I've known for a while that there is this interesting phenomena that happens on the roof of the building right across from my apartment. On some days, pigeons form a line around the brim of the roof of this building. They also occasionally fly and flock to the middle of the car road and peck on some food (there is someone that keeps leaving stale bagels there) and then fly back to maintain their formation around the roof.
I had only started realizing this around around early October, 2019 and since then began to be curious about looking for patterns to their behavior. On a personal note, I was avoiding letting this be a curiosity because of my fear of birds, especially pigeons. I like to say that I had a "Hitchcock" moment when I was young on a family trip in Milan, my dad thought it would be funny to see what happens if he put bird seeds on my head. Ever since then, I have not been fond of birds (to say the least). So despite how their behavior was interesting to me, I chose to not acknowledge it until recently.
This project is my attempt to understand my subject of fear by creating visualization with their movements. This experience of documenting their activities for the past two months and half increased my exposure to them and the activity of sitting down to create visualizations with the videos helped me see the beauty in their movement.
The visualizations were created in Processing using openCV. The style of visualizations were inspired by the general movements of the pigeons of each videos.
Art of Noticing: Patterns of Pigeons is a project by Jiwon Shin.