I was excited when I was asked to decorate a bird house for a charity art auction to benefit Habit for Humanity. Right away, I decided that I needed to take the birdhouse apart and make something else out of it. I wanted to retain the concept of the object as the bird’s home and I thought that an interactive piece would be fun. So I came up with this Mutoscope-style animation machine. The light comes on automatically when the crank is turned and I used classic Muybridge images of a bird in flight for the animation.
At the outset, I expected to transform the exterior much more than I did but it seemed like adding all the mechanism to the interior of what seemed to be an ordinary, little birdhouse produced a surprisingly pleasing and unexpected experience to everyone who looked in the hole and turned the crank. This was really a fun and challenging project to make and I think I may explore making more animation devices for an upcoming show.
