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 3-D animals are stand-ins for actual seabirds sponsored by the artist through the Tour du Valat Research Institute for the Conservation of Mediterranean Wetlands and the Organization for the Conservation of Penguins, both of which support the preservation of environments and species. Flamingos and penguins—usually geographically distant species—here inhabit the same space, highlighting the increasing fusion of climate zones on our planet. A rotating signpost displaying the words "The Long and Short of It" as well as 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 the Earth’s existence, the 200,000 years that homo sapiens have inhabited the planet, and the short time we have to act on what we have learned from scientific climate forecasts.