Text of the performance BEASTED. Echilibre precare by Emma Dotti
The very act of seeing is crucial in the formation of the human self.
Watching the stork’s nest every day, taking at least 2 screenshots, just for the fun of it, just for entertainment. No trace of science or conservation aims. Cipi tells me more than once, shaking his head, that it’s not a real passion, it’s just curiosity, you know, they live next door, I wanted to see them better. A passion would be too much, actually passion is quite an animalistic trait, u become passive to an object that drives u in directions u might not expect. U wobble. U enjoy the risk of falling, the temptation of pleasure.
U correct, shift your weight, convince yourself you’ve found your balance, when really it was just another form of falling, of failing, still potential. He started climbing onto the roof of his house some years ago and bought a super-zoom lens to take pictures of the storks. In 2024 the mayor gave him permission to install a camera on the power pole where the nest is. Since then he checks on the family every day, just to keep himself company. Kinda like neighbours. Even if it would be pretty fucking weird to install a camera in ur neighbours’ bedroom. But storks don’t know they are being filmed, so it’s okay.
I often see them staring straight into the webcam, they walk right up to the lens with their long beaks, tilting their necks left and right, trying to find their good side. They look at me as if they’re influencers sometimes. And I look at them from my window while they look into the camera while Cipi looks at them. I would love to watch Cipi watching them. They maybe don’t know it, but they really are like influencers of sort. Actually animals have always been, operating from body to body within a sort of hypnotic attractiveness. Technologies create a new form of intimacy, for example how cute is it to watch a stork preening her chick while you’re sprawled masturbating on the couch, or maybe taking a long shit with the bathroom door open. Nature content, straight in ur hands.
Speaking of influencers, a Facebook anecdote comes to mind. Last May it was very, very cold and all the chicks died. Some webcam screenshots got posted in the town’s Facebook group and, within minutes, the comments section turned into a storm. People couldn’t accept seeing some tiny animals die before their eyes, live-streamed, next door. Someone should have saved them, brought some food or a heater to the nest. A blanket at least could have been thrown.
As if seeing something happen in real time automatically means taking some responsibility for it. Nature is cruel and that’s it. Extreme visibility generates either indifference or moral responsibility… or, more likely, both at once. Scrolling scrolling scrolling, emotional spectator generator, two-dimensional and colorful reactions. Human concern keeps bouncing between the need to be entertained and a socially acceptable amount of ethical outrage.
I like to watch them also because they are not nice animals, Cipi says, telling me about that time the mother was trying to throw a chick out of the nest. The baby, God knows how, resisted keeping himself clutching onto the twigs. He didn’t want to die. How bad is it for a mother to try to kill her weakest baby…where is the maternal instinct? Almost unbearable to watch, but still an event in Cipi’s living room. He shows me a screenshot where a sharp beak is trying to pull the baby down into the street. “This incomprehensibility, this unmotivated self-mutation of natural balance is the nature of nature, the anti-natural core of what we take for granted as nature”1
I ask myself if nature ever existed before humans named it. It probably completely disappeared since I started talking and even thinking about it. Cipi keeps showing me pictures of the nest, the brooding, the preening, the eggs… once they put a pair of pink underwear into the nest. It was quite a fun fact for the village. We want nature to stay wild. Untouched, authentic, aka more Instagrammable. But only within the limits of what we can emotionally handle.
Storks have learned to live next to human settlements, yet they are not
domesticated animals, certainly no more than we are.
In 1971, a stork woke up, worked her ass off, and squatted an electrical
infrastructure, changing its intended use. Today, power poles support almost
93% of white stork nests in Romania. The power pole cuts vertically through the
landscape, the roads, the town, putting the nest on top of a streetlight and under
a spotlight. The stork becomes visible simply by occupying a human device.
And then the devices start piling up. Insulating cables, webcams, metal nesting
platforms, Wi-Fi connections, cell phones scattered across Europe.
Platform diameter: 1.2–1.5 meters.
Maximum nest weight: 250 kilograms.
Galvanized steel.
Expected lifespan: several decades.
Electrocution risk: medium-voltage lines, 10–30 kv.
The nest slowly transforms itself into a stage for an ongoing performance
where the wild animal becomes a producer of digital content. A habitat on
my touchscreen. Protective glass for a perfect smoothness. It is important to
protect the device so it can survive over time. Every morning, someone opens
the stork app while drinking coffee, to check if the chicks have learned to hunt,
if the parents have returned, if anyone has died during the night. The hatching
of the eggs is a premiere; the pink tanga found in the nest, a meme, the first
flight going viral. And every morning, a human feels connected to a nature prêt-
à-manger, forgetting about the camera making this connection possible. It is
a very vicious form of control, not police like but rather like a form of affection
mediated by a device of hypervisibility. There’s no need to take a stance, what
counts is engagement, a bit like in this performance.
Perhaps the camera doesn’t simply record a nest but actually produces it. It
turns it into a public event where the animal, rather than being observed, is
staged. Not in the sense that it becomes fake, but rather in the circus sense
of the term: it exists because there is an audience. The nest, the pole, the
surveillance camera, the phone I’m holding, and my attempt to strike a balance
between meaning and the absolute meaninglessness of these interactions: all
elements of the same apparatus. A network through which the stork and I exist,
bed neighbours, balancing on one leg, super stable and hyper fragile.
It’s starting to hurt.
A bug in the system or a peck that was too hard; I click the link, total blackness, a dog’s jaws, a crash, the nest has vanished, a media manager will rush to reactivate the stream. The nest falls from my arms, a trickle of saliva runs down the screen. The last chick has learned to fly!
1. A global cinematic zone of animal and technology, Seung-Hoon Jeong (in ANIMALS, Documents of Contemporary Arts, edited by Filipa Ramos, 2016)