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Heavy Plant

Walk past a "Heavy Plant" warning and wonder vaguely if the trees thought it was for them; if whoever put it up had enough imag...

2007-10-01

Birdcage in a fishtank


I like ideas that force a change in perspective. I came accross the image above randomly the other day and it has been troubling me for a few days. It shows a birdcage inside a fishtank.

At first I thought the image was manipulated but someone actually has created a birdcage inside a fishtank.

Something about this still made me uneasy. The thought that it might possibly be cruel to the birds bothered me, but how is this any less cruel than caging them to begin with (They still have a grill at the top of the cage to allow air to circulate)?

Something about the dissonant juxtaposition of two sets creatures, that in thier wild state would be free but here confined, draws attention to the unnatural state and wanton human interference. Particularly with the birds cage inside the tank where they look imprisoned and in danger. Somehow if the fish tank was surrounded by a birdcage it wouldn't seem as strange.

The last troubling thought was the reason for it's creation. I found the image without any contextual information. There's nothing to tell me whether the fishtankbirdcage is intended as a conceptual artwork intended to provoke those thoughts, just a visual oddity intended to make it appear is if birds were flying underwater or simply the product of someone with spare perspex, a tube of silicon glue, a twisted imagination and too much time on their hands.

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