[spectre] Urban Eyes at HTTP Gallery.

[marc]

HTTP [House of Technologically Termed Praxis] presents
Urban Eyes
by Marcus Kirsch and Jussi Angesleva

Private View: 1st June 2006 7-9pm
Exhibition: 1st June - 9th July 2006
Friday- Sunday: 12noon-5pm

HTTP Gallery is pleased to present Urban Eyes, an intermedia project by 
Marcus Kirsch and Jussi Angesleva. Urban Eyes uses wireless technology, 
birdseeds and city pigeons to reconnect urban dwellers with their 
surroundings.

The Urban Eyes feeding-platform stands in one of London's public spaces. 
By landing on the platform, pigeons tagged with RFID chips send aerial 
photographs of their locality to surrounding Bluetooth-enabled devices. 
In this work pigeons become maverick messengers in the information 
super-highway, fusing feral and digital networks. HTTP Gallery provides 
an interface to the project, mixing live and documentary footage and 
offering visitors an opportunity to experiment with Bluetooth.

Being one of the last remaining signs of nature in a metropolis such as 
London, the urban pigeon population represents a network of 
ever-changing patterns more complex than anything ever produced by a 
machine. However pigeons' movements are based on a one-mile radius 
around their nest. Any pigeon you see everyday shares the same turf as 
you. Urban Eyes crosses and expands human mobility patterns offering to 
reconnect you with your neighbourhood.

In the 1960s, situationists Debord and Jorn composed psycho-geographic 
diagrams of Paris, which described navigational systems based on their 
drift through the city. For this, they used Blondel la Rougery's Plan de 
Paris a vol d'oiseau, a birds-eye map of Paris. Inspired by this 
methodology, Urban Eyes enlists our feathered neighbours to establish a 
connection between this view of the city as now distributed by Google 
Earth and our terrestrial experience.

For more information:
http://www.http.uk.net/docs/exhib10/exhibitions10.htm

HTTP Gallery:
http://www.http.uk.net

Furtherfield:
http://www.Furtherfield.org

This project is supported by Arts Council England (London), V2 lab 
(Rotterdam, Netherlands) and Furtherfield.org. Supported by Awards for All.