Antennae

Issue 4 Winter 2007

Deleuzian
Karen Knorr Fables Andrea Tarsia The Horse as a Resilient Signifier Taus
Makhacheva Karakul Marcus Coates Becoming Animal – Dawn Chorus
Geoff Sample The Recording of Dawn Chorus Erik Kessels Found
Animals Scott Silvey From Cellulose to Steel Robert Proctor From Nature
to Form Jonathan Burt The Animal Series – Becoming Culture

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 EDITORIAL
ANTENNAE ISSUE 4

T
his issue of Antennae is marked by a philosophical imprint. As the title reveals, its content revolves around the
thought of Gilles Deleuze (and his co-writer Felix Guattari) whose anti-psychoanalyitical approach and rhizomatic
structures expounded the very concept of philosophy over the end of the twentieth century.
We decided to choose two of the key ideas brought forward by these unconventional writers: the concept of ‘becoming
animal’ and that of ‘deterritorialization’; both can be traced back to the seminal work ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, first
published (in English) in 1988.
Becoming animal plays a pivotal role in the current debate surrounding animals and identity. As Deleuze
explains, it does not involve imitating animals: ‘to become-animal is to become a body-without-organs, to cut across the
strata of organism, significance and subjectification that serve to (ab)normalise us as biological, social and sexual beings
(1). In becoming-animal the body becomes an event, the action that it itself becomes; signification enters into deviation
(2), identity into variance; the subject becomes a deject (3), the abject other than object. To replace human identity with
an interspecific performativity is to go some way towards destabilising the autonomous Cartesian subject and mobilising
an ex-centric subject always in process. To become-animal is to be swept up by the visceral and to shed the backbone
of knowledge and discourse so inherently bound to systems of power, processes of (hetero) normativity and
mechanisms of alienation and exclusion (of bodies, behaviours and subjects).
Becoming animal is a challenging concept in itself, one that opens a range opportunities leading to a closer
understanding of what it may be like to be an animal or that at least may take us far enough from ourselves so to
envisage what being other than human may entail. Representing or using the concept of ‘becoming animal’ has
presented consistent challenges to contemporary artists. Marcus Coates whose work, embraces a range of media,
confidently displaying a balanced mix of highly creative procedures leading to jaw dropping results, has managed to
successfully address the subject of becoming animal. We have interviewed the internationally renowned artist to discuss
his career, his most recent work ‘Dawn Chorus’ and some philosophical and practical difficulties involved in ‘becoming
animal’. More or less directly, other artists’ work featured in this issue, like Karakul by Taus Makhacheva and Erik
Kessels’ ‘found animals’, bring different perspective to the subject.
Deleuze and Guattari encouraged the re-contextualisation of their key concepts as they did not believe in an
original and fixed interpretation. Following their intentions, this issue also makes use of the concept of
‘deterritorialisation’, here intended as ‘animals that have been taken to spaces where they conventionally or naturally do
not belong’ . Karen Knorr’s Fables and the iconic Senza Titolo (12 Horses 1969) by Kounellis reveal the presence of
boundaries imposed by traditional representation.
We are also very proud to feature an interview with Jonathan Burt, influential writer in the field of Animal
Studies and editor of the pioneering ‘Animal Series’ published by Reaktion Books..

Ultimately we’d like to thank all our contributors for their hard work and dedication. This issue of Antennae is
dedicated to the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, especially to Astrid Schmetterling, Gavin Butt
and Brendan Prendeville. -Those Deleuzian years will never be forgotten! -

Giovanni Aloi
Editor of Antennae Project

(1) Deleuze, G. & Guattari (1988). F. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, University of Minnesota: Athlone Press, p.159

(2) Deleuze & Guattari (1988). Ibid., p.159

(3) Kristeva, J.(1980). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York: Columbia University Press, .p.8

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 CONTENTS
ANTENNAE ISSUE 4
4 Karen Knorr’s Fables
Fables is part of series Karen Knorr did at the Carnavalet, a museum of Parisian history where different rooms from palaces
across Paris have been reconstructed. Of the work Karen said: “I like the disruption of animals in this pristine museum where
they don’t belong. If they were real they would pee and crap on the furniture, they would annihilate the space.”
Text by Lucy Soutter

9 The Horse as a Resilient Signifier – In Conversation with Andrea Tarsia

In 1969, Kounellis brought 12 live horses within the four white walls of the gallery space creating one of the most iconic
performances ever staged in the history of art.
Text and Questions by Giovanni Aloi

15 Karakul
In her project, a video entitled «Karakul» and photographic prints, Taus Makhacheva explores borders and main features of
humanity through the relationship between a strange unsociable, anthropomorphic creature, covered by gray karakul fur, a sort
of “Snow man” and a horse, which embodies a domestic animal.
Text by P.R. Gamzatova, Images by A.Sinyagin and Wai Lau, Costume by M.Dzhivelegova

18 Marcus Coates – Becoming Animal

Marcus Coates is the most original and interesting artists working with the concepts of animality, identity and becoming-
animal. His most recent work, Dawn Chorus, is disorienting as it is rewarding; it is simple as it is sophisticated. A rare work of
art, one of a kind: it pushes the boundaries dividing animals from humans and also those separating pretentious and shock-art
from intelligent art.
Text by Giovanni Aloi

21 Geoff Sample – The Recording of Dawn Chorus

An unusual creative use of wildlife sounds and human sounds is featured in Dawn Chorus. Recording was made more
challenging by the requirement for recording each individual songsters on its own and simultaneously capturing the composite
soundscape of the dawn chorus.
Text by Geoff Sample

31 In Conversation with Marcus Coates

We interviewed Marcus Coates to discuss Dawn Chorus, shamanic rituals, Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of becoming animal,
bird-watching and Japan.
Questions by Giovanni Aloi

35 Erik Kessels’ Found Animals

‘I Almost Every Picture’ is the most talked about underground photographic project of the past few years. Relying on the
unanimity of the found and vernacular photography Kessels work invites us to look at images in a new way. We interviewed
Erik Kessels to discuss two books from the series focusing on animals.
Text by Eric Frank, questions by Giovanni Aloi

40 From Cellulose to Steel

‘Scott Silvey is an internationally known artist whose work investigates different processes of becoming. Here he introduces
three different works dealing with the subject of plants.
Text by Scott Silvey

44 From Nature to Form

A compelling synergic effort of science, technology, nature and art played a defining role in the development of Rene Binet’s
style. From Nature to Form, a recently published book by Prestel shows how nature became design and architecture
Questions by Eric Frank

50 Becoming Culture
Animal is a pioneering series from Reaktion Books. The first of its kind to explore the historical significance and impact on
humans of a wide range of animals, each book in the series takes a different animal and examines its role in history around the
world.
Questions by Giovanni Aloi

3 - cctv lift - photo by Nick David

Front Cover Image: Marcus Coates, Journey to the Lower World
 KAREN KNORR’S
FABLES

Fables is part of series Karen Knorr did at the Carnavalet, a museum of Parisian history
where different rooms from palaces across Paris have been reconstructed. Of the work Karen
said: “I like the disruption of animals in this pristine museum where they don’t belong. If
they were real they would pee and crap on the furniture, they would annihilate the space.”
Text by Lucy Soutter

T
he Thirsty Pigeon
A pigeon, oppressed by excessive thirst, saw a
goblet of water
painted on a signboard. Not supposing it to be only a
picture, she flew
towards it with a loud whir and unwittingly dashed
against the
signboard, jarring herself terribly. Having broken her
wings by the
blow, she fell to the ground, and was caught by one of
the bystanders.
Zeal should not outrun discretion. 1
Fables are due for a revival. Short, pointed narratives,
peopled with familiar animals and barbed with cruel
morals, they explore the myriad facets of human vanity.
They seem particularly well suited to our own era,
with its decadent consumption, spectacularity, and
highly developed taste for shadenfreude. Fables have
been used since ancient Greece to consider the baser
aspects of human nature. Writers and artists from Jean
de La Fontaine to Charles Schulz have drawn on
Aesop’s legacy to skewer specific politics or attitudes
of the day. And certainly, many of Aesop’s morals ring
true to our own moment, not least “Familiarity breeds
contempt,” (The Fable of the Fox and the Lion) “One
bad turn deserves another,” (The Fox and the Stork),
or “Any fool can despise what he cannot get” (The Fox
and the Grapes).
Karen Knorr’s most recent series is entitled
Fables, but the morals of the individual images are not
immediately apparent. The colour Lamda prints, staged
in the Muse Carnavalet in Paris, feature classic animal
characters: the cunning fox, the foolish pigeon, the
parsimonious squirrel and the pesky rat. Yet these
creatures—borrowed from a taxidermist’s shop rather
than a zoo—are not doing much to move a narrative
along. Rather than earning some kind of humiliating
comeuppance, these intruders are mostly sitting or
standing quietly. Their gazes draw us into the highly
loaded recessive space and provide an allegory for the
way we look at this strange rarefied world of culture
and at the photographs themselves.
Knorr punctuates her elegantly composed
period interiors with details that jar us back to the
present. In various Fables we can see an illuminated
exit sign, wall labels, and contemporary track lighting.
These details provide the clues that these images are
not supposed to represent some kind of time-travel to
the original incarnation of these rooms. Rather, we are
in a time apart, an imaginative time/space parallel to
our own, akin to the subversive scenario in which the
nursery toys come to life after the children have gone
to bed.
In Demarteau’s Study, three rats and a grey
squirrel occupy a remarkable Rococo room the walls
of which are painted with pastoral and farmyard
scenes. While one rat concentrates all his attention on
the floor, the other two stand upright looking, as if in
recognition, at some painted chickens and a cat. If we
anthropomorphise these rats as philosophical
creatures, we might imagine them drawing a moral
conclusion from the decorative painting they examine.
How foolish or arrogant the chickens to be sitting in
plain view of the cat. The squirrel, meanwhile, looks
out at the viewer, drawing us into the play of looks and
layers of representation.
Knorr's works are site-specific. Her prior
projects have found their richness in the baggage of
particular modes of architecture and sculpture, and of
specific cultural institutions. Many works have been set
in 18th and 19th century British interiors, the territory

4
Karen Knorr
Fables - Reception, Lamda Fuji Archival Print.

of Sir John Soane, Lord Burlington, and Robert Adam.2
Knorr leads us to reflect on our ongoing relationship
to the spaces and artifacts depicted, and also on the
Enlightenment values that they represent: rationality,
order and an elegant austerity on the one hand, and a
darker tradition of elitism, exploitation and control on
the other. The French context of the Fables gives the
work a slightly different emphasis. We are still located
in the museum, that is to say in a version of the past as
projected by the present.3 The Muse Carnavalet
presents period rooms from different sites and eras in
the history of Paris. The photographs in this series are
set in the museum’s ancien rgime interiors. While
these rooms serve to display the wealth and
magnificence of their original inhabitants, they also
attest to an engagement with the key artistic notions of
the day. In the case of Demarteau’s study, we are
looking at a decorative scheme based on a playful
slippage between nature and culture, a highly self-
conscious art, delighting in its own artificiality at the
same time as it mimics certain aspects of the natural
world.
5
In this context, Knorr’s sewer rats are vermin,
providing an element of abjection. They are as out of
place in this painted barnyard as the sound of a cock’s
crow or the smell of chicken shit. Flattened onto the
same plane as their painted rivals, the rats and squirrel
add another layer to the Rococo discussion of artifice
and illusion, a layer that takes place in contemporary
photographic terms. The camera angle used
throughout the series helps to draw us into strange
identification with the animals. Angling her large format
camera up from the floor, Knorr has given us a rat’s-
eye view, with perspectival distortion optically
corrected by tilting the back of the camera. The result
is a disconcerting mechanical view that implies a very
low, non-human spectator.4 Using photographic means
as well as the skills of a child at play, Knorr recuperates
this room for a contemporary reprise of the kinds of
conversations about art that might once have taken
place within it.
In The Blue Salon Louis XVI, the flavour of the
room is neoclassical, but with a decidedly pre-
revolutionary twist. While artists during the French
Karen Knorr
Fables - Ledouxe’s Reception, Lamda Fuji Archival Print.

In this context, Knorr’s sewer rats are vermin,
providing an element of abjection. They are as out of
feminised classicism.5 In this interior from the 1880s
we see furniture with long slim legs, and a folding
screen decorated with grotesques, inspired by the
frescoes at Pompeii. In the background hangs a portrait
of a female sitter styled with a loose muslin head wrap
and informal gown. In contrast to the formal court
portraiture of ten years earlier, images like this were
designed to reflect a Rousseauian naturalness and
simplicity—the kinds of values that led Marie
Antoinette to dress up as a shepherdess. Knorr has
peopled this room with a family of foxes, a female with
two cubs. Poised warily across the bottom of the
frame, the foxes criss-cross the picture plane with their
glassy gazes. These are not cute Beatrix Potter animal-
people, but something more awkward and troubling.
Without the foxes, the photograph might be seen as a
contemporary document of a historical interior. Their
presence charges the room with Knorr’s own
personality and humour. She has penetrated this
6
historical interior with its highly stylized version of
naturalness, and has introduced another layer of un-
natural nature.
Staged photography provides a suitable
extension of the 18th century preoccupation with the
relationships between nature, culture and the artist’s
imagination. The digital element of the work gives the
photographic artist additional power to master and
subdue the index, potentially moving towards painterly
ideas. Knorr has turned only recently to digital
technology. Like many contemporary practitioners, she
now shoots her images on large-format film, and then
scans the negatives so that she can tweak and alter.
She could use this capacity to make the images more
believably illusionistic, to enliven them. But Knorr is
clearly not aiming for the photographic realism of
wildlife photography. For the most part, the animals
appear stiff, even a little clumsy. Visual clues suggest
that some of them may have been inserted, repeated,
or flipped via digital means. We cannot account for
how the pigeons in The Green Bedroom Louis XVI
 Karen Knorr
Fables - Corridor, Lamda Fuji Archival Print.

presence charges the room with Knorr’s own
personality and humour. She has penetrated this
mannered. While objects of taxidermy might be able to
stay propped up in many of the poses that Knorr
depicts, these pigeons have attained their flight through
the will of the artist. Their composition, complete with
disorienting shadows, transforms a relatively plain
room into a swooping rococo composition. In this case
Knorr’s intervention has one-upped the historical
interior.
Aesop’s fable of the Thirsty Pigeon offers a
counterpoint to Pliny’s allegory of painting, in which
Zeuxis and Parrhasios compete to create the more
illusionistic picture.6 While Pliny’s tale deals with the
power of the very skilled artist to trick even his peers,
Aesop focuses his attention on those who are fooled.
And of course it could be any one of us whose
questing desire for an item pictured in a mail order
catalogue or internet personal ad leads to humbling
disenchantment.
Karen Knorr is never out to trick us; she lays
all her illusions out before us to be examined. This
7
work, perhaps more that any of her earlier projects,
stages illusion not merely as a means but an end, to
lead us beyond the consumption of historical
imagesand into an irreverent and questioning
engagement with them. In Knorr’s work, we are the
bystanders with the discretion to identify the illusion,
and to keep it separate from lived experience. Still, we
enjoy the looking.
These curious photographs address the
circumstances in which Knorr finds herself. First, she
has arrived rather late at the banquet of history. Many
of the grand ideas that attract her are trapped, like flies
in amber, within the space of the museum, waiting to
be rediscovered. Using staging, technical virtuosity,
playful humour and a pinch of deliberate awkwardness,
Knorr teases some of the most exalted themes of art
history out of the objects of elite material culture and
into photographic terms. In doing so, she claims an
ambition and importance for photography as a medium
capable of such work. She also claims a serious role for
herself, a woman artist, reworking spaces that were
created by men of power and taste. As in the tradition
 Karen Knorr
Fables – The Green Bedroom Louis XVI, Lamda Fuji Archival Print, Edition of 5, 2 AP (of each set)

of fable, animals provide Knorr with a vehicle for
exploring human desire, vanity and ambition in a mock
serious tone that sparkles with wit.
End Notes
1
Aesop’s Fables, in a classic English translation by George Fyler
Townsend, are in the public domain, and are available online at
sources including www.literature.org
2
This aspect of Knorr’s work is discussed by Antonio Guzman,
“Rewind and Fast-Forward: Photography, Allegory and Palimpsest,”
in Genii Loci: The Photographic Work of Karen Knorr (London:
Black Dog, 2002), p. 11.
3
See David Campany, “Museum and Medium: The Time of Karen
Knorr’s Images,” inGenii Loci, pp. 114-123.
4
Conversation with the artist, 2 September, 2005.
5
For a discussion of the overlap between Neoclassic and Rococo
th
tendencies in 18 century France see Robert Rosenblum,
8
Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art (Princeton, 1967),
pp. 3-10.
6
For a discussion of this motif in Knorr’s work see Rebecca
Comay's interview with the artist, “Natural Histories,” in Genius
Locii, pp. 65-6.
Karen Knorr, was born in Germany, spent her
childhood in Puerto Rico and completed her education
in Europe. Since the late 1970s her photographic work
has developed through six major series. This
development continues with the series Academies,
which she began in 1994. More recently her work uses
video and installations to examine the ideological
value of fine-art culture in Europe and the distinctions
it proposes. Karen Knorr's work has been extensively
collected both publicly and privately in Great Britain
and abroad.
For more information please visit:
www.karenknorr.com
 THE HORSE AS
RESILIENT SIGNIFIER –
IN CONVERSATION
WITH ANDREA TARSIA
In 1969, Kounellis brought 12 live horses within the four white walls of the gallery space creating
one of the most iconic performances ever staged in the history of art.
Text and Questions by Giovanni Aloi

Jannis Kounellis
Senza titolo, 1969, as installed at the Galleria l’Attico, Rome

S
enza titolo (12 Horses), a performance by Jannis
Kounellis, was originally staged at the Galleria
L’Attico, Rome in 1969. It consisted of a group
of twelve horses tethered to the gallery walls. At the
time it shook the art world; today it is regularly
restaged as one of the most iconic pieces in the
history of art.
The relevance of Senza titolo (12 Horses) lies in its
open text offering multiple interpretations as well as in
the paradoxically intense encounter with the horse, an
animal made familiar through the history of
representation, suddenly revealed in a new light. So
here it is in flesh and bones: the animal that in mythical
texts draws Apollo’s chariot; the one that

9
emperors, warriors and noblemen forever ride in
immortalisation for posterity; the emblem of strength;
the physical extension of man’s power.
In the tradition of painting the horse’s
presence mainly emobodies the function of ‘key
auxiliary’ rarely finding the role of sole protagonist. In
Whistlejacket by George Stubbs (1762), an exception,
the horse heralds for once a very personal history of
success: Whistlejacket was foaled in 1749; his most
famous victory was in a race over four miles for 2000
guineas at York in August 1759. Prior to this painting,
the representation of the horse, as that of a range of
other animals, was often emblematic, speaking of
human qualities and values rather than about the
animal itself. For Kounellis, prominent artist of the
Arte Povera movement, the departure from pictorial
representation, allowed for the possibility of a
‘different type of presence of the animal’. As Steve
Baker argues in his influential book The Postmoder
Animal: “The postmodern animal is there in the gallery
not as a meaning or a symbol but in all its pressing
thingness. Symbolism is inevitably anthropomorphic,
making sense of the animal by characterizing it in
human terms, and doing so from a safe distance. This
may be the animal’s key role in postmodernism: too
close to work as a symbol, it passes itself off as the
fact or reality of that which resists both interpretation
and mediocrity.” 1
Part of the beauty involved in a work like
Senza titolo (12 Horses) lies solely in the wonder of
the encounter with the real thing, which unlike its
representational counterpart, smells, it is noisy, looks
slightly threatening, produces excrements and
urinates. This ‘open encounter’ triggers a series of
considerations, most importantly the questioning of
our knowledge of the horse as an animal, for its
versatile qualities and ubiquitous presence in our
culture seem to have mystified its nature rather than
exposed it.
It could be argued that Kounellis’ work shows
the secular limitations involved with painterly
representation highlighting the fact that animals are
more than ‘beautiful bodies’ and that their presence is
best captured when other sensorial receivers are
triggered. For as much as it may reveal something
more about the ‘animality’ of the animal, Senza titolo
(12 Horses) also speaks of affairs that are
predominantly human concern as the work could be
easily read as a riposte to the antiseptic nature of the
white space of the modern art gallery, its anonymity
and neutrality.
The work surely pushes the boundaries of
performance-art where performance had never been
before, and it can acquire further symbolic levels as
we consider the presence of the number 12 with its
composition. This is a number with mystical
association: the 12 disciples, or the number of months
in the year. This observation leads us to believe that
upon entering the gallery space the
10
animal cannot escape the entanglements of
anthropomorphism and symbolism.
The most recent restaging of Senza Titolo (12
Horses) took place at Art Cologne 2006 as part of an
exhibition called ‘Homage to Jannis Kounellis’ , but in
2002 it was presented by Whitechapel Art Gallery as
part of ‘ A Short History of Performance Part 1” a
very ambitious programme involving the restaging of
seminal live works.
We met with Andrea Tarsia, Head of
Exhibitions and Projects at Whitechapel Art Gallery to
discuss the practical and conceptual problematics
involved in the restaging of the work.
Why did you decide to re-stage this work?
We showed Senza titolo in the context of a series of
seasons that teased out different aspects of
performance art in a historical context. To date there
have been four seasons, and with the first we wanted
to address the direct encounter with the live body that
performance proposes. There had been a number of
exhibitions in the late nineties that addressed the
history of performance art through its documents and
relics – most notably MOCA LA’s Out of Actions in
1998 – as well as broader shows focusing on
experimental practices in the sixties and seventies, the
period in which performance fully emerged as an
artistic practice. Each had to contend with a central
paradox that defines performance: while it seeks to
escape the confines of atemporal and aspatial images it
is experienced by most through documentation or
residual objects, and in the process returned to the
realm of iconic images or auratic objects. The lens of
history often acts as a freeze-frame, suspending
moments and movement. As exhibitions are an arena
of experience as well as study, we wanted to press play
and re-propose a direct encounter with a number of
seminal live works from the sixties and seventies. The
project was formulated as a series of questions really:
how can we relate to performances over a period of
time? What happens when performances are re-staged
after a period of forty or so years, when the context
has changed? To what extent do changes in context
matter – we don’t, for example, unduly worry about
this when viewing an exhibition of Abstract
Expressionist work.
The season included seven works that
explored different issues. They ranged from an
investigation of gender and sexuality in Carolee
Schneemann’s Meat Joy, to Stuart Brisley’s evocation of
socio-economic realities and Herman Nitsch’s
references to pagan ritual. While Nitsch’s performance
was in many ways operatic and participative, Brisley’s
and Bruce McLean’s were made up of intimate, private
gestures; Schneemann’s was more akin to forms of
Kinetic theatre, and played with conventional
separations between audience and stage. We were
 do with a poetics, as well as politics, of the
George Stubbs
Whistlejacket, 1762, The National Gallery London,

keen to include Jannis Kounellis’ Senza titolo as it
introduces an encounter with the physicality of animals,
and not just the human body. It does so through the
frame of the installation, which bridges the gap
between art and its audiences by placing both in the
same space and time.
11
Kounellis is an extraordinary artist who expresses a
continental sensibility that often differs from Anglo-
American practices. Like other artists associated with
Arte Povera, his use of materials such as coal, tar, fire,
cotton, wood, metal and so on signals a relation to the
contemporary that is filtered through the long lens of
history, through memory and an archaeology of sorts
in which the present is always understood as a function
of time. His approach has to everyday, and conceives
of our relation to our environment in the broadest
possible terms.
Senza titolo captures all of this. The horse is of
course a powerful symbol of man’s relation to the
natural world; its domestication delineates a shift in
our perception of our humanness, where we move
from elements within to ‘masters’ of the world around
us. The horse is a tool for farming and for war, a
symbol of power and wealth. It has appeared in art
across the ages: in Paolo Uccello’s ceremonial displays
of Renaissance wealth; in equestrian statuary as a
symbol of military might; in Stubbs’ images of
cultivated, upper class refinement; in Boccioni’s
Futurist visions of urban progress. Kounellis’ untitled
installation engages the mind in these references while
also proposing a direct, unmediated encounter at a
physical and sensory level.
Where did the horses come from and what
measures were taken to ensure the well being
of the animals throughout the installation
period?
It took us a while to find the horses. We contacted a
number of organisations whose horses are used to
being surrounded by people, such as riding stables and
the mounted police. In the end we hired them through
a company that provides horses to film and television
productions. The star of the show had appeared with
Mel Gibson in Braveheart.
The company had a good track record for the
care and safety of their animals. They were also
comparatively near (given that the Gallery is in central
London) so the horses didn’t travel far. We discussed
the installation with the company to ensure that they
were happy with the conditions of the piece. The
installation lasted for a day (11am – 6pm) and we had
two grooms on site who tended to the horses
throughout the day. They brought hay and forage feed
with them, and the horses were regularly groomed and
supplied with water, while we kept the temperature of
the space at a comfortable level through the gallery’s
environmental controls. We let about 20 people into
the gallery at any given time. They were allowed to
stroke and pet the horses under the supervision of the
grooms.
What challenges did ‘exhibiting live horses’
present?
Quite a few. Besides tending to the horses’ needs we
also had to ensure the public’s health and safety, and
that we didn’t damage the galleries. We cleared the
galleries of all people while we brought the horses in
and out, and we also let them acclimatise and settle in
for about an hour before we opened the doors to the
12
public. The horses were tethered to rings, secured into
the gallery walls, and we had a number of duty
managers on site, as well as the grooms, in case any of
the horses were to become in anyway nervous or
agitated. We had a rehearsed evacuation plan to meet
this contingency.
The grooms also helped us clean up the urine
and excrement which inevitably accompanied the piece,
at fairly regular intervals throughout the day. As this
involved copious quantities of mopping we had to alert
visitors and ensure that they stayed away from slippery
surfaces. We had discussed these issues with our
Health & Safety inspector, and with the company from
whom we hired the horses.
As far as protecting the galleries went, our
main concern was with the parquet floor, which could
be easily damaged by the acidity of horse urine. In
consultation with Kounellis and the hiring company we
laid several layers of thick, grey plastic sheeting across
the entire gallery, which did the trick. The only damage
was caused by the nails of a loose shoe on one of the
horses. It left a series of indents in one corner of the
gallery that are still visible today.
In 2000, Trapholt Art Museum in Denmark
found itself in hot water over fish in food
blenders (Helena by Marco Evaristi), whilst
The Wetterling Gallery in Sweden, became the
target of a campaign by Peta for showing
photographs by Nathalia Edenmont, who kills
mice, rabbits and cats for her work.
Is there a need to identify precise ethics for
artists working with the living world? Where
does Whitechapel draw the line, and why?
Yes, I think artists and galleries certainly have to take
responsibility for the work that they do. Unless you
are ‘experimenting’ with your own skin then I’m not
sure that inflicting harm as a comment on the harm
being inflicted is a particularly fruitful or interesting
position, aesthetically, philosophically or ethically. A
notion of consent obviously comes into play, which
becomes complicated when you are dealing with the
broader living world.
I’m not sure, however, that it’s possible to
draw up a ‘one policy fits all’. Each work has to be
considered individually and against an artist’s broader
practice. I also worry that occasionally issues can
become too emotive, making it impossible to have a
considered discussion about subjects that are anything
but straightforward.
Did Whitechapel encounter difficulties
through the re-staging of Senza titolo because
of animal activists?
No, we didn’t, although I have to admit that we were
careful with our marketing of the piece. As a policy,
the Whitechapel at any rate avoids sensationalising
Paolo Uccello
St George and the Dragon, 1470, The National Gallery London,

work, and throughout all its activities hopes to
stimulate a direct engagement with art works and the
ideas that they propose. We discussed the issue with
Kounellis, who considered it at length before
consenting to the work being re-staged. In the end we
all felt that it was an important work to re-propose.
Kounellis’ anti-mimetic/anti-painterly
gestures of the second half of the 60s relied on
a range of resilient signifiers enabling a
complex dialogue between reality and signs;
Did re-staging the work 33 years after it’s first
appearance, alter the content and/or form of
this dialogue?
Well yes, to a certain extent the work itself has
created its own forest of lost signifiers in that we are
experiencing both the installation and the re-staging of
its 1969 ‘original’. Certainly that was the case here,
given the frame of the overall season. But given also
that Kounellis has since shown the installation at a
number of venues - indeed had already re-shown it at
Documenta in 1976 – at what point do we stop
13
distinguishing between a 1969 ‘original’ and subsequent
‘re-stagings’? Should we now simply be saying that the
work was first presented at Galleria L’Attico and
subsequently at other venues?
Our sense of an original partly has to do with the
iconic quality of the photograph, taken by the
chronicler of Arte Povera Claudio Abate, of that 1969
presentation. Reproduced in exhibitions and
publications world wide, the image was specifically
selected by Kounellis amongst many, precisely because
it captured the powerfully imagistic quality of the
installation itself. Kounellis was in other words already
conscious that the work proposed a dialogue between
live presence and representation rather than simply
polarising them: the gallery framed the work as an
image as well as an experience. The photograph is
therefore more than a document, as it is also an image
conscious of its role within a (historical) flow of
images.
There was of course a specific artistic context
against which the gesture of placing live horses in a
gallery setting was read in the late sixties. In part
Kounellis, like many other artists at the time, was also
trying to short-circuit the commodification of art by
proposing an unsellable work. To date no one ‘owns’
the piece, there is no certificate that allows an owner
to present it or sell it on.
On a broader level artists have returned to the
languages of installation, of the everyday and of an
expanded materiality more recently and the impact is
naturally different, as are the ends to which such
practices are deployed. However, I think that today’s
even more intensely mediated world offers a backdrop
against which such a confrontation between reality and
representation can still stimulate much thought. In this
respect it seems somehow fitting (if entirely
unintentional) that while the 1969 installation consisted
of horses belonging to a nearby circus, in 2002 they
should be associated with film and television.
On a slightly different note, I was struck by the way
Kounellis dealt with precisely this issue for his solo
exhibition at Modern Art Oxford in 2005. The bulk of
the exhibition consisted of works created in the last 15
or so years, while he installed all his earlier works in
one room in the upper galleries. There were bundled
together on a raised platform made of old wooden
tables, so that they were removed from the space of
the audience. It was like an attic, filled with relics from
the past, physically as well as temporally remote from
us today. It was a wonderful way of giving form to the
artist’s own attitude to his past, as well as to the time
that has elapsed since they were made and that
distances us from them. They were incredibly inert,
archaeological relics almost, which is fitting giving his
sense of history. Yet at the same time the
condensation and distillation of the presentation made
the works incredibly alive, as though it were a vibrant
mind-map where ideas and attitudes ricochet from one
work to another.
But getting back to Senza titolo, I think the
work still has an extraordinary impact today, which is
in part dictated by the way in which it inscribes the
very conditions of performance within its process and
meanings. The historical moment Kounellis has chosen
to put forward here – our relationship to our
environment – is one that reaches beyond Europe in
the late sixties. This isn’t to say that it presents a
universal truth, simply that for as long as this historical
moment lasts the work will continue to speak of our
relationship to the living world.
What was the reaction of Whitechapel’s
visitors on that day?
I think visitors were fairly overwhelmed by the work.
As the horses arrived and were led into the Gallery
traffic pretty much came to a standstill, and a crowd of
bystanders quickly formed on the pavement. Some just
followed the horses in and waited in the foyer until the
installation opened, even though they were on their
way to do something else entirely. Once inside you
14
could tell that visitors were fairly struck; there were a
lot of smiles, or people stood around taking it in as
though in a slight daze. Some petted the horses and
children were generally pretty excited. Many also
found it extremely moving. It was quite extraordinary
to see how the range of reactions was of course part
of the work – placing horses in a gallery was only half
the story. At the end of the day people were reluctant
to leave. The last group of visitors spontaneously fell
into two lines that faced each other and formed a path
out of the gallery and to the trucks, watching the
horses as they were led out. They stood on the
pavement as the trucks drove off and disappeared, then
hung around for a while longer chatting before finally
dispersing.
The installation exuded a certain kind of
rawness, with the acrid smell of urine mixed in with
the sweeter smell of hay; and the implicit, dormant
strength of each horse, which generated a lingering
sense of danger. It was also unexpectedly aesthetic:
two horses turned so that they stood facing each
other, their bodies running parallel to the Gallery wall,
highlighting the beautiful curves and lines of their
physical shape. It really was like a Stubbs made flesh, no
longer an idealised representation contained within the
picture frame but a live presentation within the larger
frame of the gallery. It reconciled two often-opposing
typologies of exhibition space; at the same time both a
laboratory for artistic experimentation and a temple
for reverie and contemplation.
Do you believe the work allows us to develop a
new knowability of the horse?
I’m not sure. I think it reflects on the knowability of
things in general. Horses are and horses do. The rest is
the product of our imagination.
Andrea Tarsia is Head of Exhibitions & Projects at the
Whitechapel Art Gallery, where he has worked on
numerous exhibitions including Albert Oehlen: I Will
Always Champion Good Painting; David Adjaye; Ugo
Rondinone; Gerhard Ricther: Atlas; Philip-Lorca
diCorcia; Mies van der Rohe; Alighiero Boetti; A
Short History of Performance 1 – IV; Early One
Morning: Contemporary British Sculpture and Live in
Your Head: Concept and Experiment in Britain 1965-
75.
End Notes
1 S. Baker, the Postmodern Animal, Reaktion Books, 2000, p.
82
2 T. Godfrey, Conceptual Art, Phaidon, 1998, p.178
 KARAKUL

In her project, a video entitled «Karakul» and photographic prints, Taus Makhacheva explores
borders and main features of humanity through the relationship between a strange unsociable,
anthropomorphic creature, covered by gray karakul fur, a sort of “Snow man” and a horse, which
embodies a domestic animal.
Text by P.R. Gamzatova, Images by A.Sinyagin and Wai Lau, Costume by M.Dzhivelegova

Taus Makhacheva
Karakul, still image from video, 2007, photograph by A. Sinyagin

15
‘K
arakul’ is the Turkic word meaning astrakhan
fur in Russian. It is usually black fur of the
Karakul breed of lambs (rarely it may be
brown or gray) used for coats. In Caucasus, where
Taus is from, karakul fur is commonly used to make
traditional hats for men. The use of gray fur to make
these hats is considered to give the hats a more
precious and high quality status. Culturally, wearing fur
illustrates our ancient and strong connection with the
world of nature. There are also many legends about
the love between the daughter of a fairy forest king
and a hunter. Sometimes she is a beautiful girl, while at
other times she appears as an animal. In folklore this
image embodies the spirit of nature. These are only
Taus Makhacheva
Karakul, still image from video, 2007, photograph by A. Sinyagin

16
some associations and the story takes many other
forms. In Taus’s project there are no direct symbols
referring to any particular myth or story. She may even
be unaware of the myth I mentioned earlier. But
undoubtedly she feels some nature of femininity
without logically identifying it. There is a degree of
intuition, feeling and self reflections in her works.
With the help of culture we build a hierarchy
which creates subordination. One becomes able to
position oneself according to the other, self-identify
oneself and understand his own intentions and desires
in existence. In the film that “one” is SHE – that is her
point of view, her problem and her decision. Why do I
use “her and she”? Because the person covered in
Karakul fur is not sexless. It is a girl or a woman. But understand the specifics and features of social and
who is the horse? There is a deep cultural tradition of natural.
representing man – bridegroom, fiancé as a horse and In her statement Taus Makhacheva wrote: “I
also folk and romantic representations of sexual am interested in the possibility of realization of
relationships use the symbolism of riding horseback. In aspirations, desires, ambitions and social advancement
the film the horse is not standard brown or black. It is of young people in the period of globalization. I am
beautiful and colored white – gray or ritual marriage flustered by the problem of maturity, finding your own
colors! And there is color closeness between him and way among the great number of possible,
karakul fur of a girl - creature. But what is the way of understanding of desires and ways of their realization.
understanding and accepting one another in this One important problem, to my mind, is a
relationship? They are somewhat natural beings, but problem of natural and artificial, emotional capabilities
there is no sexual uncontrolled passion between them of man, “ecology of our senses”.”
as a base of male – female attractiveness, so often used Taus experiences and feels the dynamics of
to interpret relationships in modern culture. Relations complicated changes, destructions of established social
of the creature and the horse are full of humanity, structures and traditional sensuality. The vagueness of
intention to understanding, full of mental and the situation of new transition is apparent to her.
emotional sincerity. They meet each other, they try to Observing ideas of ethnic and traditional orientations
understand each other, to grasp the best features of as well as gender aspirations in a new lifestyle and
humanity in that relationship and to overcome mental environment, she tries to make clear their inner
loneliness of the modern man, or Homo Sapiens in meaning. She explores not only the processes of the
general. maturity of self, but also the process of changing the
«Anthropomorphous » repeats all movements world, changing our sensibility, feelings and emotional
after the horse. What does that process mean? orientations.
Spectators of the video may feel that is a very human,
very sociable way to be together. Of course our artist
intuitively feels that method, but she is also right as a
scientist.
Process may be explained through the reference to the
modern scientific explorations of the functions of the
Taus Makhacheva. Born in 1983 in Dagestan (Russian
brain’s mirror neurons.
Federation), Taus has studied in various institutions,
Mirror neurons, as their discoverer G.
accomplished different projects and performed in
Rizzolatti considers, serve for understanding of actions,
different locations around the world, including Tate
senses and emotions of other people and relate to
Modern. She learned English at Harvard University,
imitation and mimicry. Following this theory empathy
obtained a degree in economics in Moscow, did
and sympathy are the basis of our nature and the way
foundation course in photography at LCC (University
for understanding and accepting of ones nature.
of Art, London) and took her major interest from then
Copying of gestures, mimicry, and intonations are part
on in Fine art. She graduated from BA Fine Art and
of confiding intercourse and intimacy between people.
Contemporary Critical Studies at Goldsmiths College
So the creature understood one of the models of
(University of London) in 2007.
gender and human relations. Is this relationship
Selected exhibitions include: XII INTERBIFER
structure convenient and interesting for the creature?
International Biennial Exhibition of Portrait Drawings
Would she stay with the horse-person or would she
and Graphic '06 in Tuzla. Bosnia and Herzegovina
leave? Be together or be separated?
(09.2006) and Caucasica group exhibition, Fondazione
Some images from the photographic project
Venezia per la ricerca sulla pace, VI° Salone
are printed on glass with special engraving. It is
dell’editoria di Pace IV. Scuola Grande di S. Giovanni
transparent, the pictures are not clearly distinguished,
Evangelista in Venice (06.2007). She lives and works
but if you change the point of view or use a black
in Moscow.
background the images become developed. Each move
creates diffusion, and the images melt resembling the
snow in her video work, corresponding with the colors
of the horse and astrakhan fur on the
anthropomorphic creature.
Taus uses a degree of humour and special
effects of a provincial home made wedding video as she
questions the meaning and aims of social and natural
mores.
She sets a question about scopes and aims of humanity,
about scopes and aims of gender relations. She tries to ‘Karakul’ can be seen at www.tausmakhacheva.com

17
 MARCUS COATES –
BECOMING ANIMAL
Marcus Coates is the most original and interesting artists working with the concepts of animality,
identity and becoming-animal. His most recent work, Dawn Chorus, is disorienting as it is
rewarding; disarmingly simple in its sophistication. A rare work of art, one of a kind: it pushes the
boundaries dividing animals from humans and also those separating pretentious and shock-art from
intelligent art.
Text by Giovanni Aloi

Marcus Coates
Journey to the Lower World, photograph by Nick David, 2004,

U
pon entering the exhibiting space Dawn
Chorus presents you with a cacophony of bird
songs. The uplifting effect generated by these is
offset by the absence of birds in the installation as 19
screens show people caught alone in quiet moments,
intermittently breaking into birdsongs. At a closer look
it is apparent that although looking like normal people,
the mannerisms of these subjects resemble closely that
of birds. Dawn Chorus’ performers are human but
they fidget nervously like birds.
Coates, now 38, is developing a reputation for
his work, which investigates the boundary between the
human, and the animal. He trained as a painter at the
Royal Academy of Art and concurrently nourished a
strong interest in ornithology. Although it is fair to say
that much of his work predominantly attempts to

18
reverse the flow of traditional anthropomorphism,
Coates’ practice acquires a further level of complexity
by framing his enquiry within the idea of Britishness. In
1999 for Goshawk, Coates persuaded foresters to tie
him to the top of a pine tree so that he could get close
to the point of view of a hawk scanning the countryside
for preys. This work directly references Turner’s
response to nature and his will to ‘become part of the
elements’ resulting in the painting of Snowstorm,
where he was lashed to the mast of a ship through a
storm. Coates about the work said:

“To me it was quite interesting because subjectively

it was a very transforming experience. It really felt like I was
up there at the same level with birds. But my aim was to
make it objectively interesting. I suppose it suggested the
idea that you could remove yourself from the boundaries of
your own consciousness. At the time I was reading ‘What Is
It Like To Be a Bat’ by Thomas Nagel, and his point was
that to find human consciousness, we could perhaps
imagine what it is like to be an animal in order to enter the
consciousness of this other animal. He uses the example of
the bat and he also admits that it was impossible to enter
the mind of a bat manly because of the completely different
set of sensorial modalities from ours. A bat does not see like
us or feel like us, it uses echolocation to find its prey and so
on. I suppose my intuitive response to that and this is that
although you may not enter an animal’s consciousness there
may be a degree of closeness that can allow us to leave
Marcus Coates
behind our own consciousness in order to at least enter that
Goshawk, (Self-portrait), photograph by Jet, 1999.

of another animal. This mainly is the area that my work is
concerned with.”1
for them. I said: if you’d like to ask a question I will go
In 2000 Indigenous British Mammals saw Coates down to the low world, talk to animal spirits and tell you
emulating wild animal calls whilst buried under the turf what they say.” 2
of deserted moorland. In 2004 Journey to the Lower
World investigated the social texture of a Liverpool In 2006 for Mouth of God he’s still giving advice
tower block that was scheduled for demolition. Here wearing a stuffed hare strapped to his head. The
Cotes was a shaman accessing the knowledge of creation of unlikely characters and the staging of
animals’ spirits to answer the anxiety ridden question situations bordering on madness allows Coates to
of the inhabitants of the block “Is there a protector for usher his audiences through a journey leading to
this site? What is it?” multiple discoveries and revelations about themselves
and not just about the animals.
“The fascination with the crossover of species is This is achieved at its best with Dawn Chorus
also informing another strand of my work which looks at (2007) where Coates’ concern is poised between his
the functionality of becoming animal and the skills involved love for birds and his interest in portraying British
in becoming animal and how you could overcome mimicry idiosyncrasies. For this project he spent two weeks
and fully become animal instead. camping with a wildlife sound recordist, Geoff Sample
I started to look into shamanism and focused on living in a motor home in Northumberland, getting up
how to use rituals to help people. I wanted to think of how at 3 am to activate a 24-track digital recorder. Coates
it could be useful to society. So I did a residency in Liverpool recalls:
in a tower block. I lived in it for 3 or 4 months and I got to
know the residents pretty well. This tower block was going “ I developed this filming technique enabling
to be demolished with the residents being re-housed. They people to sing very much like birds. I made a few films like
were really anxious about it so this made me think that I this but what I really wanted to do from the outset was to
could have helped the community offering my services as a recreate a whole dawn chorus with a number of people
shaman. I then took a weekend course in Notting Hill and I singing like birds. At the time it seemed like a ridiculous and
took a new age shaman course. The course was jumbling not feasible idea but then I met a guy called Geoff Sample,
together elements of different cultures and mixing different a famous sound recorder in Northumberland where I was
religions. I then decided to offer my services and do a ritual living. He had a strong knowledge of language of birds; he
19

Marcus Coates
Finfolk, photograph by Mark Pinder, 1999.

knew all species very well and could distinguish between
ranges of calls.
We tried to recreate a dawn bird chorus using
human voices. So we had to record the real dawn chorus.
We got a van and went to a wood in North Cumberland
and recorded about 40 birds individually but simultaneously.
That was a very unique thing to do. Nobody had ever done
that in science or art and it is a quite complex operation
using a number of microphones. We also had to identify
where the birds were singing, on which tree. You always get
a bird singing from 3 in the morning to 9 in the morning so
you place the microphones and we would spend the night in
the wood and turn the recorder on at 3 am and get blasted
by this amazing cacophony of sounds you really start to
understand that there was something quite hellish about it.
There was something about it that was not so beautiful but
it was much more about life and death and survival. We
recorded 3 or 4 hours each morning for a total of 60 hours
over 2 weeks. Then we had to pick the best morning with
the broadest range and level of communication between
birds.
We took the recording of bird songs back to the
studio and slowed them down about 20 times. Interestingly,
a bird song at normal speed could contain 4 or 5 notes but
slowed down it could reveal up to 40 notes offering a
different level of complexity to the listener. We then slowed
the songs 20 times and asked singers to sing along with it
whilst we were filming and then speed up the film 20 times.
20
This was very a demanding task. We also had to choose
our singers according to the original range presented by the
birds. So for a Robin we had to choose a young person that
was able to go very high and very low. The robin really
takes big breaths and does not breath for a long while so
the person singing its song has to do the same.
It took three years to bring all the songs together
and a year to gather the singers and another year to do the
editing and getting the material together. Each person
involved in the piece had a separate screen so when you
walk in the space you can actually see each person position
where the birds originally were. Interestingly, each person
involved had to learn to breath like the bird and also ended
up moving like the bird to closely reproduce the song. We
filmed each person in their own habitat, in their homes. We
wanted them to preserve some humanness.”3
Most of the subjects included in Dawn Chorus
are amateur singers from Bristol, handpicked at choir
rehearsals. Blackbird is Piers Partridge a musician from
Bristol who was filmed in his garden shed. “I found
myself going deeper and deeper into the quality of the
sound,” he recalled. Partridge found that he could
predict where the Clanger sounds were going. “The
Blackbird had one or two favourite riffs, so I’d think,
‘Ok, here it goes.’ I imagined myself as a Blackbird on a
spring morning, very early in a high place, having the
freedom not to think but just to let the sound come
out.” With that came some interesting movements: “I
was cocking my head to look around. I felt really
spaced out. When it finished I was miles away”. 4
Dawn Chorus highlights the fact that humans
share many biological and behavioural aspects with
birds, whether it’s social group behaviour, the building
of nests or, in some cases, the display of affection
culminating in monogamy for life. Birds have very
complex vocal communication patterns, which have
comparisons to our own; even having varying
geographical dialects within the same species. Part of
the fascination with Dawn Chorus lies in its melancholy
atmosphere generated by the fact that each subject is
caught in isolation performing their song to an
anonymous, perhaps absent listener. From this
perspective the work abandons its outward look
toward nature and acquires the introspective and
existentialist element that makes Coates’ work so
poignant.
End Notes
1,2 and 3 Marcus Coates, Artist Talk at Whitechapel Art
Gallery, 5th of July 2007 – Courtesy of Whitechapel Art
Gallery
4 V. Groskop, Chirps With Everything in The Guardian’s
G2, 25.01.07, p 26
 GEOFF SAMPLE –
THE RECORDING OF
DAWN CHORUS
An unusual creative use of wildlife sounds and human sounds is featured in Dawn Chorus. Recording
was made more challenging by the requirement for recording each individual songsters on its own
and simultaneously capturing the composite soundscape of the dawn chorus.
Text by Geoff Sample
W
e had decided on a two week intensive
period at the beginning of May to get the
field recordings. Well, maybe we felt that
was all the time we could afford to devote to the
recording side of the project. I can’t quite remember
now. But I do remember that, after a year thinking
through the practicalities and working out the plan, as
the date approached I was feeling very nervous.
Timing was a matter of choice that would
affect composition. If we’d gone for an earlier period,
then the chorus would be more restricted to resident
birds and the weather tends to be more turbulent,
sometimes still hanging on to winter. May is really the
peak month for birdsong, though as the month
progresses, the output of some of the resident males
declines as they have to provide for nestlings. So the
first fortnight of May it was - with the first wave of
summer migrants settling in and the resident males still
in good voice. And hopefully we would get a few days
of calm, dry weather - microphones just don’t work
very well in wind.
We’d spent a lot of time discussing sites. I felt
more confident on this. We had permission to work in
three separate sites, all with slightly different qualities,
two of which I knew quite well and had used on a
regular basis for my own recording work. In this aspect
I was at least on familiar ground: I’m used to arriving at
a site, living with it round the clock for several days
and really getting to know the bird community. Marcus
and I had visited the sites during February and March,
but there wasn’t much to be gained from mapping out
the singers and song-posts at these early dates, since it
was all likely to change as spring came on.
We wanted somewhere with a reasonably diverse
community of birds, so there would be good variation
in the sonic themes. But we also wanted several
species with more than one individual male singing, so
there would be some counterpoint in the final score.
Depending on the site, this should not be too difficult
in the case of wrens and robins, or maybe even
dunnock, blue and great tit, and possibly one or other
21
of the finches or warblers, but was more difficult in the
case of the thrush family, which tend to slightly larger
individual territories. The practicalities of rigging out a
site with up to 16 cable runs meant that we could
cover a roughly circular area, from the central point of
the recording device, with a diameter of about 100m,
though if needed we could extend an individual line
further by doubling up leads.
Marcus’ requirements in deriving clean
individual signals from within the sum of the chorus
meant that, on the other hand, we would not want the
individual birds bunched up together too much. The
ideal would consist of a diverse community, not too
heavily-populated, with individual males evenly spread
through an area within about 100m of a central point.
As much as possible we needed individual birds to sing
close to individual microphones, without any other
singers close-by. This requirement suggested that
woodland or any other site with a surfeit of tall trees
would give us problems: it would be too difficult to
consider getting mics up trees to cover birds singing
from tree tops or ranging through the canopy. So we
tended to sites with scattered scrub and saplings; open
habitat with little cover (rank vegetation, scrub and
bushes) would not be likely to provide us with enough
individual birds within our potential work area.
In theory male birds of this kind of habitat have
favourite song-posts that they sing from; a bird will sing
a while from one, then move on to another, its song
showing the area that this bird is claiming as its
territory. Some birds (wrens, tits, some warblers) are
more mobile: they may sing while foraging for food -
they stop, deliver a song, then continue moving
through the foliage. Other than fitting individual birds
with tiny radio mics, I didn’t see how we could deal
with this; some day soon this may be feasible. It
seemed to me that we had to choose our mic locations
carefully and spread them through the area. It wasn’t
simply a matter of micing an individual’s song-post, but
putting mics in spots where mobile birds might sing for
a while in passing - isolated bushes, wood edges, the
Marcus Coates 22
Collection of screen captures from Dawn Chorus, 2007


Geoff Sample
Mic on site, 2007

the corner of an old hut and such-like.
Actually we did consider another possible approach -
multiple mobile recordists with parabolic reflectors. A
parabolic reflector with a microphone fixed at the focal
point looks like a satellite dish and is a fairly standard
part of the wildlife recordist’s toolkit, that acts like a
telephoto lens for a photographer. This was a feasible
approach, apart from the impact of having 12 or more
people moving about in our fairly limited work area. By
impact I mean the effect of this human presence on the
birds and the disruption to their singing behaviour.
This is something we had thought about in our
planning. Birds in urban parks, suburban gardens and
regular rural walks become accustomed to the
presence of humans and would be less likely to be
disturbed by our activities. Recording in such sites
offered clear advantages from this point of view, but
such sites are likely to be quite noisy and the patterns
of noise can be unpredictable; a rubbish van might
happen to work through the adjacent area on the most
important period of our one calm morning. Then there
would be the worry of having many thousand pounds
worth of mics carefully laid out overnight in a site
frequented by other people.
So we needed sites where we would have
some privacy to do our stuff. We wondered about
renting an isolated cottage with an extensive garden
and spent some time looking through the possibilities.
Or even moving in on some unsuspecting friend. We
wondered about travelling further afield - into the
Borders, the Scottish Highlands, somewhere in Wales.
It would certainly have been more comfortable to
work from such a situation, with the recording centre
set up under a solid roof and the big bonus of mains
power. But maybe the more solid barrier between us
23
and our subject matter out in the open would be
detrimental to the process of the field work. And I
think we had a feeling that this was a bit like putting all
our eggs in one basket - there wasn’t much scope for
adaptability.
In the end we went for a campervan as our
shelter and recording centre and planned to work the
sites we knew in our area of north Northumberland
that allowed us access for the van to a central point in
a recording arena. The fact that we could get the
campervan to that point would suggest that the local
bird community would be used to the occasional
presence of vehicles. This gave us more flexibility,
depending on what we learned as the sessions
proceeded and how the weather conditions developed.
And was quite luxurious compared to my usual field
work conditions. I tend to rough it, Marcus likes his
basic comforts - and a decent sleep! But it was
surprising how this spacious camper became clogged
once the recording equipment was rigged up. Try
bringing 16 heavy duty cables discreetly through the
window of a vehicle. Flightcases, heavy duty batteries,
mic boxes, multicores from pre-amps to recorder,
rigging improvisatory kit and so on.
We had three scrub/wood-edge sites in mind
to work, with the tempting possibility of trying a
moorland site, if time or conditions allowed; we
couldn’t rely on such open habitat, since so many of
the birds’ territorial displays involve aerial song and
advertisement and a lot of motion. Difficult. The three
main sites had the added advantage that they were
sheltered from different wind directions, which proved
to be particularly useful.
We still didn’t have a working recording
system, but we had decided on the set-up to go with.
This hadn’t been at all straight forward. We wanted a
16 track system and had originally thought that
recording to laptop would be the best solution.
Research into others’ experience of mobile multi-track
recording suggested we’d be taking a laptop-based set-
up to its full capacity and this might not be a robust
enough system. We needed the system to record
continuously for up to an hour to 16 tracks, running at
a minimum of 16bit and 44.1k f/s. Reliability was more
important to us than sheer quality: it could well turn
out that we only had one or two opportunities when
weather conditions and the birds’ movements were
right for us, and we couldn’t afford for our recording
system to jam at the crucial moment. So we hired a
dedicated 24-track hard disc recorder that we were
advised was rock-solid - an Alesis HDR24 with two
focusrite Octopres (each with eight microphone pre-
amps). This did prove to be a reliable system.
Marcus had arranged for the loan of a heavy-
duty 12-volt ‘leisure’ battery with the hire of the
campervan. The plan was to run the whole rig (240-
volt recorder plus two 8-channel mic pre-amps) via an
inverter from this battery. It was a case of fingers-
crossed: I knew that inverters are inefficient in their
Geoff Sample
Site 1: A disused quarry near the coast, 2007

use of power and, from the figures I could find for the
power consumption of the equipment, I felt it should
just work. If it didn’t we would have to rethink things.
At least at Pawston (site 2) there was the possibility of
laying an extension lead from the camper to one of the
farm out buildings and running from mains power.
There was some rational comfort in having a plan B,
but it didn’t really soothe our anticipatory nerves on
the power issue.
We took delivery of the kit on bank holiday
Monday and spent the afternoon testing it out and
going through all our gear. We decided for our first
night, at site 1, we’d just listen and observe, to get an
idea for mic placement. It was rather a cold dawn with
a light breeze blowing; the dawn chorus was hardly a
fanfare and left us slightly apprehensive. The rest of the
day was spent preparing kit, testing mics and
improvising wind covers. (Bird peanut feeders -
remove the ends and cover the mesh with a couple of
socks. Suspend the mic inside using elastic bands.)
Tuesday evening was our first rig-out. It took much
longer than expected and we didn’t finish until around
11pm, after working into the dark and getting a fair
come-uppance from brambles. Scrub might be the ideal
habitat for various reasons, but it proved to be a
difficult habitat to rig in practise through the abundance
of brambles, nettles, spear-like dead stems of bracken
and willow-herb, (haw)thorns and such-like. Working
into the dark also meant that we would probably have
driven out any birds trying to roost in the area, though
24
I hoped that they might return when we finished and
certainly at dawn if they were used to singing here.
So, the moment of truth - powering up the whole rig
and going through each channel to check the signal.
Naturally one or two weren’t working and a couple of
mics didn’t appear to be in the right channels; but it
really wasn’t very easy to tell when there was no
sound to pick up except the soft hiss of the breeze, not
that different from the soft hiss of system noise or a
dead cable. More tramping through the brambles and
up the steep brackened slope in the dark to check
connections. Marcus got busy cooking us up some tea.
Particularly delicious with midnight hunger pangs. It
was about 1am when we were finally ready to get
some sleep, with the alarm set for 3:50am. The last
thing I remember was the breeze playing round the
campervan and the patter of drizzle starting. Oh hell.
But we still hadn’t bottomed out yet.
The plan was to keep all lighting and noise to a
minimum, with the camper’s curtains drawn and all
windows shut but the one with the dozen snaking
cables entering. We didn’t want to do anything to
disturb the birds, though this meant we wouldn’t be
able to observe what was going on (even though it was
still too dark to see). Coffee is an essential luxury for
me on dawn sessions; even more so on a couple of
hours’ sleep. Powering up was amazing; in the cold
gloom of dawn, technology’s multi-coloured lights
sparkled like a Christmas tree. Well, it was all a bit
pointless anyway since it was still drizzling; but at least
 Geoff Sample
Site 2: An open are behind some disused farm buildings, 2007

the mics were still working - except channels 5 and 8.
By 4:45am the rain was just about finished and we
went into record. The first wave of the dawn chorus,
such as it was this grey morning, was about over now,
but we were desperate for a test run to see how the
power held out. 65 minutes later it was still running
OK, so we stopped it there; we’d set our goal at one
hour of continuous recording. The weather may be
against us, but this gave us a definite lift. Now we
needed to get more channels in operation.
On the other hand, the birds weren’t exactly co-
operating - we had very few birds singing directly into
the mics. There was a very obliging whitethroat that
was a sheer joy to me at least. Not only was he singing
his heart out, he was moving from one mic to another
on predicted songposts. But that was about it; we
needed another dozen or so to perform like him.
There was also a lesser whitethroat about this
morning, quite a scarce bird in these parts with an
unusual song - a complex warble leading into a
mechanical rattle. But he never reappeared on
subsequent mornings.
After a short period of half-baked euphoria,
tiredness set in. And with it a draining depression - in
spirits and barometric pressure. The wind built up and
it was pretty cold, certainly not conditions to enthuse
the birds’ singing nor lift our mood. The bottom line:
several mics weren’t working properly, including an
expensive B&K 4006; the birds hadn’t appeared where
I expected them to; the forecast was poor until the
25
middle of next week. Time was slipping by, each day
costing a small fortune for hire of mics, recording
system and campervan.
Then to really dig it in, a rumble and clattering started
up just round the corner: workmen had arrived to
begin maintenance work on drainage nearby. They
were going to be here for a few days at least and
planned to use the quarry for storage of some of their
kit.
The next few days somehow got lost in the
weather, trying to improve the kit, get replacement
microphones, think through our methodology and look
for alternative plans. Have you ever tried to enjoy
something when you feel in your heart it’s a waste of
time, making the best of elaborate plans that appear to
be disintegrating into complete failure? Can there ever
be pleasure in futility?
The other difficulty we faced at this site was
the fact that it was rather public, with a road,
admittedly very minor, running alongside. In fact
several of the mics were in roadside hawthorns. This
all meant we couldn’t leave the site with the mics out:
one of us had to be here all the time it was rigged. On
the Thursday when we both had to get off for
provisions, meetings etc., we took all the mics in and
weatherproofed the ends of cables (sandwich bags and
elastic bands) and left the site for a few hours. That
night was my real low point. Fortunately Marcus had
the resilience to resist my mood and maintain a
constructive outlook. Whatever happened, there
Geoff Sample
Site 3: A hollow with extensive hawthorn scrub and gorse patches. 2007

would be a show. There WAS light at the far end of
the tunnel, I just couldn’t see it at that point. And since
the field work was my area of responsibility, I felt I was
letting Marcus down. Another late night and early
morning: beware of the demon tiredness. I know from
hard experience of many dawn sessions that I need to
get a few hours sleep during the day to recharge my
batteries. Marcus tried to skip on this, but suffered at
dawn, when he would struggle to keep awake. Anyone
can do one dawn, the difficulty is doing five in a row.
Topping up your sleep in the early afternoon is
essential - it’s a boring bit of the day anyway. You wake
up pretty groggy, but after an hour or two you can get
working for the evening.
No recording Thursday morning. I bought a
heavy duty battery charger - but it needed a good 24
hours to charge up one of these leisure batteries, so in
the meantime I put it in to the local garage for a quick
high-rate charge. Sleep - ‘knitting up the ravelled sleeve
of care’. Copy files to another hard disc in the studio
and check out playback with my software (Logic
Audio). No problems - I’m thinking I must be missing
something. Back-up to DVD. Picking up the battery
from the garage, I realise it’s election day in some
other world, so get out to vote and back on site (15
miles away) soon after 7pm.
It was a little worrying that the battery
indicator was still showing low, but it’s just a rough
26
indicator. We put out the mics again, with better wind
protection, and it was quite dark when we finished.
Marcus got on with cooking some pasta, while I started
testing the lines. Problems. And the battery was low:
shutdown. I never did trust these quick chargers. Back
to assessing the options - can we run it from the main
campervan-battery?
Friday morning it ran for just over a minute
then the system shut down - not enough power. The
forces of entropy were clawing back again. Trying to
make the best of a reasonable morning (there was
some sun, though chilly with a gusty breeze trying to
get going) we ran 8 channels through a single octopre
from the main campervan battery and recorded 45
minutes. Just to feel that we were making some
progress.
Back to filming and photography, making the
most of a heartening dawn. Then later, since it was
proving to be a reasonable morning with a rather good
birdsong chorus, I did some stereo recording to DAT.
The workmen returned at 8am, so we packed in and
assessed the situation. The wind was forecast to swing
round to the north-west, so we decided to pack up at
Brada for the time being, take the night off and try
Pawston (site 2) from Saturday. We were pretty run-
down at this point, after a week’s hard slog with little
to show for it; although things hadn’t gone our way
here, we had a pretty good feel for the site. We just
needed a break. The north-west wind would get in at
Marcus Coates
th th
Dawn Chorus as installed at Baltic, 14 February to 18 of March 2007, photograph: Colin Davison

Brada, whereas Pawston should be a little more
sheltered. Give the battery a good 24-hour charge and
get a second one, so we could alternate them - putting
one on charge each night.
There’s a real sense of security comes from
having a solid plan that makes sense. We arrived at our
second site on Saturday soon after 5pm. Very nice - a
few birds were singing and there was a feeling of calm,
though the rumble of distant thunder was a bit
foreboding. This was the most wooded site with a
surrounding of tall, mature trees and we were aware
that this could be a problem in terms of sound
separation and how close we could get mics to singing
birds. But it looked good for sheer numbers of birds
(Brada had been a little less populous than expected), it
was a secluded, private site and we had plenty of
battery power, with the option of using mains if we ran
into problems.
We were feeling a positive apprehension at the
possibilities here when the distant thunder became a
heavy local downpour. Well, at least we didn’t have the
mics rigged out. But the shower was short-lived. We
waited for a while to let things dry out and check that
another wasn’t on the way, while we drew up a plan
for mic positions. Rigging out took over 3 hours, the
mics needing decent weather protection with the
threat of showers, and it was well into darkness by the
time we were finished; but we were better prepared
27
now with a choice of torches and a better idea of the
lengths of cable runs. Testing showed that it was
mostly working fine: the low output of a few of the
mics was a niggle.
During the night a light breeze picked up,
which strengthened after dawn. Nevertheless we went
into record at about 4:25am, though really the wind
noise was too much. Since we didn’t want to disturb
the birds by switching on lights or drawing the curtains,
much less going out and walking around in the half-
light, listening down the mics was our only way of
monitoring the bird activity. This proved to be a
densely-populated site and revealed the difficulties of
monitoring mobile individual singers down a multi-
channel system. I had a small mixer which enabled me
to set up a rough stereo mix and solo to channels.
Keeping track of individual songs was a matter of
watching the led levels on the recorders (if the bird
was close enough to a mic) and a lot of switching on
the mixer, soloing channels.
The basic practicalities of keeping a check that
the system was running OK, noting any problems to be
sorted out later and trying to get an idea where
individuals were tending to sing, meant that it was
impossible to also note down much observation on the
activity. It really needs several people, each with their
own monitor mixer, keeping track of a few channels
each and maybe dictating notes to a scribe; but it
would still be very difficult without being able to back
this up with visual observation of activity and
movement.
The mature trees at this site did prove to be a
problem and it wasn’t just in their height. The large
volume of space available to birds within the network
of branches and the outer foliage, offers a large area
for movement and also works as a reverberation
chamber to ‘degrade’ the direct sound-signal from the
singer. Although there was a good volume of sound
coming from quite a large band of singers here, making
up a full chorus, there was very little clear separation
of singers to individual mics; most of the birds were a
little distance from any mic and being picked up by
several mics. And looking at it from the other side,
most mics were picking up more than one singer.
We did have the satisfaction of recording a big
chorus on a decent number of channels across a large
sound stage. After a while we stopped the recording
and, now that it was light, went for a walkabout to get
a better picture of the local bird community. This was
the one site that was new to me, though Marcus had
visited it earlier in the year. The east side of our
recording area was bordered by a lovely mixed wood
in the flush of spring, with a carpet of flowering
ramsons and bluebells - full of the fresh, damp, musty
scent of a northern spring dawn. And a surprising
number of male blackcaps.
Further recording passages were interspersed
by farm activity, photography sessions and a walk
round the wood with the landowner. Back home to
put put this morning’s battery on charge, get some
sleep, copy and back-up the audio files, deal with any
pressing correspondence, then return to site at tea-
time. And this became my daily routine for the rest of
the week.
After a walk up to visit a wooded lake with
Tom, the landowner, it was back to base. The evening
was sunny, very calm and still, if a little cool in the
shade of the oaks. We wanted to change some of the
mic positions, but before that recorded 15 minutes of
the evening chorus. We re-arranged the mics to try
and encompass a small paddock that extended down
one edge of the wood; and we changed some of the
improvised mic weather-proofing (styro-foam packing
and cling-film) that was making unwanted noises when
brushed even by a light breeze. All working nicely at
10:45pm; what’s more, it’s calm and clear. Just maybe
....
Monday 4am it was still calm, though cold, as
the under-lying airflow was swinging round to the
north. 4:05am and we’re into record mode, running a
continuous 65 minutes to 14 tracks. It’s a decent
chorus as well, though going a little quiet later on
because of the chill. By the time the finches and
warblers we’re going, with the sun now warming
things, farm activities were starting up. Another walk
round the wood on a glorious May morning; then we
28
made a few more recordings between 6:45 and 9am,
but the breeze was gradually picking up.
With the lack of individual separation at this
site, an over-abundance of high song-posts and the
wind swinging round to the north, we decided we’d be
better moving on to try out our third site at Ford
Moss, which was more sheltered from the north. Sod’s
law: we’d put two mics out by the entrance gateway
where several birds had been singing the previous
morning, but not this morning - until we started
derigging: first a dunnock came to one, then a wren
came to the other and delivered just where we’d
hoped. Oh well, new site, new opportunities. But first,
food, sleep, backing-up, the daily chores.
I’d tried to keep some diary notes on the
project, but they’d been growing thin. They run out
entirely at this point. There just wasn’t time to do
everything. And all along any time that as going spare
was well-spent observing the goings on of the bird
community at whatever site we were working - this is
how you work out where to put the mics and is all the
difference between getting serious recordings and just
recording. Usually it also leads to a deeper
understanding of what the recordings represent. I call
it ‘tuning in’ to the place. The awkward irony is that, if
the weather isn’t conducive to recording or wildlife
display, there’s usually time to reflect and write up the
diary; when the weather comes good, there’s too
much to do.
Now we were in much better spirits since we
had one good dawn chorus in the bag, even if it wasn’t
ideal for extracting the models Marcus needed.
Monday was a day of glorious sunshine and it always
feels a bit strange and wasteful going to bed in the
middle of a sunny day. Ford Moss is a favourite spot of
mine: the topography, the scattering of gorse, heather,
bracken and hawthorn, the patch of mature woodland
with shapely mature oaks and scots pines all give a
sumptuous sweep to the eye. It’s set back from a very
quiet road, with access up a track which we could use.
As I drove out in the late afternoon sunshine, I felt
very optimistic for the first time.
We were unsure about mic placement because
of the many potential song-posts in the sweep of
hawthorns and gorse scrub and the plantation edge
behind us. We were inclined just to observe the singing
behaviour of the bird community the first morning; but,
as the wind died to calm through the evening, I was
desperate to try some recording, so rigged out a
spread of our six best mics to take in the ambience.
We thoroughly enjoyed the evening activity here,
listening to cuckoos, then roding woodcocks, barn owl,
tawny owls and finally a female long-eared owl
somewhere off in the plantation. As I recorded several
sequences between 4 and 10am the next morning, we
tried to get a grasp on the use of the area by the bird
community. I was really pleased when Marcus came
back beaming at one point after a close encounter with
a couple of roe deer grazing among the bluebells and
Geoff Sample
Marcus Coates listening to the recording of the chorus. 2007

bracken shoots. Stuff like this is the bonus of being out
working quietly in the early morning.
We set out the full rig of mics that evening and
enjoyed it for a change; the weather was good, we had
the place to ourselves and the cable runs didn’t involve
too many encounters with thorns. With a clear sky, as
last night, the temperature quickly dropped once the
sun had set and there was a light frost the next
morning. It was just about dark when we finished, as
usual, but we recorded for a little while, to try to
capture something of the evening. Searchlight beams
sweeping around off to the east had puzzled us. Was it
someone out poaching or was it the estate keepers
lamping for foxes? Later, when headlights appeared
from further up the track, we found out it was the
keepers and we had a bit chat before they went on
their way.
Going into record in the pre-dawn darkness at
3:50am I could hear a distant redstart from the old
oaks and a skylark somewhere out on the moor; a
cuckoo called out on the Moss, then a robin song,
another, a blackbird somewhere in the distance and a
song thrush and the chorus was gradually building. We
recorded for 65 minutes continuously then stopped.
29
We were a little disappointed that the several local
blackbirds hadn’t put on much of a show. A song
thrush had sung almost continuously by our front pair
of mics, but the garden warbler which had used those
bushes the previous morning had moved a little further
off, outside our area.
We had a break and a wander for some filming
and photography, then we entertained visitors. Pippa
and the new director from the Baltic dropped in to see
what we were about. We recorded some further
sequences between 6:30 and 10am, while the sun was
warming up; this tends to be a good time for birdsong,
not strictly the ‘dawn’ chorus, slightly more spacious
and relaxed than the surge from dawn, more
characterised by liquid meanderings of the warblers
and finches.
As the air warmed, the day’s breeze gained in
strength. It had been a lovely morning with a rich
variety of birdsong developing in phases throughout
the larger area, but yet again we were a little
disappointed with our recorded sequences. Although
we had some nice passages with a variety of birds
cleanly recorded on individual mics, there didn’t seem
to be any passage where there was a good number of

Geoff Sample
Robin. 2007

individuals singing at the same time, recorded cleanly
and discretely; and a few of the birds that we’d hoped
for, and had been present the previous morning, had
not performed well or had not been close to mics -
blackbird, garden warbler and linnet.
The wind was continuing to swing round from
the north to the north-east; we’d recorded a pretty
good chorus from this site, but probably not ideal for
what we wanted to provide a workable score for
Marcus. This site was more open to the east, so we
faced a difficult decision - whether to continue for at
least another morning here or move back to our first
site at Brada Quarry. As well as Ford Moss being open
to the east, we felt that we faced an additional difficulty
here in the extensive, scattered scrub at the site with a
surfeit of songposts, which meant the birds were very
mobile in their singing behaviour (also an intrinsic
characteristic of many warbler species). The lack of a
good blackbird chorus this morning was puzzling and
we felt that blackbirds were an essential ingredient in a
chorus that would be generally representative of
Britain. In principle Brada still offered the best
prospects for what we were after. Back to Brada it is.
My memories of the rest of this week are dominated
by the sunshine of spring coming on strongly. That
30
evening Jaime arrived from Bristol with his cameras to
do some filming of the project. It was a fine morning
with a clear dawn leading into a warm, sunny day.
Although it was fairly calm, the air flow was still from
the north-east, drifting to east, so there was a soft roar
coming over from the sea a mile or two away. Our old
friend the whitethroat was still at full throttle. In the
unpredictability of the natural world, a sedge warbler
spent the morning wandering hidden in the scrub in the
centre of our area, pouring out its erratic rhythms and
mimicry. This wasn’t the usual habitat of sedge
warblers and sure enough he’d moved on the next
morning. And we had the base of blackbirds, robins, a
song thrush, wrens, linnet, yellowhammers and
swallow now, in an abandoned hut, plus other
incidental vocalists.
Things were flowing quite smoothly now:
alternating the two batteries was providing us with
reliable power, the weather was good for recording
and encouraging the birds to sing and we had 14
channels in operation. It seemed that now we had a
pretty good chorus recorded from Brada, though we
could still do with more individuals cleanly recorded.
Proceedings this morning had been slightly disrupted by
considerations for the filming. After the mid-day
maintenance and recovery period, we assessed the
situation in the late afternoon sun.
We adjusted some of the mic locations and
even decided to experiment a little. The mobility of the
birds was proving to be our major problem: very few
individuals of any species were singing for very long at
any one spot. So, once it was reasonably light, (so as
not to disturb the start of the chorus) Marcus would
go up into the wood and man the highly directional
MKH70 mic, while I would slowly move along the
roadside bushes recording to DAT with a parabolic
reflector, having synced up the start time with the main
recorder. This way we could make sure that these two
tracks were focussed on individual birds and even
follow them, if feasible. We recorded for a continuous
70 minutes from 3:50am; then another 65 minutes in
several passages between 6 and 10am.
This was a great morning - calm, quiet, sunny
and full of bird song. In fact the activity was so intense
at some points that it was impossible to keep up with
what was going on; there had seemed to be three male
blackbirds singing really quite close together at one
point. The song thrush seemed to be flitting about and
popping up to deliver a verse or two all over the place.
But, unlike yesterday, none of the local blackcap males
sang in our arena (as we’d come to think of it) until
later in the morning. We could hear a willow warbler
singing for much of the time, but never close to a mic.
Later we realised the female was busy building her nest
just a few metres in front of the campervan, very
trusting of us watching so close.
On my walkabout, I realised that a young
peregrine falcon had spent the night on the crags of the
main quarry, just round the corner from us. The
whitethroat was less obvious this morning and
disappeared for a few periods, possibly up the road to
the far end of the quarry site. My theory was that he’d
just arrived the week before and was singing strongly
on the core of his territory; but maybe he’d failed to
find a mate and, though still attached to his main patch,
was having to range further afield to try to pick up a
female. A blue tit took a liking to my expensive
Sennheiser wind-sock and returned several times to
try to pull out lumps of the synthetic hair, presumably
to line a nest.
We’d come a long way from the angst of the
first few days here at Brada - it was actually fun this
morning. But the round-the-clock work had taken its
toll and we were pretty low on energy reserves. We
were unsure about trying to record at Brada over the
week-end, since there are a couple of large caravan
sites nearby and the quarry was sometimes being used
for unofficial raves, general partying and messing with
motorbikes. We thought we’d got a pretty good
recording this morning; after talking things through, we
felt we’d got about as far as we could and decided to
wind up the sessions at this point.
With relief I was looking forward to a proper
night’s sleep, comfortable in the misguided notion that
the hardest part had been completed reasonably
successfully. We had over 12 hours of recordings,
varying from 6 to 15 tracks between sessions. Saturday
was spent tidying up the equipment and setting up all
the files for playback, checking that there were no
technical problems while we still had the recorder
(which, incidentally, had worked flawlessly). The
weather was still calm and on the Sunday morning I
was drawn back to Brada to do some more recording
on my own; I recorded some of the individuals with my
reflector, in case we needed to do any patching up, and
some stereo ambiences, just because.
Other projects took up my time for a while
and it was July before I could continue with Marcus’
stuff. After setting up a rough mix, with the stereo
spread corresponding approximately to the mic
placement on site, the choruses sounded very nice –
when listened to as choruses. Our next task was to
select a passage with as many individuals (from a good
variety of species) recorded cleanly and discretely on
different channels: after a week of listening and noting
timings and individuals on different channels, I
appreciated the enormity of this task. It’s a very slow
process: you listen to short passages ensemble, then go
back through the same half minute or so soloing
different channels. With music this sort of thing is
relatively easy: you know the hi-hat is on a particular
channel corresponding to the mic placed close to the
source. With mobile birds, often singing a little way off
from any particular mic and spilling through to several
channels, this was much more involved.
We tried some experiments slowing down
recordings of different species. Some species such as
robin and wren needed to be slowed at least 16 times
31
to bring their songs into the range of a human voice;
this meant that any individual singing for a full 10
minutes would produce a 160-minute model for a
human singer - a tall order. It was also clear that,
although any slight overlap between two birds at
normal speed didn’t cause too much difficulty in
following one individual’s pattern, at the slower speed
it was generally impossible.
We quickly rejected the chorus from the more
wooded site at Pawston since there was just too much
spillage and overlapping between tracks. The choice
was between Ford Moss and Brada: Ford was more
spacious with reasonably good separation, but not
much blackbird song, whereas Brada had a really good
representative chorus, though it was difficult to assess
the separation without actually going through and
working on the tracks.
In the end we went for Brada mainly because
of the quality of the ‘turdine’ chorus; the turdidae
make up the thrush family, including blackbird, song
thrush and robin, which are the main singers in the real
dawn chorus. At the peak of the first wave of the last
Brada chorus there had been three individual
blackbirds singing in our arena. We also decided that,
rather than simply use one 10 minute section, which
would show limited dynamic development, we’d use
several shorter sections from different times through
the full morning chorus beginning at dawn, which
would show more variety and reveal the changing
phases of the full dawn chorus.
It might have been easier if we’d used Ford
Moss, since it proved very difficult to derive clean
tracks from individuals (the wrens get everywhere!).
We had to resort to our bottom-line safety net and
substitute cleaner songs in some places, trying to
match the original with a similar verse of the same bird
from elsewhere in our recordings. I’d known all along
that what we’d aimed for was an ideal and we’d have
to do some substitution in the end. But what an ideal -
to reveal the full live interaction of a community of
birds singing counterpoint, within and between species
- the rich interplay of shared phrases, mimicry and
assimilation producing the subtle, dynamic evolution of
themes that characterises a real dawn chorus.
Geoff Sample is a musician and wildlife sound recordist. He is an
acknowledged expert on bird song and has a particular interest in
the ecology of acoustic communication.
He is the author of six books on wildlife and sound, published by
HarperCollins, and runs his own CD label, Wildsong, as an outlet
for his bird song and natural soundscape recordings. He has
produced a series of audio guides for the British Trust for
Ornithology and Scottish Natural Heritage and supplies sound for
film, TV, radio and installations.
As an active practitioner in an area that combines aesthetics and
science, he is increasingly involved in collaborative projects with
visual artists and musicians, including Marcus Coates, Harriet
McDougall, Clodagh Simonds and Evan Parker.
 IN CONVERSATION
WITH
MARCUS COATES

We interviewed Marcus Coates to discuss Dawn Chorus, shamanic rituals, Deleuze and Guattari’s
theory of becoming animal, bird-watching and Japan.
Questions by Giovanni Aloi

Marcus Coates
Journey to the Lower World, Beryl, Nick David, 2004.

32
T
he philosophical idea of ‘Becoming
Animal’ plays a defining role in your
work. As it seems clear that a deep
knowledge and passion for animals is at the
core of your practice we were wondering if
you share Deleuze and Guattari’s views on the
subject or whether you may be working toward
new definitions of the concept?
My knowledge and passion for British wildlife has
become an artistic tool. The work isn’t necessarily
about birds or animals, they are a vehicle for looking at
humanness. Becoming animal suggests a progression
from one state of being to another, from one’s
consciousness to another’s – specifically to that of a
different species. The attempted leap between these is
of interest to me. One skill I have developed and it is
probably the reason why I chose to be an artist is the
conscious study and practise of moving between
personas and positions of identification. This along with
an interest in natural history has led me to adopt
‘becoming animal’ as a investigative device. More
recently I have looked at the historical use for
becoming animal particularly shamanism and have
started to employ this ‘skill’ in society as a direct
benefit for communities.
You believe in the possibility of achieving a
level of proximity with animals which may
help the abandoning of ones consciousness in
order to enter that of the animal. Is Becoming
Animal something that has to start from a
physical level?
Surely it’s impossible to abandon one’s consciousness,
but I am excited by the degrees to which elements of
an animals experience of ‘being’ might possibly be
shared by us, a cross species consciousness. The idea
of this inevitably questions how we set the cultural
definitions of human experience.
The physical position is an obvious and undeniable
starting point from which to explore this commonality.
It is perhaps a position from which we explore
everything relationally. Maybe we have a genetic
physical knowledge that we have lost faith in. For
Dawn Chorus, the starting point of vocalisation is the
result of a basic common experience - the physical
reflex of breathing and the air passing through the
voice box (although these differ in humans and birds).
The form of our vocalisations seem to have evolved to
be remarkably similar perhaps because of shared
functionality, birds have contact calls, alarm calls,
territory song, they attract and stimulate mates with
song. However it is the realm beyond obvious function
that our vocalisations become interesting to me. Some
birds for instance the American Blue Jay sing in their
sleep, some birds as we witnessed during the fieldwork
embellished their songs with such complexity that we
would struggle not to call it musical. During these
33
dawn recording sessions Geoff Sample was able to
point out so many of the fascinating dynamics
occurring between the birds. I would hear a Robin
(well what I thought was a robin) but Geoff pointed
out it was a blackcap imitating a robin. This bird then
took elements of the robin song and mixed them in
with its own, it was as if it had gone beyond mimicry
and was faithfully sticking to its own song, but singing
‘in the style of’ a robin. A bit like a classical singer,
singing an aria in the style of Frank Sinatra. The physical
level is always a starting point and then beyond this I’m
playing with scientific theories and romantic
speculation.
Dawn Chorus surely is one of the most
surprisingly fascinating works of art of the last
few years. In your recent talk at Whitechapel
Art Gallery you mentioned that Dawn Chorus
took a few years to make. How did the idea
come about?
I’ve been wanting to work with this natural phenomena
for about ten years and have made other work that
relates directly. I made a couple of short films for
Channel Four and Grizedale called Dawn Chorus and
Out of Season in 2000 which featured a football
supporter singing his terrace chants in the forest at
dawn. This looked at one aspect of the scientific
definition of the birdsong dawn chorus as a functional
instinct to define territory. Male birds use song to
defend and define territory – employing loud and
aggressive melodic phrasing, repetition, improvisation
and showing their colours to warn and signal their
strength to other males and their virility to females - I
saw an analogy in the use of song by football
supporters.
At the time I was also investigating our physical
capacity to create sounds and comparing human
vocalisations to other species.
In 1999 I was working with the tempo and pitch of
birdsong recordings and found that if you slow them
down to a certain speed the songs come into the pitch
range of the human voice.
I have made a number of films where I have
filmed myself and others copying this slowed-down
song and then by speeding the film up to the original
bird speed you get a very accurate human rendition of
birdsong and coincidently bird like movements:
Local Birds (Allenheads Contemporary Arts) 2001, A
Guide to the British Non-Passerines (Wysing Arts)
2002, Residents (Further Up in the Air, Liverpool)
2003, Voices of Toge (Grizedale Arts, Japan) 2006.
I had always wanted to apply this process to the bird
song Dawn Chorus – to attempt to recreate this mass
ensemble with humans and provide a unique walk
through experience that could be revisited and studied.
It wasn’t until I met Geoff Sample (wildlife sound
recordist) and then teamed up with Picture This and
the Wellcome Trust that the ambition of such a
 Marcus Coates
Linnet, Screen captures from Dawn Chorus, 2007

project could be realised. From beginning to end the
project took at least 3 years. It was so complex
because we so accurately replicated an actual dawn
chorus from one morning, in one location
(Northumberland). I could have used pre recorded
birdsong and the viewer probably wouldn't have
noticed but it was important for me to be as authentic
as possible, to create a unique record that occurred in
the wild. This made the role and accuracy of the
human voices even more critical and significant. The
production of the work (managed by Picture This) was
extremely time intensive: the field work, the audio
editing, researching and auditioning the singers, filming
the singers, the video editing and lastly the production
of the exhibition - a 14 screen video installation with
synchronised projections.
One of the singers who took part in the filming
of Dawn Chorus said “ I imagined myself as a
blackbird on a spring morning, very early in a
high place, having that freedom not to think
but just to let the sound come out. With that
came some interesting movements – I was
cocking my head to look round. I felt really
spaced out. When I finished I was miles away.”
Dawn Chorus brings to the surface an uncanny
comparison between human and bird
language. In doing so it also highlights that
language is not merely a matter of producing
and decoding meaning but that the production
of meaning is also bound to specific
anatomical morphisms. For example the speed
34
at which birds produce their song is not
comparable to that possible to humans. Is this
something you wanted to highlight with the
work or is it something you noticed once the
project was finished?
Once I had slowed the songs to human pitch and asked
the singers to copy the sounds it became evident that
the singers were not just copying the sounds but were
using small gaps to take breaths in the same places the
birds had done, they were also moving in particular
ways i.e. in a species specific way to generate some of
the unusual sounds. It was as if by slowing down the
birdsong to a human scale – the birds physical
characteristics needed to make those sounds became
scale to a humans physicality. The bird lung capacity
had now become the human lung capacity, the
breathing rate became similar, the head and chest
movements became comparable and so on. The singers
also had to perform this song for up to 2 hours
(resulting in 8 minutes when sped up), the
concentration and endurance required for mimicking
the bird sounds over this period meant the singers
could not mentally sustain a conscious interpretation, it
became very instinctive. Perhaps this is why some of
the singers felt it was the closest they would get to
knowing what it is like to be a song thrush or
blackbird. They had been taking the same breaths and
making the same sounds but on a different scale.
The entire project created a fountain of speculation -
whether the speed at which we engage with our
surroundings could be the measure of our relative
consciousness (to other species). Also, how has our
language and music been influenced by birdsong.
Sophisticated recording technology plays a
defining role in Dawn Chorus. Paradoxically it
seems that ‘machines’ constitute a medium
that can bring us closer to animals. Is that one
of the possible readings of Dawn Chorus?
The digital technology helped us to hear the
similarities, and to allow a human access to another
species mode of behaviour. Across many traditional
cultures the role of becoming animal has been
necessary and valued. These cultures have been aware
of the inherent connection we have with birdsong and
the power of mimicry and musicality to inform their
lives. I think technology is helping us to rediscover this.
Your work has been described in a number of
occasions as being ‘ quintessentially British’.
How important is the idea of Britishness in
your work?
Dawn Chorus is as much a portrait of British society as
it is about birds. I recognise that I am a product of
Britain in so far as my sensibility, humour and cultural
references are all important tools of my work.
Nationality is also important to my work because it
relates to belonging and the idea of being indigenous or
to a romantic sense of source however perversely.
Becoming as a cultural concept is linked to this and so
the idea of Britishness is fuel for me.
You re-worked Dawn Chorus in Japan. How
did that make Dawn Choir different?
I made a single screen version called Voices of Toge
with Grizedale Arts featuring people from a small rice
farming village north of Tokyo called Toge. Using a
similar process they performed Japanese birdsong. It
was a rewarding piece of work because of the
reactions of delight and disbelief from the audience and
participants, which seems to be exactly the same
anywhere its shown. Because it refers to language but
on such a elemental level it resonates especially
between people from different parts of the world.
Dawn Chorus was exhibited in art galleries as
well as at the Festival of Birds at St. Georges’.
Did the audience reception of the piece
change according to the exhibiting space?
Dawn Chorus as a multi screen installation has only
been exhibited at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary
Art and at Picture This in Bristol, the audience reaction
seems to be universal.
35
At the talk you gave at Whitechapel Art
Gallery you recalled how you and your brother
use to go to a small woodland close to your
house to practice bird-watching. Why are
birds so fascinating?
We have a paradoxical relationship with birds
On one hand we are so similar: very complex
vocalisation patterns, nesting, mating for life, use of
song, share living space – birds adapted to cities,
nesting in houses etc, our folklore and culture is so
linked to birds, birds are signifiers of season change
etc.
On the other they couldn't be more different: they
have feathers and beaks and they fly!
Culturally artists and poets have played on this, birds
are a symbol of unattainable aspiration while being
familiar and present enough to identify with and
anthropomorphise. We share so much of our lives
with them but we are so far from understanding
everything about them.
Marcus Coates' practice has continually questioned the
ways in which we relate to other species. His
film/performance process aims to re-present definitions
of humanness through the investigation of cross species
consciousness. Coates has exhibited nationally and
internationally exhibitions and projects in 2006 include
British Art Show 6, Liverpool Biennial, Bucharest
Biennial, Romania, Israeli Centre for Digital Art,
Holon, Israel and a Grizedale Arts project in Toge and
Tokyo, Japan.
Antennae would like to thank Anthony Spira, curator at
Whitechapel Art Gallery for his help over this project.
Marcus Coates was interviewed by Antennae in the
Autumn of 2007.

 ERIK KESSELS’
FOUND ANIMALS
‘I Almost Every Picture’ is one of the most original underground photographic ever published.
Relying on the unanimity of the found and vernacular photography Kessels work invites us to look at
images in a new way. We interviewed Erik Kessels to discuss two books from the series focusing on
animals.
Text by Eric Frank, questions by Giovanni Aloi

Erik Kessels
In Almost Every Picture #3, Front Cover, 2005

36
Erik Kessels
In Almost Every Picture #3, 2005

E
rik Kessels is creative director of communication
agency KesselsKramer based in Amsterdam. Since
it was founded in 1996 the agency has distinguish
itself for the high quality of their production, the shock
tactic associated with their campaigns and also because
of an irreverent creative streak that permeates
everything they do. Apart from conceiving
KesselsKremer mischievous campaigns, Erik Kessels
cultivates a sophisticated interested for photography,
which he concretizes in the publishing of challenging
volumes at times touring in the format of exhibitions.
Most recently, the publishing of a series of
books called ‘In Almost Every Picture’ has accidentally
(?) involved the presence of animals. The series
published in 2007 comprises of five books gathering
series of found photographs. For Kessels the found
photograph is a particularly interesting art object.
‘In Almost Every Picture #3’ presents
photographs taken at night in the wilderness. A motion
detector that opens the shutter of a hidden camera
instantly when something walks by takes the images.
The result is a series of photographic self-portraits
taken by deer in a world we seldom see. The images
capture these animals and bring us face to face with
them in a sudden, unexpected flash. Found
photographs present
37
layers of mystery that challenge our views of the
world. The representation of animals in ‘In Almost
Every Picture #3’ heightens the level of mystery that
found-photography usually involves. Does the hermetic
presence of animals result in the epitome of found-
photography?
‘In Almost Every Picture #5’ is a series made
by the owners of a special and photogenic Dalmatian
dog. The beauty of the Dalmatian, its physique,
colouring and disposition, make her outstanding. Over
the dog's lifetime, her owners were fascinated with
how well she looked in photographs even
experimenting with different styles and film stock. We
see her in many locations as the central subject in
almost every picture and we look for her over and
over again even when other people or dogs enter the
frame. We watch as a beloved member of the family
grows up and accompanies her owners in their life's
journey.
We interviewed Erik Kessels to discuss these
two volumes in the series.
Found photographs are images of a peculiar
kind, as they are never meant to be viewed
and interpreted by total strangers. What
started your interest in found-photographs?

Erik Kessels
In Almost Every Picture #5, 2005

Since I work as an art-director, I work with and select
a lot of images made by other photographers. That’s
why I feel more comfortable with other people’s
photographs than the one’s I made myself. The interest
for found photographs started when I found people’s
private belongings at flea markets. It’s a strange
phenomenal that hundreds of peoples private
photographs end on a public space like a flea market.
‘In Almost Every Picture’ could be described as
a voyeuristic collection of five monothematic
books. Two of these focus on animals: an
ever-present Dalmatian and wild deer.
Is the presence of animals in the series a
coincidence or a calculated inclusion?
This is purely a coincidence. The narrative always tells
an emotional, funny or sad story. The series involves
everything that belongs to life, so animals also belong,
one way or the other, in this series.
Where did you find the photographs for ‘In
Almost Every Picture #5’ and what made you
decide to use them for the series?
38
I have a huge collection of photo albums and private
photographs that I sometimes look back at and
discover new stories in. But nowadays people are
more aware of my work and ring me to offer
interesting series. Not a lot of them are suitable for
publishing. The album of the woman with the
Dalmatian came from a German girl called Marion
Blohmeyer. She showed the album to Martin Parr after
one of his lectures. He got us in contact. The
remarkable thing about the album was the fact that the
owner of the dog made an album dedicated to the dog.
You find this adoration back in the photographs she
took of the dog. Another funny detail lies in the fact
that in about 15 years the owner of the dog used once
a roll of black and white film. Something logical to do
when you’re the owner of a black and white dog.
What does ‘In Almost Every Picture #5’ reveal
about the dog and its relationships with other
family members?
To my idea the dog was bought after the kids left the
house of their parents. This is something you hear
frequently. Also people that can’t get babies mostly buy
a dog to replace a baby. This is the case in the first ‘In
almost every picture’ book.
Another thing that’s a bit mysterious is the identity of
the photographer. Is it in this case the women’s
husband or is it always someone else. And if it is the
husband, why does he never want to get photographed
with the dog? The main idea behind a lot of these
publications is also that the viewers can come up with
these scenarios themselves.
‘In Almost Every Picture #3’ presents a
substantial departure from the stylistic and
contextual approach of the rest of the series.
The nighttime images included in this volume
were taken in the woods with a camera that
detects motion. As a result, the series offers a
challenging crossover of documentaristic and
surrealist imageries. Are these also found
photographs?
I found these images on the Internet. By coincidence I
looked at a page of a hunter from Texas. He had one
of these images on his site. I got intrigued by it and
found out that a lot of hunters have these images as
some sort of illustration on their site. Other than that
they only use the images to find out at what time the
most deer pass on this specific spot. A lot of images
have a time and date imprint.
What were the criteria behind the final
selection for these images?
I tried to show as much variety as possible, but also
show a sequence of photographs made at one spot.
Other than that I show mostly night images, jus
Erik Kessels
In Almost Every Picture #5, 2005

39
because these fit better with the idea that they are
caught and surprised by a flash.
It’s important for me to use a certain sequence
of images outside their original content. In this way
people look at them in a ‘new’ way. The original images
are never made with the intention to end up in a book
or an exhibition. Found photography on it’s own is not
that interesting, a lot of times it’s full of clichés.

These photographs capture the deer in

sudden, unexpected flash creating an
unconventional series of portraits. Do you
think the deer developed an awareness of the
camera?

I don’t think they develop an awareness of the camera,

but the deer are in a way the photographers
themselves. They make their own self-portraits.

‘In Almost Every Picture #3’ presents animals

that at times look otherworldly, naïve, Erik Kessels
childlike and even sometimes spooky. Do you In Almost Every Picture #3, 2005

think the camera helps in revealing these
animals or contributes to a process of
mystification?

The fact that they set of the shutter of the camera

themselves and that this is totally not expected helps a
lot. There is no photographer involved so the cropping
of a lot of images is very ‘free’ which makes these
images very special.

Erik Kessels is Creative Director of Amsterdam based

communication agency KesselsKramer, working for
national and international clients such as Diesel,
Oxfam, Ben and The Hans Brinker Budget Hotel for
which he has won numerous international awards. He
is a photography collector and has published several
books of his 'collected' images; ‘Missing Link’ (1999),
‘Instant Men' (2000), 'in almost every picture' (2001,
2003, 2004, 2006) and ‘Wonder’ (2006). Since 2000,
he’s been an editor of the alternative photography
magazine ‘Useful Photography’. He has curated
exhibitions such as 'Dutch Delight' at Foam
(Photography Museum Amsterdam) and
‘Confrontation’ at the Institut Néerlandais (Paris).
Recently he made the exhibition ‘Loving Your Pictures’
at the Centraal Museum Utrecht (The Netherlands) with
a wide variety of found photography material. Kessels Erik Kessels
In Almost Every Picture #5, 2005

has taught communication at the Hallo Academy
Amsterdam and photography at the Gerrit Rietveld
Academy in Amsterdam.

For more information please visit:

www.kesselskramer.com Antennae would like to thank Sam Trenerry, press
Erik Kessels was interviewed by Antennae in the officer at the Photographers’ Gallery London for the
Summer of 2007
help given over this project.

40
 FROM
CELLULOSE TO
STEEL

‘Scott Silvey is an internationally known artist whose work investigates different processes of
becoming. Here he introduces three different works dealing with the subject of plants.
Text by Scott Silvey

Scott Silvey
Developing what seems at the expenses of what is, steel, mirror, mahogany, walnut, 4.5ft x 6ft. x 11ft., 1998

W
here can we find the relationships of tree
to lumber, soil to plastic, and cellulose to
steel? Over the past 10 years I have made it
my work to explore the many possible answers to
these questions. Via both three and two-dimensional
media I have endeavoured to tap into the semiotic,
scientific, and historical connections between the
natural world and the objects that humans construct.
By conjuring the human presence in the absence of the
figure the soul and the land find a place to both
commune and collide.
“Developing what seems at the expense of
what is” is a meditation on man’s intellectual
arrogance. The primary structure is built of steel and
mirror. It’s form is a graphic synthesis of an English
conservatory, an autopsy table, and a lady’s vanity.

41
Scott Silvey
Nourished by Change, steel, suitcase, soil, 49.5ft.x11 ft.x7.5 ft., 1999

Sitting atop the table portion of the form is an African
violet carved of mahogany and walnut. The primary
structure of the piece alludes to much of humankind’s
desire to manipulate and control nature according to
it’s own purposes. The conservatory is a place to
display plants, the autopsy table is a reminder of
dissection and genetic engineering, and the vanity is
designed to help us feel better about ourselves. Being
one of the most common of domesticated houseplants,
the African violet demonstrates the human
consumption of the natural world. At the nexus of
these allusions the central question I am posing
becomes evident, are we engaging in genetic
engineering and other forms of biological manipulation
because it will truly benefit the world we live in, or
rather, just because we can?
“Nourished by change” represents the bond
between the static and the kinetic. Fabricated from
steel, (one of the most basic of modern building
materials,) thirty-eight corn plants in various states of
growth sprout from a field of forty-nine suitcases.
Being a grain-bearing plant, corn is a staple food in
much of the world. By extension these plants are a
symbol of diet itself and the life-giving routine it
necessitates. The suitcases then are a representation of
change and movement. The totality of the installation
42
comprises a homogenous landscape built from these
superficially irreconcilable ideas.
I am currently working on a project titled
“Civic remedies.” The architectural imagery in these
acrylic and carbon works on panel is taken from in and
around my Tokyo neighbourhood. Within a decaying
and spectral residential urban landscape I have
rendered various emblems of consumption. Vending
machines, street lamps, electric poles, and meters all
stand as silent sentinels amongst the places where
people once lived. Extracted mostly from aged herbals
and pictures I have found online, the only inhabitants
now are mounds of dirt in which medicinal plants have
germinated. In all of their unique and sundry ways
these healing herbs emerge to restore a world that has
become sick.
Although my work is fashioned out of concrete
research and internally clear goals it is intended to act
more as a catalyst for thought than any sort of
proclamation or didactic instruction. It is more
concerned with introducing relationships than
demonstrating a thesis. Like many artists before me my
desire is to provide a starting point from which
contemplation, or simply a moment of pleasure, might
proceed.
Scott Silvey
Ginseng, from the series Civic Remedies, acrylic/carbon on panel, 2007

43
 Scott Silvey currently lives and works in Tokyo, Japan.
Originally from Indiana, Scott has an MFA in Sculpture from
Georgia State University and has shown his work in various
venues in the United States and Japan.

44

A compelling synergic effort of science, technology, nature and art played a defining role in the
development of Rene Binet’s style. From Nature to Form, a recently published book by Prestel shows
how nature ‘became’ design and architecture.
Questions by Eric Frank
‘F
rom nature to Form’ is the title of a lavishly
illustrated volume published this year on the
work of Rene’ Binet the French architect and
designer author of Esquisses décoratives’. The world’s
enthusiasm for Art Nouveau reached its apex at the
World Fair in Paris in 1900. There, René Binet created
the main entrance, ‘La Porte Monumentale’. To
coincide with the exhibition, Binet published in
Esquisses Décoratives (1896) the plate designs for the
gate, along with other sketches of furniture, jewellery,
wallpaper, lighting, stained glass, signs, wrought iron
and architectural details.
The sketches for Esquisses work, eminent
German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician,
professor and artist Décoratives, collected in this volume
present the perfect marriage of nature, science, art and
design that Binet assembled whilst inspired by Ernst
Haeckels. The eminent German naturalist and biologist
was also a philosopher, and artist and amongst other
things named thousands of new species and mapped a
genealogical tree relating all life forms.
We interviewed Robert Proctor, Professor of
Architectural History at the Mackintosh School of
Architecture in Glasgow, who’s one of the two authors
of the book.
From Nature to Form reveals the fascinating
professional symbiosis between the architect
Rene’ Binet and the scientist Ernst Haeckel.
Where does one end and the other begin?
Binet and Haeckel remained firmly in their separate
fields, but in each case it is what they absorbed from
other disciplines that transformed their own. Binet
45
FROM
NATURE TO
FORM
appropriated Haeckel’s scientific illustrations for his
own purposes: the architect mentions in his letters
that he would frequent the Natural History Museum to
leaf through the plates in Haeckel’s ‘Challenger
Report’, copying the engravings into his sketchbook for
later digestion and use. He must have done the same
with other such natural history books: I discovered
some of his source material in Alcide d’Orbigny’s
Paléontologie Française, a beautifully illustrated series
of volumes of fossil taxonomy issued throughout the
nineteenth century. Binet’s book shows a fascination
with all kinds of animal and plant, but his greatest
importance is in his extension of this artistic research
into the field of microscopic life. This was something
that had been proposed earlier in the nineteenth
century, but not carried out before on this scale or
with such enthusiasm. What I also find so interesting is
that the ways in which science communicated in this
period are what allowed Binet to make such artistic
use of it. Haeckel and others were primarily concerned
with the taxonomy of species, ordering and describing
nature (in a system which created its own
chronological, evolutionary, setting as the visual
elements locked into place). The visual image was
therefore extremely important. Natural history books
had meticulous textual descriptions of every species,
but thanks to developments in book production in the
nineteenth century, the best way to make comparisons
between species was through the accurate and fine
detail possible with metal plate engravings. Books such
as these were very expensive, and owned by museums
and universities. They had a practical function in
allowing species in collections to be identified and
named, and in assisting scientists in the discovery and
labelling of new species. Nevertheless, both in their
Ernst Haeckel 46
Selection of tables from ‘Forms in Nature’,1899-1904

Rene’ Binet
Entrance to the World Exposition in Paris, 1900, inspired by Hackel’s drawings of radiolarians

images and in their introductory texts, they are
extremely accessible. Flicking through Haeckel’s
‘Challenger Report’ today is still a magical experience:
page after page of extraordinary and endlessly diverse
and complex abstract forms passes before you. And
you can still read the text and understand, without any
difficult terminology, what a microscopic creature such
as the radiolarian is: its life cycle, feeding habits,
nervous system, buoyancy mechanism, and even
Haeckel’s own comments on the wonders experienced
in observing them, glowing under the ocean’s surface at
night or discovered in the mud dredged up from the
ocean floor. We also know that Binet had his own
polarising microscope, the essential equipment for
seeing these creatures himself. My point here, I
suppose, is that it was actually not very difficult to
become, or at least to imagine yourself, a scientist: the
discipline of biology was openly available and required
little specialist knowledge to understand it.
Haeckel reached out to art from his discipline
in a similar manner, above all with the Kunstformen
(Art Forms in Nature). He evidently saw the artistic
potential in his purely scientific images, but the
Kunstformen does not attempt to show what their
applications might be. It merely selects from amongst
those images. The applications are hinted at by the
choices made: hummingbirds, for example, are
presumably included less for their shapes than for their
vivid colour juxtapositions; jellyfish are so often shown
in plan and section (their tentacles carefully positioned
and coloured pink) because they could be used as
architectural motifs, like the painted ceiling rose in
47
Haeckel’s own house in Jena. Otherwise, everything is
left to the artist. Nevertheless, Haeckel’s vision for art
was tied to the logical expansion of his science into
every field of knowledge: unlike Darwin, he accepted
all the wider implications of evolution, and proposed a
religious view that would promote the understanding
of man’s humble position in the natural world. The
Kunstformen was a small part of that project, and
therefore attempted to direct the artist down this
path. If there is any real bridge between the two men’s
work, it is here: it is clear that, even if he only partially
accepted or understood Haeckel’s philosophical views,
Binet’s Esquisses décoratives was to some extent an
experiment in putting them into practice.
Prestel’s reprint of Equisses decoratives is the
first since 1904. In your essay we read that
Rene Binet was unsatisfied with the limited
availability of this work and that as a result,
its influence on subsequent Art Nouveau was
negligible. Do you believe the reprint of his
work could play an influential role in the
future of design and architecture?
As a historian of architecture, I would have to leave
that question to my architect colleagues. I find it hard
to see the plates outside of their artistic context.
While his work may not have been well known, it was
part of a larger tendency that resulted in similar work
elsewhere. Louis Sullivan’s architecture was in many
ways similar, stylistically and in its ornamental principle.
Binet may well have known of Sullivan, as some of his
 Rene’ Binet
Banc, 1904.

designs were published by this time and plaster casts
from his buildings were available in Paris. Sullivan may
have known of the Esquisses décoratives when he
created his System of Architectural Ornament in 1924,
with its visual metaphors of plant growth applied to
abstract forms; but he could just as well have published
this without a knowledge of Binet. In the same way,
D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form of 1917
continued Haeckel’s ideas and was eagerly adopted in
many fields, not just architectural design but also urban
analysis and planning throughout the twentieth century.
I would not wish to be dogmatic and say how
designers and architects should or should not look at
Binet’s Esquisses décoratives. But I am suspicious of
any method which now uses visual forms and justifies
them as related to some essential underlying concepts
in nature. What Binet should tell us is how historically
situated that attitude is. Why, in any case, should it be
important to imitate nature in design? If I wanted to
find inspiration in Binet, I might consider his more
fundamental methods. In that case I would want to
know something about the state of science – the real
science which describes the world in new ways. Could
48
Rene’ Binet
Tympan, 1904.

microbiology, biochemistry, genetics, nuclear physics,
and so on, provide visual images which describe their
methods in the way that Haeckel’s science did? I do
not mean visual images of their subjects so much as
visualisable processes. It would be easy enough to
make a building that looked like a magnified virus. If
this is often what Binet’s work did, it could be justified
because Haeckel’s images embodied his scientific
method of morphology; but I don’t know if there are
any current scientific methods that are so intrinsically
graphic.
There are not many self-declared monists
around today, but perhaps our culture does adhere to
some of Haeckel’s principles – if we are to see nature
in terms of balanced ecosystems, and to care for it
accordingly, we can consider buildings as having to take
a responsible place in their environment, as if they
were new animals unleashed within it. Sustainability is
accordingly a (possibly the) major issue in current
architecture. But this attitude might also lead architects
to Binet’s solution – the effusive visual delight in
nature, and direct representations of nature’s
interconnectedness through a building’s form.

Rene’ Binet
Plaque de Porte, 1904.

Personally I enjoy Binet’s work because it makes such a
refreshing contrast to the twentieth-century Modernist
guilt trip over ornament. Over the last few decades
ornament has been gradually emerging from the
cupboard where it was shut away for so long, and it
seems that architects can also now design it without
having to resort to parody to hide their shame. I would
like to think that Binet might quite simply remind
architects of the joys of ornament, and give them ideas
for new ways of working it into the materials at hand.
Then choices have to be made over sources and
meanings, which may not be the same as those of
Binet.
For Binet, nature was the source for a renewal
of art and a way to avoid the copying of
historical styles. To what extent can Binet’s
style be considered a ‘new style’?
In the preface to Binet’s plates, Gustave Geffroy wrote
that Binet’s supposedly direct and unmediated
incorporation of nature was a way out from the
problem of style – from historical style as much as
49
from a personal style. This is an unsustainable view
now, of course. Even if Binet thought he was
approaching nature directly, it was in practice filtered
through many cultural layers – through its enclosure in
scientific discourse; its visual representation in
engravings of magnified specimen views (views which
were only provided by certain types of microscope,
and were not obtainable with the naked eye); its
involvement in cultural forms (Jules Verne, museums,
zoos and aquariums) which posited certain types of
nature as exotic fantasy spectacle and gave
associational meanings to certain animals. And when
incorporating nature into architecture, Binet re-forms
it to fit all the conventions of his own discipline –
columns with capitals and entablatures; objects, like
keys or rings, of conventional use and form; openwork
carving or moulding in wood or ceramic; structural
frames in wood and walls in stone or brick; repeated
patterns in brick, lead inlay or tiles. Nature is co-opted
to shift those conventions, and the shift gives an effect
of surprise: the familiar looks suddenly odd. In that
sense it is a new ‘style’, in the same way that a
nineteenth-century architect could employ Egyptian,
Greek, Roman or Romanesque styles at will. On the
other hand, as there is no fundamental transformation
or denial of those underlying conventions, and of the
values of architecture in its period and place (structural
logic, symmetry and monumentality), it remains a
manifestation of a late-nineteenth-century or Art
Nouveau style. How you label Binet’s work depends
on your frame of reference.
Geffroy also thought that Binet’s use of nature
would avoid excessive individualism in a period when
(as the architect Frantz Jourdain excitedly wrote)
design seemed to be characterised by anarchy.
Nevertheless, Binet’s own style emerges very clearly –
it is entirely different in technique to Victor Horta’s
appropriation of nature in swirling and fluid forms, for
example. In the end this must have been inevitable
considering that Binet’s ceramics, mosaics, embroidery,
marquetry and so on are not created in practice, but
only in design, through pencil drawing and watercolour
or gouache. I don’t know if there is any current
research on the ways in which drawing is affected by
the constraints or habits of the artist’s body – I am
sure others have described these effects before. In the
case of the drawing designer, it seems obvious enough
that the same habits in moving a pencil or mixing
colours will result in similarities across the work (in
this case, furthermore, produced as a single body of
work). Binet’s distinctively spiky style of drawing
further transforms his favourite selections from nature,
and imbues everything with a certain similarity which
one can only call a Binet style.
Binet’s Equisses decoratives brings to surface
the problematic relationship between Nature
and Culture within the field of the visual arts.

Rene’ Binet
Anterne Electrique, 1904.

To what extent can stylisation and realism be
considered expressions of natural and
artificial?
You’re trying to trip me up! Clearly in the nineteenth
century the decorative arts were described in terms of
a scale of conventionalisation of nature, from realism
to abstraction. Owen Jones thought that abstraction
and stylisation showed a greater achievement in human
intelligence (compared to the slavish copying of
nature), while Auguste Racinet and other French
authors argued that realism required greater skill in
execution by craftsmen, so could demonstrate a higher
culture in that way than simple geometrical forms. So
while Jones thought that stylisation was artificial, and
therefore good, Racinet implied that realism actually
requires greater artifice. In both cases it is the idea of
human labour (whether mental or physical) operating
on nature that gives cultural value to the designed
product.
Both Jones and Racinet, and thus also Binet and
Geffroy, accepted the idea of such a scale, and the
concept of realism, assuming an unproblematic
50
relationship between nature as object and its
representations. It is essentially an enlightenment,
imperialist view of nature as something to be
appropriated completely by culture, either to be
worked into productive use, or to be framed as
untamed and exhibited as part of a cultural or scientific
ordering of the world. It is perhaps no coincidence that
Binet’s Porte Monumentale of 1900 formed the
entrance to the Paris World’s Fair, where all the
French colonies were represented by typical buildings
occupied by imported inhabitants, and where a
journalist could publish a series on the types of women
he had observed from so many countries. Binet
similarly takes the distant and ‘other’ in nature and, by
adapting it to convention while appearing not to do so,
makes it familiar and brings it under control.
The working relationship between Binet and
Haeckel was not purely a visual matter. Their
investigation of natural forms also involved
theories of classification and evolution. Can
design and architecture play a role in defining
these concepts?
Classification in nature has often been discussed in
architecture as ‘typology’, and evolution in design is a
well-enough established concept. But I would hesitate
to make such analogies so glibly. They are just
analogies, perhaps with some analytical uses. I tell my
students off for talking about the ‘evolution’ of
buildings in history. Buildings are not animals. We
could accept that human beings might be evolving, but
even if we did accept that, there is no logical reason
why the products of our intelligence and labour should
evolve. They do not contain DNA or replicate
themselves. If there is a link between the evolutionary
biologies of our brains and hands and the things they
produce, it is not going to be a simple one!
Robert Proctor has been Lecturer in Architectural
History at the Mackintosh School of Architecture,
Glasgow School of Art, since 2002, having previously
studied at Edinburgh University, and studied and
taught at Cambridge University. His work on twentieth-
century churches began through research on the
architectural firm of Gillespie, Kidd & Coia.
Robert Proctor's work on church architecture continues
alongside an interest in French architecture of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His PhD at
Cambridge University explored the department store in
Paris in this period, on which he has also subsequently
written, and he has more recently specialised in French
art nouveau.
Rene’ Binet – From Nature to Form is published by
Prestel. Many thanks to Anna Kenning at Prestel for
her kind help.
 BECOMING
CULTURE
Animal is a pioneering series from Reaktion Books. The first of its kind to explore the historical
significance and impact on humans of a wide range of animals, each book in the series takes a
different animal and examines its role in history around the world.
Questions by Giovanni Aloi

51
52
 Jonathan Burt
Published so far, The Animal Series, 2007.

T
o those close to the field of Animal Studies the
work of Jonathan Burt is an invaluable resource
of inspiration. He is the author of a number of
relevant publications and more recently also the editor
of one of the most innovative and challenging
publishing works in the field of Animal Studies: the
‘Animal Series’ published by Reaktion Books. The
series introduces a new and much needed format in
the history of ‘animal writing’ replacing the ‘objectifying
monographical approach’ with a multidisciplinary
formula presenting the animal as protagonist of cultural
histories. Beautifully designed and illustrated the series
now comprises of 19 published titles (as per December
2007) and is awaiting the arrival of 6 more titles
scheduled to be released in 2008.
We interviewed Jonathan Burt to discuss the series.
Your writing career in the field of Animal
Studies has developed through the publication
of essays like ‘The illumination of the animal
kingdom’ and books like ‘Animals in Film’.
How did the idea for a vast project like
‘Animal’ series come about in the first place?
It was more a case of ideas than a single idea.
When I began working in what is now called ‘animal
studies’ back in the early 1990’s my research was
mainly on the London Zoo in the early twentieth
century, and at the time there was barely a handful of
worthwhile things to read of a secondary nature apart
from the source material itself. And the zoo archive
was not exactly fulsome. In a funny way that
experience shaped my approach to animal studies for
ever afterwards. I would trek over the road at
lunchtimes from the London Zoological Society Library
to the Gardens and watch the animals for an hour or
so. The consequence of this was that I began to think
about the zoo, and animal history, in two different
53
ways. I was fascinated by the minutiae of zoo
management, the paperwork and committees that
constituted its institutional history, on the one hand,
and, on the other hand, the more problematic, diffuse
questions raised by the impact of animal display and
visual imagery on public culture. The interest in film
and photography began there too and I trekked all
over the country trying to find as much early archive
film as I could of British zoos. For a brief time, in my
over-enthusiasm, I began to think of film and
photography as my most important resource for
researching animal history partly because the archives
seemed so inadequate.
When I finally published some of this work on
the Monkey Hill, which was a display of a community of
Hamadryas baboons opened in 1925, I think the
approach I used pretty much shaped my idea of how I
wanted the animal series to be. I described all the
different types of discourse used to describe the
Monkey Hill – the press, scientists, official zoo
publications, novels – and at the same time wrote
about how some of the visual aspects of the display
eluded all these written accounts. In a way I see the
animal series as expressing this dilemma where authors
summarise all the many different ways in which a
species is described in science, the arts, across cultures
and so forth, whilst the images act as a parallel
commentary. Sometimes the images elucidate
connections between the written material, or act
symbolically in their own right, and sometimes they are
much more opaque or elliptical.
My intellectual models for the series were
obviously classical writers like Aristotle, but especially
Conrad Gessner whose encyclopaedic Historia
Animalium I absolutely love both for the images and
the text. And also, perhaps surprisingly, the Rough
Guide Travel series, whose founder is an old friend of
mine. I see the evolutionary history section that each
book has as a version of the Rough Guide’s Getting
There and Visas sections, before you get to all the
regional chapters.
Reaktion Books has developed a strong
reputation in the field of Animal studies. Was
it difficult to convince the publishers to
produce such vast and original project?
Yes, Reaktion had already published some good and
important books on animals such as Steve Baker’s
Postmodern Animal and Hilda Kean’s Animal Rights:
political and social change in Britain since 1800 both of
which had a big influence on my thinking. And I think
Michael Leaman, who runs Reaktion, is very
predisposed to animal projects not necessarily for
ethical reasons but for his interest in the more
marginal areas of cultural history. The Animal series
itself partly arose from a light hearted suggestion when
I suggested to Michael that it would be great to do a
Rough Guide to the Camel. We then drew up a list of
oddball animals that you could do similar books for,
because at the time I was also frustrated by the dogs,
cats and horses type of animal history and wanted to
do more on fish, insects, and birds. I do remember that
we initially came up with oysters, rabbits and flies!
There was no formal proposal as such, it just came
from that informal and slightly surreal discussion.
Reaktion came back to me about 3 weeks later and
asked how such a series might work, what sort of
shape the books might take, and whether we could find
the authors. The first two questions were easy to
answer, the second proved much more difficult
because there were so few people who had worked on
animals in the interdisciplinary way that was required.
The interdisciplinary approach of each
volume has been highly praised by the critics.
Is there a formula that applies to each book in
the series?
The books do have a formula, or rather a template,
which I mentioned in 1). I insist on the evolutionary
history chapter, and I like an emphasis on other
cultures where appropriate. But I also always say to
authors that they should try and see their book as an
essay with some sort of shape and a thesis, rather than
as an encyclopaedia entry. My main problem as an
editor is dealing with texts that get a bit like lists of
examples, which is a big temptation in interdisciplinary
writing when you are trying to squeeze a lot of
information into c. 35,000 words.
"Superbly illustrated, this is the perfect book
for the rat fancier in your life."--The
Guardian (James Fleming, The Spectator, Apr
15 2006)
The series has been praised for its innovative
and challenging content as well as for the
beautiful design and finish of each book. Have
54
you had any influence on this area of the
project?
The only influence I had was to insist on the
importance of images, that there should be as many as
economically possible, and also that we should have
colour. Reaktion are not a wealthy publisher, they are
a very small outfit, so there were lots of constraints on
costs and size. But they make up for that with really
fantastic book design. We won a National Book Award
for ‘Best Designed’ new series when it was launched in
2003.
At this stage, ‘Animal’ has covered the cultural
history of a broad range of animals from the
whale to the ant and the parrot to the snake.
Are there animals that are more likely to be
part of the ‘Animal’ series than others?
There are two interesting issues here. The first is that
animal studies is still a relatively new subject and some
areas are still very under-researched so we have to be
careful about whether an ‘animal’ may or may not have
enough of a cultural history for a book. I would really
like to do a book on Jellyfish, for instance, though
coming up with 120 varying images from different
periods of history may be a challenge. The second is
how to deal with animals that have a limited
geographical area and a regionally limited cultural
history. We have tended to avoid those, we rejected a
proposal for the dingo recently on those grounds, and
have gone for creatures with a global resonance.
Having said that though we do have a book
forthcoming on the Moose because we have a very
good author, Kevin Jackson, and a lot of rather
wonderful and eccentric material. In the end it comes
down to the strength of a proposal. I wouldn’t
necessarily add ‘… and what might sell’ because we
have published on what might be considered fairly
marginal creatures like the cockroach and the peacock.
As part of the series, you wrote the
book ‘Rat’. Why did you choose this animal in
particular? Are you planning to write other
titles for the series?
As I mentioned the period of animal history I am most
interested in is the early twentieth century and the rat
is such a key animal for that period. The beginnings of
the bubonic plague epidemics in the mid-1890s, the
importance of the rat in laboratory science, and then
you have the Rat Man case in Freud and the prevalence
of rats in the First World War. I am very drawn to
these multi-stranded examples also because it is one
way of writing a more animal centred history. And the
rat has such an impact on almost every aspect of
human life which also fits with my preference for
writing about the way animals impact on humans rather
than vice versa. I don’t have any plans to write another
book for the series, though if tempted I would go for
that elusive jellyfish or maybe the giraffe.
The ‘Animal’ series offers the unique
opportunity to trace the history and cultural
development of a number of iconic animals. In
doing so, each title takes into consideration
philosophical and relevant ethical views. Who
is the target readership of ‘Animal’?
Whenever I am asked about the readership of the
animal series I usually say something about them being
in that area of semi-academic, semi-popular books. And
that is a very difficult area to write well for. But also I
find that there are fanatics for a particular animal or
group of animals so obviously they make up the
readership.
21 titles have already been published as
part of the series. How many titles will it
comprise of? Could you reveal which animals
will be captured by the series over the next
season?
At the moment on my desk I have drafts of
Horse, Eagle and Moose. And in the pipeline there are
some very exciting books to come in from people
whose work I really like. Brett Mizelle on the Pig and
Phillip Armstrong on Sheep for instance. We also have
Hare which I think will be really good especially for
fans of Joseph Beuys. I’m not sure how big the series
will be in the end. I would like to close it with Human
although I know that sounds a bit like making that the
final rung on the great chain of being but it seems a
logical way to finish.
55
Jonathan Burt studied Palaeolithic archaeology at
Cambridge University between 1977 and 1980. After
two years as an archaeologist, agricultural contractor,
and barman, amongst other miscellaneous jobs between
1980 and 1982, he became a freelance writer and
teacher which he has been ever since. Between 1992
and 1995 he co-directed the Unofficial Knowledge
project at the Kings College Research Centre,
Cambridge University. He began working on animal
history full time in 1994 and co-founded the Animal
Studies Group (U.K.) in 2000 with Steve Baker, Erica
Fudge, Robert Mckay, and Garry Marvin. He created
and edits the Animal series for Reaktion Books. This
series won the U.K. National Book Award for Best
Designed New Series in 2004. He is also a review
editor for the journal Society & Animals.
Animal: The importance of mythology, religion and
science are described as is the history of food, the trade
in animals and their products, pets, exhibition, film and
photography, and their roles in the artistic and literary
imagination.
Written by authors who are passionate about their
subjects, these highly accessible, informative and
beautifully produced books will appeal to the general
reader as well as to those with a specialist interest, and
will be of educational value to college students and
school children.
Antennae wishes to thank Reaktion Books for the help
received over this project. Special thanks to Maria
Kilcoyne, Publicity and Rights Director at Reaktion
Books.
Jonathan Burt was interviewed by Antennae over the
Autumn of 2007.

Back Cover Image: Karen Knorr – The Order of Things
2004-2005, from the series Life Class.

 Antennae.org.uk
Issue five will be online on the 21st of
March
2008

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