Twitchers and Cheaters

Twitchers and Cheaters was a multi-channel outdoor video project installed into the branches of several large trees at the Fields Sculpture Park at Art Omi in rural upstate New York. A “twitcher” is British slang term for an avid bird-watcher. They frequently keep a “life list” of the birds that they have personally observed. This list is the source of great pride for many bird-watchers, since they will often travel long distances to be able to add new birds to their list. Ultimately, however, every bird-watcher's life list relies on a kind of honor system since there is no easy way to quantify or prove bird sightings, which often happen in remote places while the birder is alone.

On five small monitors in the trees, viewers saw life-size images of birds appear and disappear, appearing briefly and intermittently on the different monitors. Any bird in the northeast that could conceivably land in a tree at the Fields was included in the footage, and also many others that would be much rarer and harder to spot. The images flitted from screen to screen, and as such prompted a viewing experience that resembled the quick and “twitchy” experience of bird-watching. By watching these video screens in the woods for a while, a viewer could effectively assemble a “cheater's life list” of all the birds of the northeast in the space of only few minutes.

Twitchers and Cheaters pokes fun at the longstanding human compulsion to collect and categorize, as well as the competitive impulse that sometimes infuses even pastoral activities such as bird-watching. It takes the thirst for optimizing strategies to such an extreme that it turns an activity that by definition requires patience and keen observation into something comically oversimplified and absurdly efficient.