by Jessica Williams
The collaborative artwork Unseeing elegy of the tetrachromats (2021) inverts the familiar trope of simulating nonhuman sensory perspectives for the human-centered spectator. It additionally positions the contributions of artists and biological scientists at the boundaries of their disciplines, in a tension of functional non-consensus. The overarching intention of the work was proposed by lead artist Jessica Laraine Williams (www.jlogos.net), to speculate on a material-cultural sovereignty for avian aesthetes. Her expectation was that these efforts would be insufficient for the intended audience, Australian parrot Platycercus elegans (the crimson rosella); her hope was to invite the birds to engage with an artistic offering, document this encounter and then to report back to human audiences with the results. In between Covid-19 lockdown periods in her home state of Victoria, Australia, she managed to stage her performance with wild parrots over one weekend.
Jessica Laraine WILLIAMS, Alex LAST, Roger ALSOP, Mathew BERG. Unseeing Elegy of the Tetrachromats, 2021. Video and sound, dimensions variable.
This project was conceived as part of Williams’ PhD research into figuration of posthuman imaginaries through boundary work with art, undertaken at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, Australia. Posthumanist practices recognize that figuring more-than-human subjectivity will always be hedged by our anthropocentric vision. From a critical studies perspective, this limitation can be theorized through questions such as what constitutes art to a given subject? What would nonhuman art look like? Extended to nonhuman animals, an anthropocentric vision of ‘animal art’ tends to seek analogues to those in human artworlds: dance, sculpture, painting, and song. Bird song and courtship displays draw these types of comparisons, particularly. Considering the avian sensorium from an ecological perspective, human vision has been shown to differ in particular biological aspects.
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