What does it mean to vanish from earth when you are the last of your kind?
In 1987 the Kauai ōō was recorded singing his final song. It was meant to be a duet, but as the last of his kind his song hangs in the air, unanswered. The other half of the duet is forever lost.
Built to sing at dawn, birds must wake up earlier to hear each other before human chaos interferes.
So here, it is always almost sunrise.
As a parallel past-future response, the last birdsong was fed into a Machine Learning model created to record human voices, but instead is listening to the song learning and recreating the response.
This second song will join him in a technological afterlife. Contained in a ghost flower, whose color proteins were removed to replace it with the bird heartbeat.
This is a moment frozen in time, of an impossible duet. The AI will try to learn the song before dawn.
Sound Sculpture 4ft x 4ft
Sound, Machine Learning, silicone, electronics, glass, water, proteins, air, steel.
Collaborators:
Welding: Julia Helen Murray
Pneumatic controller: MIT Media Lab and FlowIO Platform
Original recordings provided by: K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics, 2022 Field Course
Cornell University Lab of Ornithology
Special thanks to Shona Kitchen, Dr. Laurel Symes, Dr Michelle Christensen and Hyejun Youn.
DIANA SANCHEZ BARRIOS 