SALVAGING BIRDS

(2019–in pre-production)

feature-length documentary, custom-trained AI-generated birds, birdsong, and music (estimated 60 min. runtime)

A motley flock of speculative birds and avian conservation experts hover around the question: What is lost when birds become data?

Birds are the most datafied wild beings. Ornithology, among the oldest organized scientific disciplines, has captured avian data from specimen bodies to digital repositories—now feeding that data into large-scale analysis systems such as AI tools. Salvaging Birds traces the logics and histories of this extensive bird datafication. It blends documentary interviews with experts in ornithology, avian AI, and community and Indigenous sciences together with AI-generated birds that intervene into otherwise biased datasets.

Specifically, Salvaging Birds queers avian conservation data, which contains significant male biases, by featuring imaginary female, intersex, and queer birds that were created by custom-training AI. The resulting speculative birds, birdsong, and music are woven into the live-action interviews. Taken together, the film complicates datafied approaches to conserving what and who is left of our world.

Supported by:

CalTech-Huntington Art + Research Residency
New Music USA Creator Development Fund
School of Communication Faculty Research Grant, American University
Environmental Futures (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation)

Notes:

Salvaging Birds is part of a multimodal suite of works which also includes a short film (2024), book chapter (2023), sonic essay (2022), and research paper (anticipated 2024). This approach represents what Livio calls “expanded nonfiction.”
With special thanks to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library, The Moore Lab of Zoology at Occidental College, Erin Espelie, Cassie McQuater, JP Merz, the Huntington Library, and Caltech.