paradoxes. The skins are at once aesthetically striking and disquieting; each individual retaining in death aspects of an appearance which - in the case of extinct species - can no longer be reproduced in life. Meticulously tagged and stored on drawers in climate-controlled cabinets the bird collection (like many others) bears witness to a human mania for cataloguing every available detail of the life around (and within) us. With the advent of of gene sequencing Latin nomenclature has given way to numerical systems. We might wonder whether this data brings us any closer to the innate vitality of living things than the dead 19th century specimens which, already, no-one has the time to study.
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Rare/extinct bird collection: Robert M. Peck, Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences
Research funded through a NESTA Fellowship
NESTA is the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts,
the organisation that invests in UK creativity and innovation