Slow Birds

Marcus Coates' 'Dawn Chorus'

Drawing by Hazen Agecoutay ©

dear creators,

This month I’ve decided to share someone else’s work that has continued to inspire me for more than a decade. Recently, I was watching the active shadows of some sparrows behind a window blind at work and thought of Marcus Coates and his 2007 installation called Dawn Chorus.

Marcus Coates is a British artist who grew up in suburban Harpenden, England. He admits to having limited contact with the wilds as a child and ended up becoming fascinated with local birds through his rare encounters with them.

For Dawn Chorus, he got together with wildlife sound recordist, Geoff Sample, and camped out for a week in Northumberland— getting up at 3am to turn on a 24-track digital recorder. They logged 576 hours of birdsong in total. Apparently, Sample was able to tell birds apart not just at a species level but individually— because he’s able to identify birds by the way each of them start or finish a phrase. Dang!

Coates took the recordings and slowed them down up to 16 times and then recruited amateur singers to do their best to mimic the bizarre sounds. He filmed each of the singers’ performances in real time and in their own ‘natural habitat’ - in bed, a taxi, a hospital waiting room, etc.

Coates then sped up the film so that the vocalists’ songs closely resembled the original birdsong while their movements became rapid and very bird-ish. Check out the video below:

I’m amused thinking that we might be like slow birds at our usual speed. I wonder how twitchy-looking we are to a blue whale… hmm, we could speed up a whale song to mimic and then slow down the footage of the performance later.

Keep the beat,

~Corrie

Sources:

https://www.accessart.org.uk/dawn-chorus-by-marcus-coates/

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2007/jan/25/art.vivgroskop

https://www.katemacgarry.com/artists/36-marcus-coates/works/2993-marcus-coates-dawn-chorus-2007/