Urban Eyes

HTTP Gallery is pleased to present Urban Eyes, an intermedia project by Marcus Kirsch and Jussi Angesleva. Private View: 1st June 2006 7-9pm; Exhibition: 1st June - 9th July 2006, Friday- Sunday: 12 noon-5 pm; Unit A2, Arena Business Centre, 71 Ashfield Rd, London N4 1NY; tel: + 44 (0)20 8802 2827; info[at]http.uk.net

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 bird-eyes map of Paris. Inspired by this methodology, Urban Eyes enlists our feathered neighbours to establish a connection between the bird-eyes view of the city as now distributed by Google Earth and our terrestrial experience. [Related]

About Marcus Kirsch and Jussi Angesleva

Marcus Kirsch holds an MA in Interaction Design from Royal College of Art. He was invited to the 2004 Seoul Biennale and as exhibiting artist and to last year’s Rotterdam International Film Festival and DEAF Festival. He was awarded a silver Art Directors Club NY and a fusedspace.com award in collaboration with Jussi for ‘Urban Eyes’.

Jussi Angesleva holds MA in Audio Visual Media Culture from the University of Lapland in Finland, and MA in Interaction Design from the Royal College of Art and has shown at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Siggraph, ZKM and Science Museum London. He has received awards from Royal Society of Arts, NESTA, from D&AD (together with Ross Cooper), Prix Ars Electronica and the Art Directors Club of Europe. He is currently working at ART+COM in Berlin, Germany and is a co-founder of new media agency Prosopon.

For more information and images, please contact Stephanie Delcroix

This project is supported by Arts Council England (London), V2 lab (Rotterdam, Netherlands) and Furtherfield.org.