BRUTALISM FOR BIRDS
Short Description
BRUTALISM FOR BIRDS is a site-specific augmented reality work for the postal service by Kel MacDonald and Seth Thomson, created for DARC’s Tender Circuits project (2022). It considers notions of home and community through the interwoven systems of housing, hostile architecture, and urban ecology.
Viewers interact with BRUTALISM FOR BIRDS by sending or receiving an AR postcard, which depicts a locked and gated undeveloped urban green space at the corner of Metcalfe and Glouscester in Ottawa, Ontario. When viewed through the Artivive mobile application, the postcard comes alive with an AR video of the site, featuring a 3D modelled birdhouse floating in the sky, surrounded by a murmuration of birds. The loss of the London Arms Apartments and the site’s lack of redevelopment has worsened the availability of housing throughout the neighbourhood. While this space could easily be perceived as neutral to a casual passerby, its hostile lack of architecture exacerbates Ottawa’s housing crisis. BRUTALISM FOR BIRDS invites viewers to imagine alternative possibilities for the site.
Long Summary
BRUTALISM FOR BIRDS is a site-specific augmented reality work for the postal service by Kel MacDonald and Seth Thomson. It was created in response to DARC’s Tender Circuits AR call for projects to “consider the nature of the connections that encircle and extend a mycelial system and to investigate the possibility of applying fungal characteristics to human and more-than-human community building at the intersection of digital and physical spaces.”
Fungal networks have developed a form of communication - a language comprised of pulses transmitted through “nerves” through which nodes in a mycelial network can exchange information. When one mushroom is damaged, it can provide warning about the threat to all of the other mushrooms in the network. BRUTALISM FOR BIRDS imagines a similar information network being applied to the residential landscape of downtown Ottawa – the loss of one housing development transmitting a warning through a network to the other residences in the neighborhood. Birds, similarly, form a collective swarm intelligence to facilitate migration.
Viewers interact with BRUTALISM FOR BIRDS by sending or receiving an AR postcard, which depicts a locked and gated undeveloped urban green space at the corner of Metcalfe and Glouscester in Ottawa’s Centretown neighbourhood. It is formerly the site of the London Arms Apartments, a 49-unit apartment complex torn down in 2017. When viewed through the Artivive mobile application, the postcard comes alive with an AR video of the gated green space, featuring a 3D modelled birdhouse floating in the sky, surrounded by a murmuration of birds. The project superimposes this murmuration of birds, perpetually circling a birdhouse which they will never enter, into the vacant space – former housing which displaced residents cannot return to, an empty lot which for years has seen no use save for a small pedestrian walkway. The birds’ flight path is informed by audio recordings of urban noise taken on location containing both traffic noise and birdsong, a blend of man-made and natural sounds.
BRUTALISM FOR BIRDS considers notions of home and community through the interwoven systems of housing, hostile architecture, and urban ecology. It is informed, in part, by our shared lived experiences of housing insecurity. In relation to the fungal intelligence, we employed postcards as the distribution method for this work, considering the postal system a network in which information can be transmitted from any place, but only received at a fixed address. A postcard, then, becomes a means through which information can be conveyed by those with similar housing instability to those who are secure – the same process by which a mycelium will warn its own network of dangers.
The loss of the London Arms Apartments and the site’s lack of redevelopment has worsened the availability of housing throughout the neighbourhood. While this space could easily be perceived as neutral to a casual passerby, its hostile lack of architecture exacerbates Ottawa’s housing crisis. BRUTALISM FOR BIRDS invites viewers to imagine alternative possibilities for the site beyond its existence as a gated, inaccessible green space.
BRUTALISM FOR BIRDS postcards are available by post or at select locations in Ottawa’s Centretown or Lowertown neighborhoods.
