No one has done more than OTN to promote our furry and feathered friends as crafts animals and artists. Often dismissed as trivial, or worse, prescient our aim has always been to just give the animal world a fair shake when it comes to painting, sculpting and conceptual art installations. So it was good to discover that the New Scientist has come onboard with a report on art smart birds.
Psychologist Shigeru Watanabe, who works at the Keio University in Tokyo, has trained a couple of pigeons (bird variety) to distinguish between good art and bad art. We kid you not. Way back in 1995 Watanabe had some success getting birds to discriminate between Picasso and Monet and now he’s taken his critical bird project another important step. Using a reward system the academic trains the birds to know bad art when they see it. It is basically a peck-the-button-if-you-like-it-situation and it works.
You can read the New Scientist article and see what pigeons fancy here.
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
Bird’s eye view
