Urban Eyes at HTTP Gallery

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.

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

email: info@http.uk.net
tel: +44 (0) 20 8802 2827
HTTP Gallery