Inspired by Albert Einstein’s description of Quantum Entanglement, “FOWL ACTIONS AT A DISTANCE” summons the spooky spectres of (trained) magneto-sensing chickens to haunt the exhibition space. Attempting to embody a Baradian-inspired hauntological spacetime (re)configuring, the work seeks to question possible versions of “foul” (and “fowl”) intra-actions at play between Rural and Urban systems.

Scientist believe that chickens and other birds can perceive magnetic fields and anomalies due to a phenomenon of quantum entanglement, which occurs in a light-sensitive protein in their eye. Migrating birds use this ability to navigate, which has been coined as Avian Quantum Navigation. While chickens are domesticated and do not migrate, they are believed to still retain this ability from their undomesticated ancestors.

During production of the artwork, Lyndsey Walsh created specialized methods to train over 40 chickens to use their magneto-sensing abilities to move in response to an artificially created magnetic anomaly in their environment. 

In the final installation of “FOWL ACTIONS AT A DISTANCE”, chickens, appearing as spectres in the exhibition space, are seen to move in response to their sensing of an artificially generated magnetic anomaly in their rural environment, which is timed to match the generation and dissipation of a magnetic anomaly created in the exhibition space by an electromagnet. This electromagnet is located inside the central sculpture in the installation. The sculpture itself also features an artistic abstraction of Earth and its geomagnetic fields based on visualization data collected from archival and database research of EMAG2 (Earth Magnetic Anomaly Grid), Earth’s magnetic field data captured by the European Space Agency’s Swarm satellite, and 3D geomagnetic field models from NASA.  

Changes in the magnetic fields in an environment are usually imperceptible to humans without the use of technological devices that can detect them or by perceiving the effects on magnetically sensitive materials. However, in “FOWL ACTIONS AT A DISTANCE”, these changes are made visible to human audiences through the spooky actions of chicken spectres, serving as ghostly infiltrators from a distant rural cosmos. The chicken spectres themselves not only reveal the unseen shifts in magnetic fields of our interconnected environment, but also reveal the existence of a greater and more complex relationship between humans and their non-human companion species and an entanglement of “intra-actions” between rural and urban landscapes. 

Included in the artwork’s multimedia installation is a film written and produced with a site-specific interest in Bengaluru. The film sets out to reconnoiter the perilous, venerable, and haunted dimensions of the ever-shifting landscape of Bengaluru, navigating spacetime through the interwoven multispecies memory of the region and possible futures. Guided by the core concept of Karen Barad’s “spacetimemattering”, the film attempts to traverse a small range of the larger dynamic unfolding of the universe through the eyes of a chicken. 

Both the film and the greater installation set out to explore many formations of entanglement at varying scales, from Quantum to rural and urban landscapes, as well as entanglement between human, non-human, and technological/mechanistic constructions of our shared planet’s past, present, and future.

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