Videographer: Cristobal Vivar

I enjoy collaborating with artists and musicians. Ras (X), pictured in the red jersey, made a custom soundtrack for the Magic Machine Artist D.I.Y. Artist Residency. It was played loudly on the closing night!

Closing night at The Magic Machine at Coney Island 2015

BerdsCarnival is meant to travel. Over the years, it has taken many forms—sometimes as conceptual travel, sometimes as physical movement, and often as both. It’s a project that resists stasis. Whether through live-walks across Brooklyn or imagined journeys through layered media, BerdsCarnival is always in motion. It adapts to place, moment, and medium, creating porous zones between the real and the symbolic, the here and elsewhere.

In 2015, I launched my artist residency because there were no residencies for full-time workers. Magic Machine at Coney Island Artist Residency blurred the line between artist residency and carnival games. It was housed in a game booth at Bowery and 12th St. at Coney Island behind the “Bump Your Ass Off” (El Dorado) bumper cars, run by Gordon Lee and Louis Beard.

The project highlighted El Dorado Bumper Cars on Surf Avenue, a small, independently run business woven into the cultural fabric of Coney Island. Places like El Dorado persist against the odds, suspended in a precarious space between nostalgia and erasure. As real estate development reshapes the area, these legacy spaces hang by a thread, their future uncertain. The project bears witness to these fragile places, memories, and resistance icons.

I worked in the trailer 3 days a week for one month in August 2015.

BerdsCarnival explaining the “No Color Game” on closing night.

Photo documentation of Magic Machine Artist D.I.Y. Artist Residency on closing night, 2021, Location: Coney Island, NY

Photo credit: Jane Huntington contact

From left to right: Sidra Lackey, Ras (X), BerdsCarnival, No Color Game players