Mike Collier and Bennett Hogg

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A More-Than-Human-Culture couples environmental science and artistic practice to explore the patterned, structured interactions of bird species in the dawn chorus.

 

The project team (printmaker Alex Charrington -Charrington Editions; composer and musician Bennett Hogg; natural history sound recordist Geoff Sample and artist, writer and curator Mike Collier) explore the relationship between the natural world, its specific cultures and cultural ecologies, and our own sense of culture/s.

 

Their work loosely describes how individual bird species interact through song in the dawn chorus - exploring ways of visually and musically re-invoking these patterns of cultural interaction in a more-than-human world.

 

Contemporary understandings of the relations of humans to a ‘more-than-human-world’ have begun to move away from a “preservation” model to one of “sustainability”, insisting upon the inescapable interdependence of humans and their environments, a model that sees humans as participant members of a world rather than its users. Within such a context, the aesthetic objectification of the natural world of many different cultural practices maintains a worldview that sees humans as radically separate from the rest of the world. This project, which links artistic practice with philosophy and the environmental sciences, seeks to exploring ways for reimagining our complex, embodied and participatory engagement with a particular aspect of local ecosystems – a Dawn Chorus. By evidencing the extent to which dawn choruses represent complex intra - and inter-species relationships something like place-specific cultures of birds become legible to a human audience.