Creation of Birds
[Promo Video of the work, Kaldi Moss]
‘Creation of Birds’ draws its inspiration from German Biologist Jakob Johann von Uexküll’s concept of “umwelt” - questioning how can we design interfaces that enable us to adapt to uncommon sensory spectrums. By inviting the human to playfully engage with a “sensing” algorithm and a bird in the sky, this work (a web-based application) investigates our relationships with more than human scales of perception. Through a negotiation between the overlapping of a human’s umwelt (sensory bubble) with a machine learning algorithm and a bird in the sky, the human uses the built application to search for a bird in the sky (through the camera of a mobile device). As the human positions machinic eye (the camera) in the direction of the bird, calibrating her/their body with the device so that algorithm is able to detect the bird (using a computer vision algorithm), a text is generated on the screen. This text acts as a totem to signify that the three entities (the human, the algorithm, the bird) are ready for a sensory exchange. In other words, signifying that the algorithm is becoming birdlike, the bird - humanlike, and the human - algorithmlike.
Working of the interface
The participant is asked to search for a bird by opening the link (https://puneet798.github.io/p5jsSketches/CreationOfBirds6/) on their device (equipped with a camera). Once the participant opens the link, the application requests the permission from the observer to access the camera of the device. After gaining access, the camera acts as an eye of the machine and starts detecting objects in its view. However, when the observer is able to find a bird through the eye of the camera - a text is generated. Three selected texts are crawled to generate meanings - meanings from the juxtaposition of the words written by Feminist Scholar Donna Haraway on the non-human, texts from Artist Simon Penny on embodied practices, and texts on sensory perceptions from German Biologist Jakob Johann von Uexküll.
Uexküll was from a different school of thought than Darwin. His framework of seeing the world is entirely different from Darwin’s. He talks of not individual agents against each other in a competitive environment but ‘a plan’ where each subjective individual and his experience is a niche that has to be seen for itself. Similarly Simon Penny talks about the impact of mind-body dualism and Cartesianism has had on modern western thought. And how this has created this false hierarchy of the mind as the ‘centre’ and the body as a mere extension. In this work, we extend the ideas of Penny, Uexkull and Haraway by playful juxtapositions of their selected texts by a mechanic agent, read by humans in the moment of performance. We believe that the body IS intelligent, and that we are not individuals separate from our environment but it extends into us. ‘Meaning’ comes not from the cognitive act of ‘interpretation’ but is created in the moment of ‘performance’ of the sensorial and environmental.
The painting titled ‘Creation of Birds’ by Spanish-Mexican painter Remedios Varo poetically shows this ‘becoming’.
[Remedio Varo, Creation of Birds]
[Screenshot of the Interface]
[Screenshot of the Interface]
[Screenshot of the Interface]
[Screenshot of the Interface]
[Ideation notes]
[Ideation notes]
[Ideation notes]