In the winter semester, prior to making “The Flocking Party”, I was working on a collaborative project called Organelle View (GROCS). My job was to create the look and feel of a database navigation tool. Since I was showing information about proteins, some of my research brought me to the work of David Goodsell (Goodsell). He makes visually clear images of proteins based on scientific data. When I encountered his work, it was like I was seeing molecular models in a whole new way. Goodsell's colorful representations of proteins and their interactions changed my cognitive map of my own body's biology. “I” was now a walking metropolis of colorful, diverse, active, and organic chemical processes. The strawberry I was eating was the battlefront of intergalactic chemical warfare. Nanotechnology, as we think of it, suddenly looked crude and stupid, a mere subset of biotechnology. Here is where I shifted my focus from nanotechnology to biotechnology. Some would see this as purely semantic, but like the invasive birds, it gave me the twist I needed. Biotech is perceived as high tech, but genes have been doing this stuff for a long time, and they do it very well. Our biotech guru already exists. It's Gaia.

The conceptual shift to biotechnology was a prompt for me to use a type of biology that already existed. I thought that a virus would convey the idea of the invasive species in a different way. The migration of “Hebbets” in the story is global, but it also invades bodies and minds. The parallel between territories and bodies seemed like an excellent way to compare organisms to environments. The bird and the human (which also gets infected) become environments that must evolve as host territories to these new elements.

The birds and the virus were rich examples to stand-in for the broad and abstract topics that I wanted to communicate. Invasive birds, on the one hand, represented how such simple human activities can greatly affect Gaia, and biotechnology, and on the other, compared the simplicity of human knowledge to the complex technologies of Gaia. One represents nature and the other technology, but the two are conceptually bound together. They are connected by the common ground of invasive species. I decided to amplify this connection by placing the invasive biotechnology in the brains of the Starlings and Sparrows. This engineered virus invades the territory of their brains, only to increase the birds' own success as invasive species. Since, the overarching goal of my project was to map new cognitive territory, this invasion of cognitive structures became a metaphor in itself.