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Bird Fiction by Sarah Imrisek and Gary Barwin

Presented at Wychwood Barns for Nuit Blanche Toronto 2024.

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It was a pleasure to burn the midnight oil with Gary Barwin, the Wychwood community, art enthusiasts and bird lovers, at Wychwood Barns for Nuit Blanche!

From 7pm to 7am, our interactive projection installation Bird Fiction facilitated a playful celebration of urban biodiversity, with bird names scrolling across video from around Toronto, with original music and poetic text waving across the bottom of the screen with the bird names.

Participants used hand gestures (detected by a webcam using hand tracking software) to transform the names into birds who rise up, call out, and fly around the scene.

We had so much fun and wonderful conversations, as visitors shared their own stories about their encounters with birds in the city!

I will never get enough of the moment people's faces go from "what is going on here?" to "oh wow cool!" A simple form of interaction that many found meditative.

We also put up pages for people to write on to add their own notes to the exhibition: 🦅
NAME A BIRD IN YOUR LANGUAGE
LAST BIRD YOU SAW IN TORONTO
WRITE A BIRD SOUND
NAME AN URBAN BIRD
DRAW A BIRD

Some people got very creative! It was delightful to read everyone's contributions.

We are grateful to supporters of public funding for the arts through the City of Toronto.

© 2023 by cymatiste. 

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