Murmuration from Islands & Rivers on Vimeo.
Over a year ago I first saw, Murmuration, a short 2-minute film of two women (filmmakers, Sophie Windsor Clive and Liberty Smith) unexpectedly encountering a large flock of starlings while canoeing on the River Shannon in Ireland. I was immediately enchanted by it, both the mesmerizing, undulating flight of the birds over the surface of water and by the reactions of the two women. I confess that it is from this film that I learned that the term, murmuration, refers to the flight patterns of flocks of small birds and starlings in particular. The film, beginning with a series of snapshots, quickly shifts to video at the moment the flock of starlings breaks across the canoe. The camera follows the flock, struggling at times; the editing and music encourages you to feel the birds not as a mass of individuals, but as cloud-like strands dancing in the sky. The murmuration at one point passes low over the water rolling like a wave and seemingly just inches above the heads of the women. It is an uncanny moment, even a little terrifying in its chaotic wildness. In addition to being mesmerized by the collective flight patterns of the birds, I am also intrigued by the reactions of the two women, the sounds they make (sharp intakes of breath) and comments (“shit…”), especially near the end of the film when the camera shows Clive seated in the rear of the canoe, wide-eyed and grinning. I know that blissed-out look, I’ve experienced it, and I’ve seen it on the faces of others: that moment of recognizing the sublime.
The concept of the sublime is fairly well known — the influential philosophical idea was developed in the 18th century and popularly expressed by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). A sublime experience often occurs when observing something vast and expansive in nature, like a rugged landscape or a thunderstorm. It is an experience in which terror and awe blend together into a state that is somthing beyond rationality. It is a paradox both pleasurable (we seek it) and painful (we fear it).
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818).
This type of experience is most commonly understood when looking at at nature — gazing across a canyon, observing a waterfall, beholding a rainbow (remember Yosemite Bear’s double rainbow video that went viral?) — but, it’s also a feeling that can occur when looking at art. There is a condition known as Stendahl Syndrome, a term coined in 1989 by Italian psychiatrist, Graziella Magherini, to describe what has been happening to sensitive art loving tourists in Florence since at least the 19th-century. According to Magherini, certain visitors are so moved by art that they become physically and emotionally overwrought by the experience, some even fainting and becoming delirious. Looking at art can affect us, emotionally and physically, as deeply as a sublime experience in nature.
Whether we know it or not, when we look at a murmuration we are watching a system on the edge. The starlings, each responding to the the individuals next to him or her are moving in what is known as a scale free correlation, what Brandon Heim describes as a system “poised on the brink, capable of near-instantaneous transformation.” In other words, each individual is connected to every other individual within the flock and when one bird turns that signal is transmitted with little or no interference, the flock is both a multitude and a single entity. It’s a paradox. And, it fascinates us — biologists, systems analysts, physicists, and women in canoes.
It fascinates artists, too.
David Hlynsky is a video artist who says he is interested in the “dynamics of creatures with small brains who come together on mass [sic]” and animals he has recorded include starlings, black vultures, swallows, ducks, water striders, flies, and even plankton.
swallows of essex from Dennis Hlynsky on Vimeo.
Hlynsky uses a process that he refers to as “extruded time” and he says “There are no digital additions to the video. They are processed by stacking a sequence of frames and adding the darkest pixels together. The frame at the beginning of the stack is dropped and the next frame in sequence is added to the end of the stack. This process is repeated until the entire video clip is rendered. I do not use time lapse in the traditional sense of the word but offer a glimpse seconds long of the paths these creatures take. I find each “flock” has a form, a rhythm, and pattern to the glyphs they leave as they perambulate.”
His video allows us to see more. He slows it down and allows us to see patterns by showing the track or trace of the creature’s path. He is not the first artist to do something like this. Italian Futurists early in the twentieth-century, such as Giacomo Balla, were fascinated by “dynamism” the force that they considered to be at the core of modern experience. Balla created paintings that tracked the movements of light, dogs, bicyclists, and humans. Also, like Hlynsky, Balla focused attention on the movement and patterns of birds in Flight of Swifts: Paths of Movements and Dynamic Sequences (1913).
Giacomo Balla, Flight of Swifts: Paths of Movement and Dynamic Sequences (1913). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Source: http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=79347
His video of ducks paddling is even more strikingly reminiscent of Balla’s work in terms of the patterns and color palette.
ducks move and leave trails from Dennis Hlynsky on Vimeo.
Although using contemporary technology, artists like Hlynsky, are doing want artists have done for centuries — creating works of art that give us pause, literally. They capture our attention and cause us to slow down, to look, to appreciate, and perhaps even to learn something more about the natural world in which we live.
Art and Natural History 