for birders: Koos Dijksterhuis film about sanderlings on the beach of Schiermonnikoog
Created by Benny Klazenga, Jeroen Reneerkens, Koos Dijksterhuis
The sound track is a bit daggy but the human/nonhuman interface was well done.
1-800-ECOSFEAR
Go here to hear a prerecorded message about rescuing small animals. It was a Bill Burns work at the ICA. It’s truncated at the end so who knows what happened. http://www.safetygearforsmallanimals.com/ecosfear.html#
irn bru bird (bro)
The do-it-yourself guide to urban wildlife habitat regeneration or, how to make a kingfisher from a discarded IRN BRU can by Jethro Brice
see http://www.instructables.com/id/kingfisher-project%2c-Kelvinbridge%2c-Glasgow%2c-2006/
Bruce Mowson’s birdland
Unfortunately no image but an interesting project:
Birdland is an immersive sound work. Set in a 3D game construction space, visuals are minimalised and sound is maximalised in order to experiment with sensations, perceptions and flows of listening. Within the space, the user glides freely around sculptural, architectural and topological formations. The project aims to develop new techniques for composing sound and new ideas about the significance of listening, through a reading of Deleuzian and Lacaning texts in conjunction with playful and intuitive exploration. An iteration of the work presented for the Time Transcendence Performance conference is an early prototype created for the Design Research Institute’s Virtual Reality Centre.
Project partners: Intervention through Art: RMIT Design Research Institute, Firelight Technologies.
The last passenger pigeon
| September 1, 2010 |
The last passenger pigeon the world will ever know died on September 1, 1914
Aesthetics as a Way of Survival
Dutch artist Germaine Kruip filmed satin bowerbirds in her work Aesthetics as a Way of Survival similar to my 2004 video work herethere(hide).
Her film about the bowerbird poses the question relating to the »artificial« and the »natural« in a surprisingly new way, encompassing the whole exhibition with this dichotomy. Guided by visual similarities Kruip establishes a number of connections in the exhibition between her different works. Gigantic slabs of marble with a striking grain reminiscent of ellipse-shaped bowers of the birds seem to explore the boundaries between nature and construct, between appearance and being, as indeed do Kruip’s three-dimensional mobiles that cast unexpected shadows on the wall.
Marble Untitled (2009) by Germaine Kruip is now presented in the Museum Paviljoens — Courtesy The Approach, London. Photo Gert Jan Kocken
Germaine Kruip: Only the Title Remains 21 November 2009 – 11 April 2010 Museum De Paviljoen, The Netherlands
Apparently there is to be a one day Symposium Aesthetics as a Way of Survival 4 March 2010 with Clifford and Dawn Frith in attendance. Too good to be true? (no further details on the internet)
A Duck For Mr Darwin
Evolutionary Thinking & The Struggle To Exist Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art 10 April – 20 September 2009
A Duck for Mr. Darwin is a group exhibition of contemporary artists exploring evolutionary thinking and the Theory of Natural Selection. The exhibition focuses on the legacy of Charles Darwin’s ideas and is informed by the spirit of experimentation which was so distinctive to the time in which he lived.
The exhibition title references the story of an exchange of letters between the young naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin. In 1857 Wallace was to send Darwin a specimen – a domestic duck from the island of Lombok. Just a year later he would send a short twenty page essay on species variation. This correspondence proved to be an important catalyst precipitating the publishing of Darwin’s monumental theory – the Origin of Species in 1859.
It features the work of Charles Avery, Marcus Coates, Dorothy Cross, Mark Dion, Andrew Dodds, Mark Fairnington, Ben Jeans Houghton, Tania Kovats, Conrad Shawcross
Not much information on actual works. Buy me the book someone.
Mark Dion The desk of a tropical ecologist (Guyana field trip: Semang Creek) 1999
http://www.balticmill.com/whatsOn/present/ExhibitionDetail.php?exhibID=123
Hydrobotanics Symposium 17 November
| November 17, 2009 | ||
| 9:00 am | to | 6:00 pm |
A symposium hosted by ICLL and Createc on the twin subjects of water and plant life in Western Australia.
For its end-of-year symposium, the International Centre for Landscape and Language (ICLL) at ECU’s Mount Lawley Campus is pleased to present a distinguished array of biologists, geographers, writers, artists, and other creative and scientific people.
The symposium will showcase innovative, interdisciplinary, and arts-based environmental research being done by staff, alumnae, and postgraduate researchers at ECU. Presenters include Rod Giblett, Hugo Bekle, Nandi Chinna, Mary-Louise McDermott, Holly Story, Annamaria Weldon, Perdita Phillips, Nien Schwarz, and Gregory Pryor. We are also pleased to announce two distinguished keynote speakers.
November 2009 marks the 150th anniversary of the publishing of Darwin’s Origin of the Species. Patrick Armstrong, a Senior Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia, will present ‘Charles Darwin’s Other Islands: The Voyage of the Beagle, Other Than the Galapagos’. The voyage that Charles Darwin made on His Majesty’s Surveying Sloop Beagle, 1831-1836, provided the basis of much of his later scientific work. This talk will concentrate on the importance of the 40 or so islands that he visited – in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans – and his approach to the observations he made on them, in an attempt to show how they influenced his later intellectual development.
Patrick has made a special study of Darwin’s life, work and influence, using both archival methods and fieldwork at some of the sites visited by the great Victorian naturalist. His most recent books include All Things Darwin (2008) and Darwin’s Luck (2009).
Our second keynote speaker, Barbara York Main, author of Between Wodjil and Tor (1967), will present ‘Interactions of Water, Plants, and Ground-Dwelling Fauna’. Barbara grew up in the Western Australian wheatbelt. She graduated with a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Western Australia in 1957. She is Adjunct Professor with the School of Animal Biology at the University of Western Australia.
For a full schedule of speakers, please visit the ICLL website: http://www.landscapeandlanguagecentre.au.com/symposium_nov09.html
Students, staff, and the general public are welcome to join. The full-day symposium will be held in Building 10, Room 307 from 9.30am-5pm on Tuesday 17th November.
geometric form
I took this photo on Sunday at Lake Pollard and showed the photo as part of my presentation at the Hydrobotanics Symposium yesterday.
deadline for animal images to go to Newcastle
| June 30, 2009 | ||
| 11:59 pm |
Get your images to my by email or post to arrive by 30 June at
PO Box 747
Fremantle WA 6959
interesting lecture The Mirror Test: Humans, Animals and Sentience
| July 7, 2009 | ||
| 6:00 pm | to | 7:00 pm |
A lecture by Sherryl Vint, Associate Professor at Brock University in St. Catharine’s, Ontario, Canada
Date: Tuesday, 7 July 2009
Time: 6:00pm-7.00pm
Location: Alexander Lecture Theatre, UWA
Cost: Free. No RSVP required.
Enquiries: iasuwa@admin.uwa.edu.au or (+61 
6488 1340
(The nearest carpark is P3 off Hackett Drive Entrance 1)
The mirror test – a classic investigation of consciousness in animal research.
The mirror test has aspects of a typical pulp science fiction scenario of alien abduction: an animal is rendered unconscious, during which time dye is applied to its face in some way; when it awakes, the animal is given access to a mirror. If the animal then attempts to investigate the mark in some way, it is deemed to have passed the mirror test, revealing that it recognises the other in the mirror as self. Animals pass this test by mirroring consciousness as it is experienced by humans as much as by seeing themselves in the mirror’s image.
The image of the mirror also signifies that we often understand animals as mirrors for ourselves, constructing images of them that glorify some species in whom we see qualities we want to possess, while simultaneously vilifying others, often by projecting onto them human faults. Frequently, then, cultural representations of animals will tell us little about the animals themselves and much about the ways animals become caught up in human ideology. This talk will explore the tension between these two meanings of mirroring by looking at three science fiction texts that deal with questions of animal sentience: Connie Willis’s ‘Samaritan’ (1985), Walter Miller’s Conditionally Human’ (1952) and John Crowley’s ‘Beasts’ (1976). Professor Vint will contrast the mirror test’s method of defining a line between human and animal being with other constructs. Biographical details Sherryl Vint is Associate Professor at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. She is the author of Bodies of Tomorrow (2007) and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (2009) andFifty Key Figures in Science Fiction (2009). An editor of the journals Science Fiction Film and Television and Extrapolation, she has recently completed Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal.
International Dawn Chorus Day tomorrow 4 May
Make sure you get up early to hear the dawn chorus. For Perth that’s about 0556 (around about or just shortly after nautical twilight).
For anywhere else in the world you can calculate your twilight here http://www.ga.gov.au/geodesy/astro/ (but you need to know your lat and long)
Caroline Rothwell exhibition: Exotopos
Creature of Exotopos 2009 Nickel-plated Britannia metal 31.5 x 29 x 9cm
Exotopos exhibition Opening: 6-8pm Thursday 05 March 2009 Exhibition: 05-28 March 2009
From the excellent Sydney gallery Grant Pirrie
anonymous third year doing dog palpations on Roger
I would happily supply copies of these images to the ‘arm’ that belongs to them
uniting two species?
Chimeric mice produced by injecting embryonic stem cells from a wood mouse into an early embryo of a genetically distinct house mouse. Some of the resultant mice showed physiological and behavioural characteristics of both species.
first image from ongoing photography
I have a stack of images now and am trawling through to see if there are any good ones. This is from the Anatomy Museum.
Cane toad day Monday 2 March 2009
| March 2, 2009 |
Cane toads reached the Quarantine Station at the WA/NT border near Kununurra (as reported in the West Australian).
thirsty Koala after the Victorian fires
Amateur footage by CFA volunteer David Tree
http://player.video.news.com.au/theaustralian/?WbReiP1p5ONg3JLSMRELswy8O9r9Yt5Z
on the scrounge — your donations welcome
I make collages using found images.
If you are throwing out any nice visual imagery — including representations of animals, internal body imagery, maps and weird old diagrams and photos — and you think they might be of interest to me please drop me a line.
Here is a collage made from a diagram of a whale shark and a page from Arthur Mee’s Childrens Encyclopaedia: From such a cloud of fire came Earth (1997).
a boring plane flight
Something to do on a long flight… not the drink but scribbling through in-flight magazines
some relevant past works 10
Encyclopaedia Isoptera 1998 Bound digital print book with 196 illustrations. Edition of three
Book 20.5 x 13.5 x 2 cm
Encyclopaedia Isoptera was part of the Termitaria series. It was a 224-page long Encyclopaedia on termites, which combined factual biological information with interesting anecdotes and fascinating facts about termites that had been collected from history, literature and scientific sources.
some relevant past works 9
Macropus eugenii (tammar wallaby) 2006 in Chart, John Curtin Art Gallery, Curtin University of Technology vinyl on floor 10 m x 10 m
In an exhibition whose theme was mapping the radio tracking data of a two tammar wallabies on Garden Island off the coast of Perth are reproduced as a floor map. The blue (female) and aqua (male) marks are technologically mediated signatures at 1:100 scale.
some relevant past works 7
The world has no shortage of things (the world of the Great Bowerbird) was a sound installation shown as part of The System of Nature, exhibition at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, The University of Western Australia. This exhibition celebrated the 300th anniversary of the birth of Linnaeus.
some relevant past works 6
Caduac (windfall) series from 2008 digital print on archival paper. Photograph taken at the Australian Museum in 2006
