32 Pigeons

32 Pigeons (named after the 32 pigeons that received the Dicken Medal for their service in World War II) was a collective I belonged to that came directly out of one of my first-year courses. Although the collective has not been active (if it can even be considered to still exist), its influence can still be felt in my project, and the most obvious influence was my decision to create my objects in response to an open call for submissions.

The larger of our two installations, Blind Reading, was based on the little-mentioned fact that, structurally speaking, braille is essentially a six-bit binary code — although it is normally never regarded or used as such — , and part of the installation involved decoding a serialized stream of braille dots, converting the dots back to text. As it happens, a similar problem has been identified in this project as a possible direction for future work.