Going into this interview, Diana Thater thought that in one way or another the pandemic would impact the work she was making. She was right. We had a nearly completed interview about an entirely different project when the logistics of traveling and shooting on location became too unsafe to manage. As it turned out, the time and space of isolation we are living through were in deep conversation with another, long-unrealized idea for a piece. And the challenges associated with shooting on location morphed into an emergent creative response, what she describes below as a kind of simultaneity of production and reception that is new in her work.
The last time I saw Thater was in 2016. We were walking through the Streeterville neighborhood in Chicago, and she pointed out some birds perched on the portico of a building, noting their species and what was interesting about their appearance given the time of year. I had not even noticed the birds, but she left me on the corner thinking about the animals with which I shared the city. Thater’s body of work prods us to imagine the lives of other species, making connections she sees as critical to all of our survival. Her new work, Yes, there will be singing, conjures an architectural encounter with whale song through live video streaming. For her, even our present moment of isolation is filled with interspecies relation.