“Preening”
“shore-bound by force ten gales we dream about the ones that got away… far from any dimly recollected grasp… a compass misplaced forever…”
I’m very pleased that my video Preening will be streamed on-line as part of the International Migration & Environmental Film Festival on 15th October. I’ve had work there before and they are always really good programs, covering a diverse range of topics and styles.
Preening is a strange, slow meditative piece, using a single sequence of seabirds (Crested Terns, Thalasseus bergii cristatus) waiting out a storm on a beach at Marion Bay, South Australia. As they quietly preen, they wonder about their increasingly imperilled future in the face of climate change.
The footage has been slowed down using a frame-blending algorithm that occasionally creates interesting distortions. The sequence was then overlaid on itself with a time shift of several seconds using a complex composting procedure so the birds appear to be interacting with themselves.
The text adapted is from Lessons in Neuroscience, Lesson 1: Phantom Limb, originally published in my 2012 collection urban biology.