Leonie Kellein

A Wing Beat! A Wing Beat!

Animal and Technological Perspectives

Leonie Kellein (b. Basel, 1993) works primarily with moving image. Her practice centers on the investigation of the filmic gaze in a process of layering that that sets the poetics, politics and violent history of camera images in relation to the body’s sensory feedback. For her most recent project, the multimedia installation A Wing Beat! A Wing Beat!, Kellein studied possible ways of using media technology to represent an animal’s perspective. The project investigates how a homing pigeon—or actually, the equipment it carries with each flap of its wings—sees things. What happens when technology lets us see the world from an animal’s vantage point? Where are the points of transition between object and subject? A pigeon here adopts the human gaze with the visual technologies that inform it. The resulting work sets the poetics, politics, and history of camera images—and especially of drone and pigeon-camera photographs—in relation to the animals.

The artist’s book transposes Kellein’s video installation of the same title into the printed medium. With essays by Agnieszka Roguski and Jayne Wilkinson.