People should listen to the birds’ flight

Interactive installation
Size variable
2018

People should listen to the birds' flight is an interactive sound project. The sentence is taken from The Street of Crocodiles by polish writer Bruno Schultz. After attempts to translate it from my mother tongue Chinese to English, the poetry is lost. I thus transformed the titled sentence in Braille on different components, to lead the audience into a moment of alienation.

Each touching component relates to a story of birds, which can be from mythology, folklore or hieroglyph of different cultures. Do the birds from the ancient stories still share links with contemporary society and people’s lives? I try to look for the divine moments in me from the sounds that surround me in day-to-day life. Taken away from the meaning of the sentence, people must find it out themselves by walking up and touching the piece to trigger the interface which generates sounds. An anti- anthropocentric view is taken by making the audience a trigger for the circuit, to release the related story behind it. The indicative sound of birds singing, wings flapping, cars roaring, steps pacing, various sounds of city dwelling and intimate private moments bring the interpretation of silent flight of the birds.

The work is composed of a web of conductive drawing, porcelain and brass plates connected by conductive paints, copper wires and copper tapes.