Project Details

Birds provide a unique window into the entanglements of our time. Unrestricted by human-imposed borders, approximately 5 billion birds migrate every year thereby linking cultures, countries, and ecologies and revealing issues collectively shared. Across cultures and continents, birds have been viewed as message bearers, able to communicate the future, announce changes in weather and warn of coming disaster. Seen by many to be barometers of environmental health, almost a third of all bird species will have disappeared by the end of this century, leading many to conclude we are living through the “Sixth Extinction.” 

Birding the Future poses three questions in response to this crisis: What does it mean that we can only see and hear extinct species through technology? What might happen as the messages of birds are increasingly being silenced? How might we bridge knowledge systems using traditional and emerging technologies to develop a cross-cultural praxis for ecological futures rooted in kinship with the world?

Birding the Future is an interdisciplinary artwork that explores these issues and current extinction rates by specifically focusing on the warning abilities of birds as bioindicators of environmental health. The installation invites visitors to listen to endangered and extinct bird calls and to view visionary avian landscapes through stereographs, sculpture, and video. 

To date there are seven region-specific iterations of the project: Queensland Australia, Arabian Peninsula, Norway, Mid-Atlantic USA, RheinMain Germany, Ireland and Sky Islands AZ (both currently in progress) and a series focused on laboratory birds. The work has been exhibited as site-specific installations both in traditional gallery spaces as well as outdoors in public settings. By focusing on local ecosystems in a number of regions across the world, this ongoing project combines notions of site-specificity to highlight regional trends while simultaneously mapping global commonalities.                       

Within each installation, calls of extinct and endangered birds are combined with non-vocalization sounds of birds. Extensive sound spatialization is utilized to create a multi-channel, immersive sound environment where calls of extinct birds act as a memory and underscore technological reproduction as the only means to hear certain species. These are paired with calls of endangered birds from the region, which are extracted to create Morse code messages based upon tales, stories, and poetry in which birds speak to humans (such as, “Our fate is your fate” from The Conference of the Birds by 12th century Sufi poet Farid Attar). Using a real-time control algorithm (Pure Data), the projected extinction rate for the region is scaled to the duration of the exhibition by decreasing the density and diversity of bird calls. Reflecting projected extinction rates, the longer you stay the fewer birds you will hear.     

The soundscape is paired with a series of stereographs, which reveal the entanglements of birds, people and the complexity of our diverse and shared worlds. Popular from the mid-nineteenth century through to the early twentieth century, the stereoscope was chosen as the viewing instrument for its interactive potential to heighten perceptual awareness and provide a historical link to human impact on the environment. The viewer’s gaze wanders back and forth between foreground and background, and by doing so continuously shifts one’s point of view within the frame. In this way the stereograph plays with the act of looking and the viewer is challenged to consider how the lens through which one looks then translates into ways knowledge is constructed. On the front of the stereographs, composite photographs of real and imagined environments highlight regional specificities. On the back, textual analysis explores the complexities of our more-than-human world via poetry, scientific data and other habitat and behavioural information. In various iterations, large-scale sculpture and video are also integrated.

Most recently our work addresses the ways declining bird populations affect our ecologically-bound cultural identities. As Smithsonian Artist Research Fellows we are collaborating with the National Museum of Natural History and colleagues from the Pueblo of Zuni, New Mexico, to explore the cultural and artistic implications of bird species decline across borders with particular focus placed on indigenous and local ecological knowledges. Through this work, Birding the Future aims to generate new scholarship with regards to ethno-ornithology and the role art might play in understanding the complexities of our more-than-human world. Learn more here (pdf, 7.1 MB).