strange kinships

Strange kinships - Fifth Chapter: Flight

Usually it’s a bit cooler here - the water and the shadow of the trees help.

The writings document the creation of flying machines that resembled pigeon wings - not just in their mechanics, but also in their colours and sounds. As far as we know, these machines have been lost over the centuries. What we can present here are recordings made by Strange Kinships. We have expanded these with recordings of our own, following the group’s detailed descriptions on how to build a flying machine.

“Fluttering exercise”

“The pigeon is eminently a bird of flight.”

“The male often indulged in a grand wing exercise, an impressive display.”

“24th of February, 1868
Male often sits on perch or on ledge and flaps his wings for long time preparatory to flight, looking about him attentively as he does so.”

Strange kinships - Outro

The further one reads into the book, the more and more passages appear that seem slightly off. The carefully annotated observations gradually disappear, giving way to long blocks of hastily scribbled texts that no longer seem identifiable as any actual language.

The last pages of the book consist almost entirely of unintelligible drawings, sketches, and enigmatic graphs, which don’t appear to follow any priorly established research logic. For example: a page with the date ‘Thirteenth of October, 1867’ written in large and distorted letters features a number of small strokes in irregular thicknesses, alongside several circles, randomly distributed over the page, some of them closed, others half-open.
We can only speculate on what these sketches refer to - the drawings may be annotations of a pigeon walking, or they might be unrelated to the pigeon project altogether.

We have two theories as to why the book becomes increasingly obscure. One is that the group agreed to attempt communication without using language. The other one is that the group fell apart, and the book was later used by someone else - perhaps a former member - as a sketchbook, with content no longer related to the original project.
It seems there were disagreements amongst different members of the group about how to carry on. There is, however, one exception to the book’s gradual drift into obscurity - on a page titled “with …”.