In the performance-for-video “For the Birds,” I spread peanut butter and birdseed on me and lay in a friend’s backyard. I had a GoPro camera set up and intended to lie there for eight hours in hopes that birds would come to feed off me. I was interested in committing to the futility of this gesture, as there is almost no chance that a bird would approach a feeder that is not inert.

After about seven minutes in the grass I began to get fire ant bites all over my ass, and the next-door-neighbors came around to the backyard to inspect something in their cellar just a few yards from where I lay. I quit the performance 7 hours and 53 minutes early. A week later, my friend texted me a picture of a SWAT team in the next-door-neighbor’s yard with the caption “I guess there was something interesting in that cellar.”