Knightsbridge station is not the most obvious place to encounter the clicks of a bottle-nosed dolphin or the honks of a Whooper swan. However this was the surprising opportunity presented by Heather & Ivan Morison's Zoorama. The work nestled itself in the infrastructure of the station by becoming a part of the digital announcement system. Set at 'level fifteen priority' beneath the emergency and standard settings of the tannoy system, the work crept into the audible space of the station approximately every 20 minutes to play a short recording from the British Library sound archive of one of 52 different migratory animals selected for the project. The individual recordings were selected to play one per week over the full course of 2007.
The work presented a wry commentary on the ever-changing nature of the Underground and its constantly fluxing population. Each station along the Piccadilly Line, and indeed across the network, bears witness to the ebb and flow of city life and its complex fluctuations. Imagine, if you can, a time-lapse film of all those journeys (176 million per year on average on the Piccadilly line!) and you begin to imagine the implications of Zoorama.
In parallel to the station-bound menagerie, Zoorama had another manifestation as a portable sound work that could be downloaded as a podcast from the Thin Cities website. Making use of the tidal patterns of the network itself, the work was able to disperse across the entire city and beyond.
An important factor of both manifestations of the project was the voice of Emma Clarke. Known as 'The Voice of the Underground' Clarke narrated both the station announcements and the podcasts giving the distinctive outward appearance of being a legitimate Underground intervention. Like minor birds mimicking the voice of their owners Zoorama attempted to match as closely as possible its surroundings, making its message all the more arresting.
Gavin Wade and Sally Shaw, Thin Cities, exh. cat., Art on the Underground, 2008, p.64.

Zoorama
2007
52 ten second station announcements, 52 weekly podcasts

Commissioned for Thin Cities - 100 Years of the Piccadilly Line by Art on the Underground, London