Artist: Seth / Ezra Dager
Year: 2025–2026
Medium: Five-channel digital video installation
Status: Complete
Archive Context: The Field Archive

Overview

Birds I is part of the Zooms video series, a body of work examining how perception changes through distance, duration, and sustained attention. Across five recordings made in New York and Indiana, birds remain nearly imperceptible within the surrounding landscape until gradual optical movement brings them briefly into view.

Unlike other works in the series, the five recordings do not activate simultaneously. Each zoom begins only after the previous movement has completed, gradually constructing the composition across the screen before dissolving in the same measured sequence.

The field builds.

One image resolves.

Then another.

Then another.

As each loop concludes, the composition slowly returns to stillness.

The birds are not the subject of the work.

They provide the conditions through which perception becomes visible.

Position

Zooms - Birds I demonstrates that recognition rarely arrives all at once.

It accumulates through attention.

Then quietly disappears.