Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg —
Machine Auguries: Toledo

“Go outside and protect what already exists: AI-generated dawn chorus of songbirds has a sinister edge.” — Kimberly Hatfield, The Art Newspaper

Machine Auguries: Toledo is a site-specific, immersive installation that simulates a natural dawn chorus, the daily call and response performed by birds in the spring and summer to defend their territory and call for mates. In Ginsberg’s artwork, the natural dawn chorus is slowly taken over by artificial birds, whose calls are generated using machine learning. Drawing on the significance of the region’s location on spring migration flyways, Machine Auguries: Toledo reflects on the decline of bird populations caused by human action. 

The installation features the growing light of an artificial dawn and foregrounds our current environment where habitat destruction, climate change and the effects of noise and light pollution are disrupting the dawn chorus. Birds — critical to functioning ecosystems — are being forced to sing earlier, longer, louder or at higher pitches, ultimately threatening their populations as only the species that adapt can survive. Ginsberg trained a generative adversarial network (GAN) — two neural networks that work in a “call and response” and are sometimes used to create lifelike but fake images. She used tens of thousands of field recordings from the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and documented different bird species iconic to the Toledo region, including the northern cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis) and the gray catbird (Dumetella carolinensis).

A suspended lighting array spanning the gallery transports viewers from the deep blue of the Toledo predawn through to the pinks and golds of the sunrise. Visitors sit together in a clearing under the artificial sky and listen to a solo call and response between a real and synthetic bird. Over time, those calls grow into the crescendo of the dawn chorus.

Organized by Superblue and Jessica S. Hong, the Toledo Museum of Art’s curator of modern and contemporary art. Special thanks to the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology for their support of this project.

Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio, USA
29 April - 26 November 2023
www.toledomuseum.org