Step inside Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s new installation at the Toledo Museum of Art and you’ll be greeted by a chorus of bird calls: trills, chirps and chirps, descending and flowing into each other. The hitch? Not all tweets are real; on the contrary, a good part of this birdsong is the product of artificial intelligence.
The book, titled Augurs Machinery: Toledomarks Ginsberg’s American debut and represents his continuing exploration of how the dawn chorus, the daily call and response performed by birds in spring and summer, has been influenced by modern civilization.
Over the decades, bird populations have declined dramatically, not only due to habitat loss, but also the effects of human-made noise and light pollution. So much so that the birds had to sing louder and higher, if they even knew when to sing.
Installation view of “Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg – Machine Auguries: Toledo” at the Toledo Museum of Art, 2023. © the artist. Photo: madhouse.
“I wanted to consider the effects of our behaviors on other species, and as a human being, I can’t help but wonder how their adaptation, or lack thereof, affects us next,” Ginsberg told Artnet. News. “What will there be without the birds?
To that end, Ginsberg has created an immersive sound installation in which a natural chorus of dawn gradually gives way to one filled with AI-generated calls, against the backdrop of an artificial sky. The first iteration of augurs of machines was installed at Somerset House in London in 2019, the latest edition, presented in partnership with Superblue, offering what Ginsberg considers a fuller realization of the work.
Where the natural chorus of the first installation was populated by British birds, the Toledo version has been aptly localized to feature 25 species, from the northern cardinal to the black-capped chickadee. These were selected by the artist with the help of birding experts and locals such as the Black Swamp Bird Observatory.
“We chose the most iconic species of the local chorus – the birds that define the soundscape of the local dawn,” Ginsberg explained.
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg Northern Cardinal (2023), one of many digital paintings generated by the artist using DALL-E 2 and included in a field guide accompanying the exhibition. Photo courtesy of the artist and the Toledo Museum of Art.
The generative adversarial network that powers the artificial choir has also undergone a significant upgrade, having been built on a new dataset of some 100,000 field records from the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Ginsberg recalled that technology in 2019 could only do one-second clips; now, however, he can do full four-second runs.
And all in such a way that “we can’t tell what’s real or not anymore,” according to Ginsberg, who tested the artificial calls on the bird-identification app, Merlin, and with the local birding expert. , Kenn Kaufman. Comments from both were that the machine-generated calls were “indistinguishable” from the real ones.
“It’s the highest praise imaginable for a technology project,” Ginsberg said, “but also the saddest result of creating an imperfect copy of a complex, non-replicable world.”
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg. Photo: © Nathalie Théry.
Which goes to the heart of Ginsberg’s practice, which has long probed “the conflicting relationship we have with nature and with technology, exhausting one to prioritize the other.” In his pieces, like those of 2018 The substitutewho virtualized the last male northern white rhinoceros, and Pollinator Pathmaker (2022), an algorithmic tool that explores the impact of human-designed gardens on insects – the tension between nature and technology is evident in both the medium and the message.
In the vast Canaday Gallery of the Toledo Museum, Ginsberg has installed a network of lighting that mimics the colors of a sunrise. As the hues change from a grayish blue to a warm orange, an American robin sings, only to receive an AI-generated response. More birds join in as daylight artificially dawns and the orchestra of birds builds with deep machine calls emitted from 24 speakers.
Ultimately, under the gallery’s bright light, the viewer is left “in the absence of nature”, Ginsberg said, “taking time to listen to an unnatural reconstruction of life outside”.
Installation view of “Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg – Machine Auguries: Toledo” at the Toledo Museum of Art, 2023. © the artist. Photo: madhouse.
For the artist, this growing overlap between the real and the unreal touches on the question of AI as a whole. Advances in technology, even during the six months it took to build this project, shifted the conversation between the first augurs of machines and this latest iteration, surfacing, for Ginsberg, questions of authorship and what we choose to value.
But more than that, it sharpened his augury of losing the real in favor of the unreal.
“Why are we in an arms race against AI as we increasingly exclude the world around us that allows us to exist? The artificial robin can sound like a robin to even the finest human and AI ears. But does it look like a robin for a robin? she says. “AI has learned from what already exists; the imagination always has a role to play in finding new questions.
“Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg – Machine Auguries: Toledo” is on display at the Toledo Museum of Art, 2445 Monroe Street, Toledo, Ohio, through November 26.
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