STRIKE
Installation by Amy Youngs
116 dead birds are here to represent the 1 billion birds killed by buildings each year. Window strike is the term used when birds collide with windows, which they sometimes perceive as transparent throughway, or as reflected sky. Yet, these windows and tall buildings give humans great joy, as we soar up in the air and peer down at the smaller landscape below with bird’s-eye-views. What if we tried to see our architecture from a bird’s perspective?
Thank you to Stephanie Malinich of the Tetrapod collection at the Museum of Biological Diversity. Also to artist Allison Blair, whose dead bird project at Hopkins Hall certainly influenced me. And thanks to my colleagues in the BioPresence Project: Angelika Nelson, Doo-Sung Yoo, Gil Bohrer, Ken Rinaldo, Matt Lewis, Rick Livingston, Stanley Gehrt, Tom Hawkins and TradeMark. Dead birds found at the Ohio State University are mapped, stuffed and photographed. This map created by BioPresence team members Matt Lewis and Angelika Nelson.
Amy M. Youngs creates biological art, interactive sculptures and digital media works that explore relationships between technology and animals – human and non-human. Research interests include: interactions with plants and animals, technological nature follies, constructed ecosystems and seeing through the eyes of machines. She has created installations that amplify the sounds and movements of living worms, indoor ecosystems that grow edible plants, a multi-channel interactive video sculpture for a science museum, as well as videos and community media projects.
Youngs has exhibited her works nationally and internationally at venues such as the Te Papa Museum in New Zealand, the Trondheim Electronic Arts Centre in Norway, the Biennale of Electronic Arts in Australia, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Spain and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA. She was awarded an Ohio Arts Council grant for her work and has published articles in Leonardo and Antennae. Her work has been profiled in the books such as, Art in Action, Nature, Creativity & our Collective Future. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is an Associate Professor of Art at the Ohio State University, where she teaches new media and eco art courses.