Moluccan Cockatoo Molly Numbers 1-10

Diana Thater’s Moluccan Cockatoo Molly 1–10 employs video technologies to mediate the relationships between nature and human and animal subjects. Thater recorded a trained Moluccan cockatoo named Molly with three cameras positioned at different viewpoints as the bird performed a rotating dance. In the editing process, she drained the footage from each camera of all but one color (red, blue, or green) and then layered the footage together to create a composite image that appears black-and-white. This reverses video’s additive process, which typically creates color out of discrete red, green, and blue inputs. The result is a strikingly three-dimensional black-and-white scene, with multiple vantage points visible simultaneously—a misalignment that transforms Molly into a hallucinogenic multiplicity. Thater is internationally recognized for installations that explore notions of abstraction unique to the moving image and for her incorporation of monitors, power cords, and infrastructures, which are typically obscured. As in Moluccan Cockatoo Molly 1–10, she frequently applies transparent red, green, and blue gels to a gallery’s exterior windows; natural light projected through the coating bleed color into the TV’s electronic glow, producing a formal language resonant of structuralist film while resisting the segregation of video from art in other media. In her process of deconstruction and reconstruction, Thater’s work proposes an “idea of being multiple, and thinking multiply, and making things that are not iconic works of art but . . . have many disparate parts.”