Lucy Stevens' audio projects

Feeding Frenzy sun prints

17 July 2011

There’s a few ideas for projects involving pigeons, paint, sun print paper, bread, seed, fans, projections, whistles, monitors and video that I want to try out.

I drove to the canal to have a go at the sun print paper idea.

I wanted to use a different method to document feeding the pigeons, so I used sun print paper (or nature print paper). The paper is coated with light sensitive chemicals that react when exposed to light. When solid objects are placed on the paper, they block the light and turn white, while the paper around them remains blue. To encourage the pigeons to stand on the paper and essentially make their mark, I covered the paper with bread and seed. It wasn’t hard to encourage the pigeons to feed off the paper, as this is the same group of birds I usually feed every Wednesday for Project Pigeon Watch (gathering one year’s worth of data on pigeon colour morphs and courtship behaviour, to produce a sound composition). I drove to the canal so that I could use the boot of my car as a processing area. It had a tray of water that was used to ‘fix’ the image after approx 1 minute exposure to sunlight.