Creature Interstice
Creature Interstice is a site-specific mapped video projection by M.I.R.A.G.E., a collaboration between Nika Kaiser and Max Telos. The installation features an assemblage of video fragments that document the artists' encounters with non-human creatures in human-altered environments. The piece centers around a particular tree outside a truck stop along one of the largest interstate highways in the US, where thousands of cowbirds roost nightly. Their presence is frequently ignored by travelers, but to the artists, they present an essential interjection:
Everywhere that there are highways, those gigantic infrastructure projects which bisect and trample open areas of wilderness, there is also the flow of life springing from the cracks.
By focusing on non-human creatures within human-altered settings, a reevaluation of the traditional boundaries between natural and artificial environments takes place. By compositing wider environmental shots and intimate portraits of individual creatures, the artists highlight both the character of each animal and the presence of flocks or collectives of animals.
Kaiser and Telos made Creature Interstice through repeated visits to the tree and careful observation of the surrounding more-than-human life. The artists recorded the place and its inhabitants in digital video, analog Video 8, and infrared night footage, each medium offering a unique perspective and visual quality.
The resulting footage was processed with modular digital tools, creative coding, and experimental editing techniques to create visual textures that suggest the complexity of the scene, bringing a number of perspectives into a single plane and tracing the imperceptible currents of animal movement.
The piece contains composites of wide environmental shots and intimate portraits of individual animals, providing viewers simultaneous access to the individual characters in the scene, their belonging in the collective, and the environment around them.
Creature Interstice was first installed at The Abbey on Monroe in Phoenix, Arizona, as part of an event curated by the Phoenix Art Museum. The artists projection mapped the space, built an improvisational composition with the footage, recorded it, and rendered it as a loop for the installation's duration. By improvising with the recorded material, Kaiser and Telos introduce an element of relational free association.
By installing Creature Interstice as a site-specific mapped projection, the artists invite viewers into an immersive portal to the tree. Site-specificity means that the magic of this particular interstitial space is in dialogue with the site of the installation. At The Abbey, the installation bathed the courtyard with video and transformed it into a captivating five-story display that wrapped three walls of the building. Viewers laid or stood in the center and watched birds flow across the surfaces of the columns and bricks.