Sonic Feather (2020)
Survival Songs is a haunting audiovisual series by multimedia artists Marcel Karnapke and Mika Johnson, inspired by Dawn Chorus. By pairing nine iconic Dawn Chorus bird species with stories about their threats, Survival Songs seeks to create an awareness around the dangers that birds face everywhere. Made up of nine videos, each 66 seconds in length, the works are intended as portals to a single event, 66 million years ago, when the Earth was hit by an asteroid roughly 10 km across, causing the fifth mass extinction. Due to the destructive force of this impact, the climate was radically altered, which led to the extinction of three-fourths of all living species. This included all of the dinosaurs except one, ‘birds’.
In the midst of the sixth mass extinction, this one caused by humans, Survival Songs asks us to hear the songs of birds as echoes of their evolution. To represent this, the bird songs have been stretched, mutated so as to unlock their sonic mysteries in time. Meanwhile, an animation of each bird’s eye mimics their evolution, each second equalling one million years. Whether birds make it through this present mass extinction, the Anthropocene, is in part up to us humans, as we alone have the power to research and respond to the worldwide threats to birds.
In the midst of the sixth mass extinction, this one caused by humans, Survival Songs asks us to hear the songs of birds as echoes of their evolution. To represent this, the bird songs have been stretched, mutated so as to unlock their sonic mysteries in time. Meanwhile, an animation of each bird’s eye mimics their evolution, each second equalling one million years. Whether birds make it through this present mass extinction, the Anthropocene, is in part up to us humans, as we alone have the power to research and respond to the worldwide threats to birds.