Artist Brings Bird's Eye View To Security Booth

By Andrea Appleton
POSTED DEC.4, 2006

A new security booth will soon appear in Thomas Paine Park, the grassy wedge across from the court house. Hardly a newsworthy occasion, except that this booth - in place of a yawning police officer- will house a tree full of canaries. Sort of. The tree is fake and the canaries, strictly televised. “The Fortunate Islands,” a temporary public art installation by artist Seth Weiner, is due to appear in the park early this month.A synthetic tree - a steel frame covered with epoxy clay molds of real bark- will fill much of the booth.

(Weiner is a veteran tree-maker. He built the mangrove tree in the Hall of Ocean Life exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History.) On its leafless branches, a number of surveillance monitors will perch, each displaying a video of a vibrant yellow canary. If passersby press their ear to the glass, they will hear the song of the birds inside the sealed box.

“The original concept was actually to use live canaries,” Weiner, himself a canary owner, explained last month to Community Board 1's Arts and Entertainment Task Force, “but the Parks Department was understandably hesitant about that.” Instead, the five surveillance monitors in the sealed booth will show a canary on video, pecking at food, twittering, and engaging in other bird-like behaviour. The show will run in a loop, 24 hours a day for three months. Weiner said the security booth concept first came to him when he was reading about canaries. The birds are native to the Canary Islands, which, Weiner discovered, were referred to in antiquity as “The Fortunate Islands.”

Located off the northwestern coast of Africa, the islands were long considered the edge of the known world. Weiner saw some parallels in his own world.

 “This, perhaps, is not entirely dissimilar from the way in which many Manhattan residents regard the Lower tip of their island,” reads his artist’s statement.

Previous works by Weiner include “Brooding,” part of Exit Art’s Holiday Windows series last year. The piece featured an array of 250-watt red heat lamps. The infrared heat they gave off penetrated through the display window to warm people outside.

“For me what’s interesting is something that at least conceptually provides a function,” said Weiner. “These birds in theory would act as air quality monitors.”