This episode of the Fermynwoods Contemporary Art Podcast features Salvaging Birds, an original sonic essay by Maya Livio and JP Merz, followed by a discussion with Maya Livio.

Through the use of what Maya calls expanded nonfiction, she constructs a haunting and lyrical sonic essay containing a chorus of both human and non-human voices. The work draws attention to the biases and misclassifications within avian conservation datasets.

Here she has set a research-driven essay against sounds generated by an AI which was trained on specific datasets, particularly ones from the Cornell Library of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library – the world’s largest and oldest scientific archive of wildlife recordings. By using machine learning to speculatively queer birdsong datasets, the work complicates datafied approaches to conserving what and who is left of our world.

More at: https://fermynwoods.org/fermynwoods-podcast-16-maya-livio/

Thumbnail image: Salvaging Birds, generative image by Cassie McQuater, 2022