A fake pigeon sculpture stands beside the real pigeons, a piece of euphonious background music, this film utilized the technique of defamiliarization, that is, making the familiar things to become unfamiliar, thus re-examine our every life from a different perspective.

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The plan of my practice is, to place a fake pigeon into the real group of pigeons: I used clay and acrylic making a model that looks like a real pigeon, and then placed it on the corners in a church park in the centre of Birmingham, UK, a busy place that people come and go as well as a habitat inside the city where many pigeons live.

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In this case, the church park has its historical significance. And to a great extent, the psychic experiences of this area is composed of its ‘surface elements’, such as the church building, trees, pigeons (symbolizing peace), benches, etc., which will have a certain fixed feeling for people who come here, such as relaxation, peace, noise, thus this place gradually forms a distinct psychic atmosphere. In a normal situation, this kind of atmosphere is invisible to pedestrians due to everyone takes it for granted.

 

The subsequent reaction after placing the fake pigeon was that many passers stopped and took notice of it, laughed at it, some of them even tried to shock the fake pigeon. People’s expected responses should be considered as the result of defamiliarization: The fake pigeon was placed close to the real pigeons, the former’s static state remarkably was contrasting to the chaotic of the latter, and thus created a bizarre situation that defamiliarized all the real pigeons and broke the atmosphere, which easily caught people’s attention.

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Then the outcome is a two-channel screen video titled Life with color and sound where I quoted the captions from the BBC's documentary Life (2010) as well as its title and utilized as my voice-over and my title respectively. During watching this video, the audience will have a strange feeling: the captions originally used to describe living wild animals are now used to describe a static artificial pigeon, in other words, the inconsistency between the text and the image causes confusion that defamiliarizes audiences’ preconceptions.