Rock chick

An obscure art exhibition featuring live birds ''playing'' electric guitars has become a runaway hit and Internet sensation. Although it has hardly been advertised or reviewed, the exhibition has been drawing lengthy queues since a short video of the birds took YouTube by storm.

Last week people going to the exhibition at the Barbican centre in London were waiting for up to 90 minutes to see the birds perform. Visitors enter the Barbican's Curve gallery, a long, narrow room, through heavy curtains at one end and proceed through gloom towards an area of light. There they find 40 zebra finches flying free in an area with eight electric guitars set up as perches and five upturned cymbals as feeding tables.

Native to Australia, the finches were introduced into the gallery a week before the show opened to give them time to adapt. The lights are turned off at night so they can sleep.

By day the birds prefer to remain in the lit part of the gallery and flit about landing on the guitars and taking off again, plucking the strings as they do so. As the guitars are wired to speakers, the sound the birds make with their feet reverberates around the gallery. At times it can seem like a rock band tuning up or the plaintive tones of whale song.

''The finches land on the strings in the way that birds rest on telephone wires,'' said Lydia Yee, the curator of the show.

Visitors have been entranced by the exhibition, which is the brainchild of French artist Celeste Boursier-Mougenot. Many last week entered enthusiastic comments in the visitors' book. Their reactions include: ''It compares to being with penguins on the beach in South Africa''; ''best thing I've seen in ages'', and ''it's amazing to be part of their world''.

The exhibition became widely known because a two-minute video of the birds placed on the Barbican website found its way onto YouTube, where its audience grew.

''I've never known anything like it. It's become part of pop culture the way this exhibition has taken off virally,'' said Yee.

By this weekend more than 700000 people had viewed the video on YouTube.

Numerous websites and blogs have noted the show, including Guitarist magazine, which described one bird that ''goes all Jimmy Page with a twig''. In the part of the video clip one bird plays a lengthy solo by grappling with a twig that has become lodged in the strings of a guitar. One Twitter comment described the show as ''Jimi Henchicks".