Mechanical Eye Week 5
The site stands 10 feet tall on a terrace that overlooks Edgewood Avenue in New Haven, CT. It references a structure commonly referred to as a Hunting Blind made out 2 x 4’s and weatherproof canvas walls. One might describe the structure as very frontal since the ‘front’ wall consists of 78 bird seed bricks, a plexiglas window and a faux tree that is pinned to its facade.
A viewer or participant is welcomed to sit inside the structure and occupy it for an extended period of time. The view out the window is distorted and obstructed by the faux tree. One might attempt to look around the tree and see slivers of New Haven’s landscape.
I realized after making this work that so much of the experience was about the act of looking. This site became, in simplified terms, a giant bird feeder. It was asking you to just wait and watch. I started to think about the mediation between the two subjects at play — the viewer and the bird. The tree and the seeds became a sort of olive branch or peace offering to the birds and in return the viewer gained an unfamiliar proximity to them. Centered on the plexiglas window is a speak-through, a piece of hardware that you may find at a bodega or bank teller. This suggestion of communication and listening adds another possible level of interaction between the two subjects. Lastly, there is this potential that the object might attract a swarm of birds. This anticipation of an abundance of bird visitors switches the narrative from peaceful watching to fearful proximity.
I attempted to capture the interior and exterior of the site with TRNIO. I later plan on putting it through Recap as well. I can only access the exterior of the site from the front and right side which made it difficult to capture the full object but I am still excited on the result it produced. The way it abstracted the hunting blind is interesting to me because there is a specificity that is lost both with location and material. The exterior scan also made me start to think about the wall behind and it’s potential to be more integrated into the site. There is something about the quality of the wall and the bird seed bricks that could potentially morph or camoflauge eachother.
The interior of the hunting blind that I captured through using TRNIO came out a little more distorted but I was most interested in how it captured the view out of the window. I think when using Recap I will try and get a better scan so that I can manipulate what the view is of and what it captures.
