Birb Watching is a cheeky VR experience that intertwines our contemporary obsessions with watching birds and consuming social media.
Whimsically imagined, these soft, fuzzy birbs were born on Amherst Island Ontario. Beginning their life cycle as physical sculptural forms and sourced from local wool, these needle-felted birds are manifestations of the artist's emotional response to seeing birds in nature, rather than an ornithological study.
These birds are then introduced into the virtual wild: starting with photogrammetry scans, they are digitized, reconstructed, animated, then released to circulate as creatures of human fascination.
As a gentle bird watching simulator, Birb Watching invites active looking while engaging the viewer in the contemplation of nature, the behaviour of the familiar, and the alien in our world.
The VR experience encourages awareness of undulating relationships between the physical and the virtual, the hand-made and the digitally-rendered, and the shifting terrain defining art and craft.
The artist gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council, and technical artist/game developer collaborators Tim Miller and Corrie Shea-Pelletier, without whom this project could not have been made.