Decoy

From mechanical automata to “Hi-Fi” environmental recordings, there are recurring ways that the seemingly-miraculous nature of birdsong has been treated as a testing ground for the simulation of the natural world. Using a self-constructed birdsong machine, this work delves into the history of technological listening through a constellation of devices—mechanical, acoustic, and digital—whose differing logics of representation converge in a single environment to create a surreal form of imitation. Devices such as automata organ pipes (in their attempts to mimic birdsong through acoustic means), and phonographs (later reproducing field recordings through loudspeakers) are staged performatively. Through mixing contrasting media technics from disparate eras, this installation reproduces birdsong through a surreal form of imitation. The bird songs are mimicked by the sounds of organ pipes submerged in water, controlled by a digital machine listening system. This system listens to a vinyl recording from the Cornell Laboratory Of Ornithology to decode and reproduce their sounds, in a reversal of their mechanical instrumentality. Reflecting on the power and lure of imitation, the work performs a perceptual decoy which highlights the ontological deception that arises from increasing machinic representations of the world.

The installation sounds in the early morning scenes at the Bloedel Conservatory, a tropical plant and bird sanctuary built in 1969 in Vancouver. Inside the dome, an impossible ‘dawn chorus’ is sung from bird species all over the world, where a choreography of maintenance, mediation, and infrastructure sustains life under glass.