‘Magnetoreception’
2018
Yard Inn, Shoreditch
London
This old ugly heavily pebble dashed nightmare of a building is home to a huge data server, this lends to the artworks main inspiration of 'connectivity'.
When you want to send a message to someone these days, all it takes is a few swipes of your finger on a smartphone, but we should all be aware of just how world-changing this ability truly is. For thousands of years before the advent of instantaneous communication, global networks, satellites, and the Internet, communication had to be done in much slower ways. Writing letters and having them hand-delivered was probably the most basic and long-standing means of communication, but some people wanted to remove the human element entirely.
The homing pigeon or Messenger pigeon uses a sense which allows an organism to detect the earths magnetic field to perceive direction, altitude or location. This phenomena known as magnetoreception exists in bacteria, molluscs and Athropod's such as crabs. Even after foraging for miles in every direction, they were able to guide themselves home. Just as we now rely on wireless networks and microchips to do our heavy lifting, earlier generations used homing pigeons to deliver their messages across long distances during war time.
In this way, pigeons could be programmed, for lack of a better word, to fly home from a range of different locations. Pigeons could use visual cues, like natural landmarks, and gradually develop a known path back to its home base. These messages were typically small rolls of parchment or paper, stored in a small glass or metal tube. Once the message was written and stored, the homing pigeon would be released to fly home, thus delivering the message and skipping over traffic, natural disasters, dishonesty, and human error.
In many ways this signifies human beings endeavour to communicate through any means possible, as well as the relationship bond between human & animal.
Notably messenger pigeons are still used in some places around the world even today!
.
