It started with a cassette tape of bird song taken from my maternal grandmother's house after her death.
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The spectrograph weavings came first. The tape was digitized without compression. That allowed software to create detailed images of the bird song mapped on a graph. the song could then be woven into cloth using satin structures. The cloth, silent itself, was a kind of telescoping representation of the species of bird, identified only by song.
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Large commercially woven tapestries came when I no longer had access to a loom. Based off designs from William Morris's work, the tapestries conflated the arts and crafts movement with the environment concequeses of the industrial revolution. Aural thinking from the previous work inspired much of the imagery.
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Many other ideas branched into tangetial work that stood apart from the mode of weaving. Small hard-drives were wired to produce bird song. The dimunitive needle - resembling a bird's beak - rattled and twitched while producing the song. The installation was mostly auditory. Some hard-drives were placed at viewing height while most were higher up. The work was a refined version of my undergraduate thesis.
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The Aviary, a virtual environment, took the same ideas and expressed them as a phoney AI. Currently it stands as an experiment not quite resolved. Though, I appreciate its accessability and feel compelled to return to it.
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The Bird Song line grew into a general appreciation and basic knowledge of birds. Some works are simply ment to celebrate them. Other works exist as dead ends: extinct species.
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