| The Bird’s Nest continues the collaboration between installation
artist Jan-Erik Andersson and sound artist Shawn Decker. This is a site-specific
public work that includes sculptural and sound elements. This particular
version of the nest, which has also been shown in Berlin (at the Klosterstrasse
Ruine), at Wakefield, UK (Public Arts Center), and at Hyvinkaa, Finland
(in the Central Plaza), was shown as part of the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary
Art’s exhibition, “Wireless Experience”, coinciding
with ISEA 2004, and was situated in the lobby of the Helsinki Sonomat,
adjacent to the museum. In this installation, the nest was used as part
of a café, where people could sit and drink coffee, etc. at tables
inside the nest.
The Bird’s Nest in part explores new ways of developing architecture
based on forms found in nature. These forms are combined with kinetic
sound works that are likewise derived directly from natural processes.
The artists see these acoustic and kinetic elements as functioning within
the context of architecture as a kind of ornamentation, broadening of
the concept of the “ornament” to include sound and rhythm.
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| Although the Bird’s
Nest looks chaotic, it is made of a single, geometric, triangular shaped
wooden ”module". The concept of the module has been widely
used in modernist architecture, resulting in monotonous buildings with
repeated patterns. In the “Bird’s Nest” structure,
however, the arrangement of the triangular "modules" in a
semi-chaotic manner creates a space which is more organic – and
rooted in structures found within natural systems.
Visitors are invited to sit down by tables inside the Nest and experience
the transparency of the structure and how it allows the surrounding
environment to be a part of the experience, yet held at a distance as
well. In this version of the Nest, made for the ISEA exhibition, one
of the most interesting aspects of this was the contrast between the
exacting geometries of the large modernist steel and glass atrium, and
the chaotic construction of the nest.
In the Helsinki nest, piano wires form a transparent roof over the Nest,
and use the nest as a  sounding
board to create rhythmic patterns when the piano wires are struck by
small electric motors. The sounds are constantly changing and never
repeat, being generated by a computer program modelling patterns and
processes directly derived from nature (in particular, from the patterns
of local birdsong). As a sounding board, each separate “stick”
of the sounding board yields a small amount of sound. Inside the nest,
surrounded by these sounds, the listener is cocooned with the sound
environment, which is quite audible, whereas outside the environment,
where the listener can only be near to a small number of these “sticks”
the sounds are quite quiet. The constant change of the sounds, without
repetition ever, directly corresponds to the sounds of the natural environment,
and in turn contrasts with the overwhelming presence of recorded media
in our contemporary culture, which has desensitized us to the subtle
and complex processes and this constant change found in nature.
 Andersson’s
and Decker’s earlier collaborations involving ways that sounds
could function as ornament includes the Gerbera
building in Kiipula, Finland, which also involved architect Erkki
Pitkäranta. In this building, designed by Pitkäranta and Andersson,
Decker’s permanent sound installation brings stylized sounds from
the surrounding natural environment into the winter garden of the building,
creating an “iconic” or “ornamentalized” contact
with the nature immediately outside the doors of the building.
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