In Memory of the Sparrows

Royal College of Art student Cathrine Kramer says "studies have shown that sparrow populations are decreasing in areas that are affected by electromagnetic communication." She has designed an EMF-powered radio that will play sparrow songs.

She writes: "Imagine on a stroll through Hyde Park you are met with an eerie silence. All the twittering birds have disappeared. By harnessing the very force that drove them away, and transforming it into subtle, obscured bird-like sounds, my object is a monument to the sparrows. It acts as a comfort to those who want to remember the sparrows, but also as a poignant reminder of why they are gone."

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The artist tells Regine of WMNA how it works. "In the exhibition the bird sound was orchestrated, because to work the radio would have to be grounded and this was not possible within the exhibition space," she explained. "However, in the future scenario I envisioned, these memorials would be mounted to trees and tuned to pick up bird sounds transmitted on an AM frequency bandwidth. The antenna would be a long wire spiraling up the tree to pick up the radio waves." ::RCA