(disturbance hissing) - Yeah, she's got some kind of little feel mouth.

She's eating, she's ripping it apart now.

I mean, I'm excited.

(group vocalizing) Creativity is the act of wonder in action.

It's wondering about something, trying something and then trying something else.

My name is Thomas Deininger and I'm an artist, also bird watcher, naturalist enthusiast.

When we go bird watching, there's a few things, a few places we've gotten to know to go.

We've been watching a harrier in the afternoons.

- We'd need about 600 millimeters of lens and then some skill.

And then some luck.

We've been watching it hunt.

- Harriers hunt by surprising prey when they find low in the open ground area.

Why I am drawn to the natural world in terms of content, it's right there.

It's the very thing that's being threatened by our sloppy attitudes toward the environment.

And birds specifically are dwindling.

Evolution is about trying lots of different things to see what works.

And so that's, even the creative process for me, it's just mimicking a natural process.

The sculptures themselves, they're a real kind of meditation on perspective and illusion.

One spot is so precise that you move one foot off and they just kind of explode, and it speaks to like the fragility of all the illusions that we all keep up.

Russ is integral to the process to bounce ideas off each other.

He's excellent with structural engineering, so he makes sure these things don't fall apart.

(drill buzzing) - I can make this display, so we can disassemble it.

- Yeah, that'll work.

Russ photographs the birds and the art and he mostly does the video.

I do a little bit of video, and that helps with the social media, and so we kind of realized at this point it's like, "Oh, we're not just making sculptures.

We're like entertaining people, because most of the world experience these, these things through video," and Russ will find old clips from old movies.

- [Narrator] The battle for the mind will be fought in the video arena.

- [Thomas] And so he literally remixes all kinds of beats, makes original soundtracks.

There are little collages.

- [Narrator] The hypnotism is strong, but there is a chance that we will be attacked.

(Roadrunner beeps) - It's almost like our job to like kind of bring them to be together, suspend them in space so then people could kind of relate to things even more than they would've brush stroke.

It could say, oh you know... it's a great blue heron.

(chuckles) It's so easily distractible.

Plus I'm easily distractible.

(laughs) - [Russ] Here, would that work?

- Huh?

I work in front of a green screen, because things show up really well, and you can see boundaries.

There are birds all scattered throughout the detritus that accumulates all over, whether it be on the beach or in somebody's junk drawer.

I hone in on that and I start seeing lines and shapes and colors and things that can be useful to me in my constructions.

If I'm looking to do a cardinal, I will pour over hundreds and hundreds of images of cardinals and then when I see a cardinal I'll be able to understand the kind of the variation, how red, how proud their chest can be, what their crowns are like, however the cardinal got through its millions of years of evolution to that perfect form.

That's the thing I'm celebrating.

There's no waste in the natural world, and so take these nutrients, things that have to potential, the potential in the mundane, and I can elevate it and just like any good gardener knows, last year's compost are gonna be this year's vegetables.

Now I'm farming manmade materials in a sense.

I think our fin, this is just the heads, from figures that we cut.

(playful music) Nostalgia is this really kind of cheap emotion.

I'm trying to smash that thing.

That's my scream.

That's the wake up, that's the heavy hit on the instrument.

(drill buzzing) It's all just bad magic.

Like make the illusion.

My God, if it were, it's not in a church.

It's not an altar.

It's outdoors.

The natural world inspires that kind of wonder, that awe, and that's the fuel that keeps me.

That's what I wanna share with people.

Nature obviously is the mother of all beauty.

I mean, we wouldn't even have a definition of beauty if it weren't for nature.

I want to get people out of it and looking back at the natural world, reminding them that idea of this one way to look at something that's the biggest illusion of all.

- [Crew Member] Thank you.

- Right on.

- [Crew Member] Thank you.

- Yeah.

Just get to get a picture.

- [Person] Yeah.

Shy says they are.

(Thomas chuckles) - [Announcer] Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time on "ART, Inc."