How the air feels to the birds, Nick Jordan

They act as if they had never heard the question before. The what? they say. The air? What about it? We smile and rephrase the question: What does the air feel like to you, you being a bird, able to fly and all? Finally they seem to understand, and they meditate on this awhile. And then they begin: the air to us is a brother, a sister. We are intrigued, and lean in closer. The air, they continue, now quieter. We lean in yet farther. They peck us in the eye and laugh wickedly. Birds are bastards, every one of them.
Written by Dave Eggers, taken from One Hundred and Forty Five Stories in a Small Box published by McSweeney’s.

Nick Jordan: I used the Eggers story because I found it suitably deadpan and short. And it involves birds, which has become a perennial subject for me. The film has myself and fellow collaborator Jacob Cartwright as the tree climbing/bird spotting protagonists.  It’s a basic split-screen slapstick portrait of a tupelo gum tree, filmed on a frozen Horseshoe Lake in southern Illinois – a remnant of a large bend in the Mississippi River, when we were there filming the last in our trilogy of John James Audubon films. The voice is generated from an automated text-to-speech software programme. The film was put together specially for Kerry Baldry’s One Minute programme and follows on from last year’s One Minute offering How the Cutter Works.

Credits
A film by Nick Jordan
Words by Dave Eggers

How the air feels to the birds by Manchester-based artist Nick Jordan features in the One Minute project initiated by Kerry Baldry. For more about One Minute take a look at APEngine’s interview with Kerry.