Bird brain

Amos Latteier marries art and science with ease, and pigeons have their place, too

By Joseph Gallivan

The Portland Tribune, Jan 31, 2003, Updated Oct 30, 2009

That skinny guy with the pigeon poop running down his corduroys? He’s not just another laid-off dot-commer with a hobby.

He’s an artist.

Thirty-two-year-old Irvington resident Amos Latteier (pronounced luh-TEER), computer whiz turned performance artist, investigates all the usual artist stuff Ñ representation, information systems, social constructs, everything in air quotes Ñ but without the usual art school blather. He finds things out, he builds contraptions, then he talks about them in English.

Latteier’s chosen art form is the lecture, and he calls his medium PowerPointillism in recognition of the aesthetic power of PowerPoint, the business presentation software that has become the basic communication tool of office workers, the military and even college students.

He will deliver his newest piece, “Pigeon Aerial Photography,” next week in his favorite institution, the Central Library. (Also on the bill is local filmmaker Andrew Dickson, presenting a fictional character in “An Evening With Bradlee.”)

Pigeon cultivation is so retro, so blue-collar, that at first this sounds like one of those city-slicker chicks taking up crochet just to be different, just to be analog. However, Latteier has an angle. His curiosity was piqued on discovering that aerial photography (another of his special interests) began with rockets, kites, balloons and birds, long before there were any planes. A 1906 photo of a German homing pigeon with a tiny bellows camera around his neck inspired Latteier to send his birds out with wireless digital cameras and video cameras strapped to their chests.

“It’s still a work in progress,” he says, using the classic artistic escape clause. “The cameras are a bit too heavy.”

But the fact that the photos were a bust didn’t stop him from developing his 20-minute presentation, which he refers to as “more of a ‘report of findings’ than a lecture.”

Get him on the subject, and his eyes light up.

“There are a lot of reasons to do it. One, it’s stupid. Two, it’s funny. Three, you wonder what birds see up there. And four, it’s a challenge,” he explains.

That’s the Latteier way in a nutshell: rampant curiosity coupled with technical chutzpah. He recently taught himself electronics Ñ soldering, integrated circuits, microcontrollers Ñ from a book. He built a 500-pound potato battery housed in the back of a moving van. It was simple and ridiculous, with just enough output from the spuds to drive a tinny radio. Like a lot of art, it’s sort of a joke, but the element of wonder detains you.

Born outside Vancouver, B.C., Latteier grew up in Canada and the Pacific Northwest, including Seattle and Port Townsend, Wash.

His mother, Carolyn, once a maid in a Port Townsend resort, is now a writer. In 1998 she published “Breasts: The Women’s Perspective on an American Obsession.” His father is a medical administrator at the University of British Columbia, a literary man who, Latteier says, “never really wanted a career.”

“I never came from money,” Latteier says, “but it’s just fallen in my lap as an adult.” Although he studied art and philosophy at Brown University in Providence, R.I., graduating in 1996, he says: “I always ended up doing computers, and people started overpaying me. If I wanted to, I could make a fair amount of money, but my needs are so low, it’s easy for me to get by.”

Bookworm

Pedaling around town wearing a rain slicker, Latteier is classic Portland. He was in the Flexcar program until the prices went up; now he shares an old Subaru with a friend. Soft-spoken, he often ends a sentence with a nod and a ‘Yeah’ as his brain takes stock. He says he’s the least literary person in his family but comes alive when he discusses authors such as Melville and Pynchon.

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