An online artwork that changed every day for a year.
Dawn Chorus was an online artwork by Seven Art Writers, which ran from the 15th November 2013 to the 14th November 2014. The artists tweeted observations and responses to the changing environment of their separate locations during one shared dawn which, combined, played online for a total of 365 daybreaks.
We collaborated with artist Natasha Vicars to create a look and feel for the site, and built this into a responsive and dynamic site. Each day the performance expanded or contracted to fit the times of dawn and sunrise on that date, and it was our job to design and build a dedicated website to collate and hold the tweets.
The project represented the different stages of the coming dawn by showing smooth transactions between the tweets and the changing of background colours. The exact moment of dawn changes every day (what, you didn’t notice?), meaning that we had to create an algorithm to adjust the triggering of these effects at different times throughout the year.
Dawn Chorus needed to be a responsive site, so visitors could experience it on mobiles, outdoors, in real time, and at the break of dawn. The public were also encouraged to take part in the project, so we built custom functionality designed to pull specific tweets (#dawnchorus365) from Twitter, and the ability for each tweet to be moderated by an administrator before it appeared on the website.
"From our initial conversation to delivery, Wired Canvas were highly-professional and a pleasure to work with. They were sensitive to our brief for an online artwork and had great design ideas. What we were looking for was tricky and technical and needed to be completed to a tight deadline, and they rose to the challenge. We are extremely happy with the online artwork created and would recommend them to anyone."
Natasha Vicars from Seven Art Writers collective
