Survival Songs is a haunting audio visual series, by multimedia artists Marcel Karnapke and Mika Johnson, inspired by Dawn Chorus: a Citizen Science Arts project, that invites participants to stop and listen to the sounds of nature, and use their phones to record early-morning bird songs.

By pairing nine iconic Dawn Chorus bird species with stories about their threats, Survival Songs seeks to create an awareness around the dangers that birds face everywhere.

As a series, Survival Songs is made up of nine videos, each 66 seconds in length, all intended as portals to a single event, 66 million years ago, when the Earth was hit by an asteroid roughly 10 km across, causing radical climate change, and the fifth mass extinction. Three fourths of all living species went extinct, including all of the dinosaurs except one, ‘birds’.



Client:
BIOTOPIA - NATURKUNDEMUSEUM BAYERN
and STIFTUNG KUNST UND NATUR

Release date:
Nine songs were released one a day in the middle of January 2022

Survival Songs

Co-directed by
Marcel Karnpake
and Mika Johnson

Graphic design by
Jakub Tranta