Tales of a Modern Parrot: Living Entangled Lives in an Interspecies Art Collective

Ute Hörner and Mathias Antlfinger are artists and professors of Transmedial Spaces/Media Art at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Their installations, videos, and sculptures deal with the relationship between humans, animals, and machines and provide both critical perspectives on changeable social constructs as well as utopian visions of fair terms of interaction between these parties. Together with the African grey parrots Clara and Karl they have founded the Interspecies Collective CMUK in 2014, a collaborative project of parrots and humans that promotes the decentralization of human animals as superior creators and opens up the perspective towards an overwhelming productivity by a non-human agency. Their work has been presented in many international exhibitions and festivals including, CCA Tbilisi, Porto Design Biennale, ZKM Karlsruhe, Shedhalle Zürich, NMFA Taiwan, Werkleitz Biennale Halle, Museum Ludwig Cologne, KAC Istanbul, Ars Electronica Linz, Video Dumbo New York, Shift Electronic Arts Festival Basel, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, and Transmediale Berlin. Hörner/Antlfinger are members of the Minding Animals International Network. They live and work in Cologne, together with their flock.