Omana's 7 Days in April by Rebecca Ruige Xu

This project translates a bird's migration journey from South Arabian Peninsula to North Asia into a series of map images in traditional East Asian landscape painting style with haiku poems generated from the flying and environmental data. Omana is a juvenile Heuglin's gull, who flew an impressive 2890 miles in seven days in April 2020. This non-stop flight was recorded by the satellite tracker Omana wears and visualized as artworks bearing geographical information, in which immeasurable distances were conveyed through the use of blurred outlines, mountain contours disappearing into the mist, and impressionistic treatment of natural phenomena. The accompanying haiku is also computationally generated based on the data collected, where the three lines are linked to the three principles of ancient philosophy: heaven, earth, and human being, to express the view of how human life and society could be integrated with the order of the natural world.