How artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsburg uses AI-generated bird songs to draw attention to human impacts on extinct species

on view

Her new work “Machine Auguries: Toledo” is installed in the Toledo Museum of Art.

Step into Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s new installation in the Toledo Museum of Art and be greeted by an ebb and flow of bird calls, trills, chirping and chirping. The problem is? Not all tweets are genuine. Rather, bird songs are largely the product of artificial intelligence.

The work entitled Machine Divination: Toledomarks Ginsburg’s U.S. debut and represents her ongoing exploration of how modern civilization influences the dawn chorus, the daily chant of birds in spring and summer. .

Bird populations have declined significantly over the decades, not only due to habitat loss, but also due to the effects of man-made noise and light pollution. So birds have to sing louder and at a higher pitch if they know when to sing.

“We wanted to think about the impact of our actions on other species, but as humans we can’t help but ask how their adaptations, or lack of adaptations, affect us. ,” Ginsberg told Artnet News. “What would there be without birds?”

To this end, Ginsberg devises an immersive sound installation against an artificial sky in which a natural dawn chorus is gradually replaced by an AI-generated, call-filled chorus. Did.first iteration machine fortune telling was installed at London’s Somerset House in 2019, and the latest edition was presented in partnership with Super Blue, offering what Ginsberg believes to be a more complete realization of the work.

While the first installation featured a chorus of nature dominated by British birds, the Toledo version has been properly localized to feature 25 species from cardinals to black-capped tit. These were chosen by the artist with the help of birding experts and locals such as Black’s Swamp Bird Observatory.

“We chose the most iconic species for our local chorus—the birds that define our local dawn soundscape,” Ginsberg explained.

The generative adversarial network that enhances the artificial chorus was also significantly upgraded and built on a new dataset of approximately 100,000 field recordings from the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Institute for Ornithology. Ginsberg recalled that the 2019 technology only allowed him to make one-second clips. But now, perfectly, he can play a four-second passage.

Ginsberg, who tested artificial calls on the bird-ID app Merlin with local birdwatcher Ken Kaufman, says all of this is “no longer able to tell what’s real.” . Feedback from both was that machine-generated calls were “indistinguishable” from real calls.

“It’s the highest possible accolade for a technological project,” Ginsberg said, “but it’s also the saddest result of making an imperfect copy of an unreplicatable, complex world.”

This is at the heart of Ginsberg’s practice, which has long explored “the contradictory relationship between humans and nature and technology, one that consumes the one and prioritizes the other.”In her work, works in 2018, etc. understudyA virtual version of the last male northern white rhinoceros, and pollinator pathmaker (2022), an algorithmic tool to investigate the effects of human-designed gardens on insects. The tension between nature and technology is evident in both medium and message.

So Ginsburg installed a lighting array in the Toledo Museum’s expansive Canadi Gallery that mimics the colors of a sunrise. As the hue changes from grayish blue to warm orange, when a American robin chirps, it receives an AI-generated response. At artificial dawn, more birds join in, building an orchestra of birds with deep, mechanical calls emanating from 24 speakers.

Ultimately, under the gallery’s bright lights, viewers are left “in the absence of nature” and “take their time to listen to the contrived reconstruction of life outside,” Ginsberg said. said.

For artists, this growing overlap between reality and unreality has implications for AI as a whole. Even though this project took him six months to build, advances in technology have changed the conversation between the first project and the project. machine fortune telling And in this latest edition, for Ginsberg, the question of authorship and what we value comes to the fore.

But more than that, her harbingers of losing reality to unreality became even more pronounced.

“Why are we in an AI arms race when the world around us that makes our existence possible is increasingly shut out? It may sound like a robin to your ears, but does it sound like a robin to a robin?” she said. “AI learned from what already existed. Imagination still plays a role in finding new questions.

“Alexandra Daisy Ginsburg – Mechanical Augury: Toledo” is on display at the Toledo Museum of Art, 2445 Monroe Street, Toledo, Ohio through November 26th.

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