Live Like a bird
For this project I explored the gesture and movement of birds. I combined the behavioral traits of different birds and imitated their actions. I tried to use my body as a medium, and “explore” different connections with the outside world through imitation of different creature’s behaviors.
From the beginning, I got some influences from our last practice- the “Rig”, I decided continuously to explore the relation between human and nature, and think about how does our body as an interface connected with the world. Therefore, Birds are a good choice, because this is animal who close to both the nature and human life.
I used cardboards to make a bird mask. I folded up and stick together, I used glue gun to make my mask become more stable. Then, I tried to do some “researches” for analyzing birds’ behaviour, and figured out the common points of these birds. I planned to chose the frequent features of birds and repeated their action. From my research I realized: 1) many birds move their head very fast, for example: they are eating ( seems like they nock ground); 2) when they walking, they swing slightly from side to side and also move their wings to the back; 3) when birds see something “strange”, they will tilt their head then observe; 4) also very common points when they are flying, their swings move up and down. Furthermore, I also recorded video from different perspective, one is the camera directly shot at the bird, which represented the view from the outside like I made a documentary of the bird; another one is I tided my phone onto my body to record, which represented the view from the bird, like how does the bird look at the world.
In this video I treated my body as bird, and thought as bird, I realized that I get different view of the world that I never have before. Our body not only just a “body” or part of ourselves, also could be a “tool”, “medium” to help me “communicated” with the world. When I imitated birds and bring myself into their behavior/gesture, I got a strong feeling from birds’ gesture, I felt the birds' curiosity about the world and their free nature. Also, as I mentioned before, when you try to mimic their gesture and analyze their behavior, you will become truly respect this life, and you will realize that how the big difference between our behaviour and other creature. As we can see, our gestures made our become really different, like human have special gesture, birds have another different gesture.