ALEXANDRA DAISY GINSBERG

2019-ongoing

Multi-channel sound installation with programmed light, benches; 12mins.

Machine Auguries: Toledo commissioned by Toledo Museum of Art and Superblue.

Originally commissioned by Somerset House and A/D/O.
With additional support from Faculty and The Adonyeva Foundation

Installation view, 'Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg – Machine Auguries: Toledo', Toledo Museum of Art, 2023. © the artist. Photo: Madhouse

Before sunrise, an American robin begins his solo with a warbling call. Other birds respond, together creating the dawn chorus: a back-and-forth that peaks thirty minutes before and after the sun emerges in the spring and early summer, as birds defend their territory and call for mates.

Machine Auguries: Toledo is a site-specific immersive installation that simulates a natural dawn chorus slowly taken over by artificial birds. This synthetic chorus is heard under an artificial sky that transports us from the deep blue of the predawn light in Toledo, Ohio, to the pinks and golds of the sunrise.

Drawing on the significance of the region’s location on various spring migration flyways, Machine Auguries: Toledo reflects on the decimation of bird populations caused by human action, from habitat loss to more insidious light and sound pollution. Critical to functioning ecosystems, birds are being forced to sing earlier, longer, louder or at higher pitches to communicate. But only those that can adapt will survive.

Working with local sound recordists, ornithologists, and Cornell University’s Macaulay Library, Ginsberg collated thousands of recordings of bird species iconic to Toledo to create datasets of their songs. These were used to train a generative adversarial network (GAN) – two neural networks that work in a “call and response”. Reflecting on how birds develop their song from each other; here the machine learns from the disappearing birds. As the chorus concludes, we can no longer be sure what is real.

The machine-generated American robin may sound true to us. Yet stripped of context, it may mean nothing to a real robin. Machine Auguries: Toledo offers an archival copy of a vanishing reality, but this false memory reveals the impossibility of reproducing nature.