Kristin Lucas: Speculative Habitat for Sponsored Seabirds

In Speculative Habitat for Sponsored Seabirds, Kristin Lucas turns whitney.org into a “living” environment for animated flamingos and a penguin. The 3D animals represent actual seabirds sponsored by the artist through the Tour du Valat Research Institute for the Conservation of Mediterranean Wetlands (based in Arles, France) and the Organization for the Conservation of Penguins [1997−2023] (based in the Falkland Islands off Argentina), both of which have supported the preservation of environments and species. Usually geographically distant species, flamingos and penguins here inhabit the same space, highlighting the increasing fusion of climate zones on the planet. A rotating signpost reading “The Long and Short of It” along with the actual tag numbers of the sponsored flamingos and the name of the penguin promise a summary that never quite arrives. Instead, the animated landscape alludes to the long and short in the perception of time frames: the roughly 4.6 billion years of Earth’s existence, the 300,000 years that Homo sapiens have inhabited the planet, and the short time remaining to act on what scientific climate forecasts have predicted.