Machine Auguries – Toledo: Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg

Machine Auguries: Toledo is a site-specific immersive installation that recreates the natural dawn chorus of birds, gradually replacing it with the songs of artificial birds.

Drawing on the region’s importance as a crossroads for several spring migration flyways, the work reflects on the dramatic decline of bird populations caused by human activity, from habitat loss to the growing impact of light and noise pollution. Essential to healthy ecosystems, many bird species are now forced to sing earlier, for longer periods, and at greater volumes or higher pitches in order to communicate. Only those capable of adapting are able to survive.

Working with local sound recordists, ornithologists, and Cornell University’s Macaulay Library, Ginsberg collected thousands of recordings of bird species emblematic of Toledo to build datasets of their songs. These were used to train a generative adversarial network (GAN), in which two neural networks interact through a process of “call and response”. Just as birds learn and develop their songs by listening to one another, the machine here learns from the voices of disappearing species. By the time the chorus comes to an end, the boundary between the natural and the artificial has become impossible to distinguish.

Photography: Dinis Santos