Nest Building

Sarah Ford

Planet in Focus is Canada’s largest environmental film festival taking place annually in Toronto, and aiming to bring together filmmakers, activists, and community members to facilitate conversation around environmental issues. As a researcher of environmental media, I attended the festival to gather observational data and interview organizers towards my MA thesis project. On October 21, the festival held “Family Day,” consisting of family-friendly environmental film screenings and an interactive installation called “Humans Build the Biggest Nests”. Designed by Isaac King, a filmmaker and animation teacher at OCAD University, this installation was advertised as a giant interactive flipbook. The piece consists of 232 laminated square cards with hand-drawn animation style pictures protruding from the installed surface. Spectators are invited to run their hands through these cards to produce a flip-book illusion of movement in a choose-you-own-adventure style, with paths overlapping, and each card being double-sided. According to the description, there are 78 possible image routes. The illustrations are dominated by geese, people, wetlands, cars, and buildings, which interact and morph into each other as each path is traced.  

While tracing these paths with my own hand, I was intrigued by the relationship between spectator and installation that the piece evokes. Without the movement afforded by the spectator’s hand, the images remain static and difficult to view individually. Thus, the piece’s storytelling power relies upon our haptic engagement with its images: our movement brings these stories to life. However, as much as the story depends upon the spectator’s movement, the spectator lacks control over the stories they activate. Since the spectator cannot change the appearance of the images, they are likely surprised by the story they reveal, despite its dependence on their actions. This dynamic produces a reciprocal relation between image and viewer: both share agency in the storytelling process, and need to work in unison to make meaning of the display.  

As I continued to run my hand along these surfaces, I could not help but think, in a not-so-post-COVID world, of the other hands that had run through the same pages seconds prior, and the potential germs invisibly occupying these cards. Such a thought adds another layer to the installation-spectator relationship, as our tactile interaction with the piece subtly changes its composition with our own fingerprints, cells, and germs. These imperceptible marks create their own environment atop these stories of environmental relations. This marking of our presence decorates the stories of interaction and interconnection that the piece illustrates, echoed by its vaguely double-helix shape, the DNA structure that humans, plants, and animals share.  

During a chat with the artist, he showed me one possible route: a wetland becomes threatened by invasive phragmites plants, then humans replace some of the invasive plants with healthy ones, and the wetland regains some of its health. While this path comprises one potential storytelling avenue, I noticed that many spectators did not follow these stories in this somewhat linear way. Many attendees would start to trace one path, then stop and restart at the beginning, skip parts, or reverse their direction before ending a path. Such unpredictable movement adds incalculable paths to the 78 considered ones. In a conversation about the artwork, another spectator expressed to me that she was impressed that the artwork had 78 possible avenues. With a sarcastic tone, I asked her, “did you trace them all?”. The question received a laugh acknowledging the loftiness of such a task, and its impossibility when taking into account all the unpredictable avenues one may take. As such, the piece, despite its relative simplicity, presents an impossibility of complete comprehension or mastery: there will always be more avenues that one interaction with the piece misses.  

Such meditations raise intriguing questions about how the piece might mimic broader ideas within interactive relations between humans and their environment. With “nature” being a symbolic concept defined by its “otherness” to humans, its very symbolic existence enshrouds it in an incomprehensibility. As such, nature remains inaccessible to full human understanding despite our reliance upon, and interactions with, its forces. The piece echoes such dynamics in its placement of spectators within a relation that requires reciprocity and captures marks of our presence while inhibiting mastery of its contents. The title of the piece, “Humans Build the Biggest Nests,” signals both these connections and divisions. In this titular move, humans are placed in relation to animals, akin to other nest-making beings, while also being named as a distinct category, capable of making the “biggest” of such structures. Signaling this simultaneous connection and dissonance, the piece places spectators within a navigation of our environment replete with an agency that is always already limited and framed by a lack of mastery. Some of these thoughts crossed through my mind as I flipped through five or six story paths, tracing the narratives of geese, plants, and landscapes, before I left to wash my hands.