Digi poiesis: mimicking bird as lecture
Video, Unlikely Journal for Creative Arts, 2023
Video, Unlikely Journal for Creative Arts, 2023
What happens when an image is made to speak through another image? When absence is approached only through layers of mediation? Silenced Strings turns to subtitles as a site of
translation, rupture and displacement. The silent film traces the extinction of the Huia, a revered wattlebird of Aotearoa New Zealand, through a form that is itself marked by loss: a moving image stripped of voice.
The film is accompanied by a lecture-performance, Digital poiesis: mimicking bird as lecture, which unfolds as both reflection and inquiry into the research, ethics and contradictions embedded within the work's making. Through archival fragments, museum collections and sound recordings, the performance navigates the afterlives of a lost birdsong while confronting the violence that accompanies its preservation, collection and circulation.
Central to the project is the question of access: who is permitted to speak through archival material and under what conditions? Working with culturally significant recordings and museum artefacts necessitates continual negotiation with copyright regimes, institutional authority and the limits of representation itself. Rather than seeking transparency, the work employs strategies of interruption, displacement and partial concealment. Sound slips away from its source; images obscure as much as they reveal. Acts of censorship become compositional devices.
Across both works, the extinct song of the Huia remains elusive, resisting recovery. What emerges instead is a meditation on silence as a historical condition: not the absence of sound, but the residue of extraction, possession and loss. Through moving image, archival mediation and performative narration, the work considers how one might attend to what can no longer be heard without claiming to restore it.
Featured in Unlikely Journal.
Photo: Video still, Heteralocha acutirostris, detail: colour digital photograph of huia study-skin, LB8537, collection period pre-1907, record created 2002, Auckland War Memorial Museum, Tāmaki Paenga Hira. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 New Zealand Licence. Auckland Museum CC BY.
translation, rupture and displacement. The silent film traces the extinction of the Huia, a revered wattlebird of Aotearoa New Zealand, through a form that is itself marked by loss: a moving image stripped of voice.
The film is accompanied by a lecture-performance, Digital poiesis: mimicking bird as lecture, which unfolds as both reflection and inquiry into the research, ethics and contradictions embedded within the work's making. Through archival fragments, museum collections and sound recordings, the performance navigates the afterlives of a lost birdsong while confronting the violence that accompanies its preservation, collection and circulation.
Central to the project is the question of access: who is permitted to speak through archival material and under what conditions? Working with culturally significant recordings and museum artefacts necessitates continual negotiation with copyright regimes, institutional authority and the limits of representation itself. Rather than seeking transparency, the work employs strategies of interruption, displacement and partial concealment. Sound slips away from its source; images obscure as much as they reveal. Acts of censorship become compositional devices.
Across both works, the extinct song of the Huia remains elusive, resisting recovery. What emerges instead is a meditation on silence as a historical condition: not the absence of sound, but the residue of extraction, possession and loss. Through moving image, archival mediation and performative narration, the work considers how one might attend to what can no longer be heard without claiming to restore it.
Featured in Unlikely Journal.
Photo: Video still, Heteralocha acutirostris, detail: colour digital photograph of huia study-skin, LB8537, collection period pre-1907, record created 2002, Auckland War Memorial Museum, Tāmaki Paenga Hira. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 New Zealand Licence. Auckland Museum CC BY.
March, 2023