After the Last Passenger Pigeon—Video of Martha
2007
Stop-motion animation
This is my second attempt to re-animate Martha, the very last passenger pigeon. Once one of the most ubiquitous birds the species went extinct in 1914.
In On Photography, the theorist Susan Sontag said on the invention of photography, “while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.” In After the Last Passenger Pigeon, I executed a research-based examination of the passenger pigeon, a bird that became endangered in 1800 with a strong decline in 1870 and final extinction (Martha’s death) in 1914. In 1826 the permanent photograph was invented. While the passenger pigeon’s numbers dwindled the advent of the photograph ensured that their fleeting existence would be documented. I have taken the idea of Martha, the very last passenger pigeon, and used images and sounds found on the Internet as source materials to animate her. The end results (video loop, sculpture and cell phone charms) of this exercise in futility felt stagnate, more ghostly then alive, and it brought to mind the notion that one is not able to turn back history. The past is gone no matter how meticulously we try to record it, but other things like the passenger pigeon don’t need to disappear (become extinct). When they are alive humans consider them to be insignificant, it is only when they become rare or completely unattainable that they become precious.