Ginsberg

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg has become something of a connoisseur of chirps and trills.

She’s been listening to thousands of recordings of real birdsong to create the data set that will feed her installation, Machine Auguries: Toledo, and the artificial intelligence that Ginsberg has trained to recreate the dawn chorus.

Ginsberg employs a Generative Adversarial Network (or GAN) network with her longtime collaborator Przemek Witaszyk, a string theory physicist in Kraków, Poland. With GAN, two neural networks talk to each other—a kind of call and response. One network makes a sound, and the other network responds in a kind of one-upmanship moment to produce the same sound or image a little better. Each cycle introduces improvements; in the language of tech, these are called epochs. Neither the artist nor the string theory physicist are in control of the process and what emerges.

The UK-based artist, who goes by Daisy, has been examining the fraught relationship between technology and nature—in other words, between the things we humans invent and the world that surrounds us. In her explorations, she seeks to help audiences interrogate the costs of approaching our environment with a relentless will to make it more comfortable and more convenient.

Machine Auguries, an installation she first presented in 2019 on a smaller scale at Somerset House, London, will make its U.S. debut at the Toledo Museum of Art on April 29. Using light and sound, the installation recreates the experience of the dawn chorus, essentially a daily singing competition birds engage in every morning during spring and early summer to defend territory and seek mates.

The Toledo exhibition will be even more ambitious than the work’s first iteration: larger in scale, with improved technology that’s more experimental, generating longer and more accurate birdsong. The Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology has been an important collaborator; it holds the world’s largest repository of animal recordings in the world. So has the Black Swamp Bird Observatory, which helped Ginsberg capture the song of local and migratory Northwest Ohio birds—warblers and cardinals, catbirds and vireos.

Field recordings include the many additional noises being fed into the machine and crunched up, so to speak—the vibrations of traffic, the rustling of leaves—and once translated causes the artificial version of the dawn chorus to evoke a dimmer, darker alternate reality.

That was the intention, in some ways. “A dawn chorus is unique—it happens each day with different individuals in a particular habitat,” says Ginsberg. Attempting to match it perfectly is futile. “You can’t recreate it.”

Ginsberg’s childhood was spent on a farm, in the English countryside outside London, though the family didn’t raise any animals– just shiitake mushrooms. She spent many of her teenage weekends plucking them from logs in the woods. Farmed in the traditional Japanese method, their fickle growth and mercurial nature were sometimes frustrating. (“A rainy Sunday meant suddenly a mushroom-picking emergency,” she says.) There were advantages, though: out there, communing with nature, she could make her own little world and be inquisitive. “It was formative,” she says. “I was the kind of kid that needed to know how everything worked.”

Her focus on why and how things work propelled her into into a lifelong inquiry around what we often take for granted. What is progress, and why do we measure it the way we do? Who defines

“better”? These interrogations form the foundation of her practice, in her artwork, writing, and curating. She explores them in collaborations with scientists, engaging more deeply with the purpose and effect of our march toward progress. While this is regularly described as movement forward, Ginsberg estimates that this continues without enough consideration toward impact. Genetically engineered bacteria, synthetic organisms devised to help conserve nature, artificial intelligence—she’s demanded we answer more deeply for how we are “improving” the world and at what cost.

After undergraduate studies in architecture at the University of Cambridge and a stint as a visiting scholar at Harvard University, she earned her MA and PhD from London’s Royal College of Art, where she completed Better, her PhD project. In it she explores how different individuals’ visions for improving the world shape how and what ultimately gets designed. “Daisy’s practice is addressing the critical and urgent—but also enduring—issues of our day,” says Jessica S. Hong, curator of modern and contemporary art at TMA. “And in her work there is this interesting coalescing of the technological, through artificial intelligence, with environmental concerns, which are existential. I think it’s an interesting approach, and a thoughtful one.”

Her deft hand for taking highly technical or scientific tools and manipulating them to better understand our relationship with the natural world is meant to provide an opportunity. To pause, to consider, to redefine the way we measure our own advancement. She has exhibited internationally, including at MoMA New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, the National Museum of China, the Centre Pompidou, and the Royal Academy.

“Modern humans, postenlightenment Western humans, have been very busy trying to free themselves from the natural world,” she says. “The big flaw of the myth of progress is that we’re not measuring all the things that really allow our own long-term uplifting because we have destroyed our natural environment. My work is a critique on measurement in some ways and how we have been so focused on certain measures that we have forgotten our natural world. We don’t spend time considering all our conflicting ideas of what really is better.”

Working with AI creates ethical and moral questions, existential problems that Hong says stimulate Ginsberg and push her in the themes she interrogates in her work. Like the artist, the curator believes that these tools need to be examined outside the tech space.

“AI is the tool she uses to communicate the concerns that ground her practice,” Hong says. “It is a material that artists are utilizing, like the camera. And for a long time photography experienced a lot of push back as a ‘fine art’ medium. Granted there are very scary, serious consequences that can also potentially come of AI, but I think because of that it is important that it not be relegated to the tech space only. We need creatives to engage with these tools so that there’s more than one possibility.”

In Machine Auguries, Ginsberg is wrestling with a very big idea: the end of the world as we know it.

The machine in Machine Auguries comes from the artificial intelligence Ginsberg employs, AI that has been taught how to mimic the dawn chorus. The auguries— or omens—emerge from the competition between the authentic and the simulated. The experience of hearing this mutating birdsong is an emotional one.

Though artificial intelligence is a tool, it’s ultimately not the inherent point, she says.

“It’s a piece about birds, and I’ve chosen to do that with AI,” says Ginsberg. “But the most interesting thing to me is to draw attention to something we’re at risk of losing, not necessarily the technology itself.”

Given the weighty subject matter, you might expect a more dour figure to appear on the video call that was scheduled one winter morning this January to discuss her upcoming exhibition.

But the person who appears on screen feels altogether more lighthearted. She’s seated in her London office in Somerset House Studios, where she’s undertaking a residency, her seafoam green sweater contrasting the season’s gray skies. After a morning of backto-back meetings, she politely asks to excuse herself to “hunt for a biscuit”; a cure for early afternoon hunger pangs.

We discuss how in the summer of 2022, Ginsberg experienced the heat wave that struck the UK and Europe, some of the most intense temperatures ever recorded in London. She found it frightening to step outside.

“It was a really strange feeling,” she says. “You emerge into this hot, hot street and it’s wrong. There’s something really unnerving. It was like everything was upside down. It’s not how the world is meant to be in this particular place. You went to the parks to walk the dog and it looked like a savannah, it was parched.”

There isn’t much of a dawn chorus left in London—she and her partner moved outside the city, where they can still hear birdsong. The bugs that characteristically dirtied windshields on drives through the British countryside are vanishing; car windows remain relatively clean now, she informs me. Bugs, and birds, are disappearing.

It’s a shifting baseline, changes happening gradually over time until one day you realize you haven’t noticed the major transition taking place right before you. It makes her feel listless, she says. So she returns to the work, the place she communicates her concerns and can create a true dialogue with her audience.

“There’s a more nuanced point, which is that we need to be living with nature. Once it’s lost, it’s lost,” says Ginsberg. “You can’t recreate the natural world because it’s a constantly ephemeral and changing thing. We need to look after it as our greatest priority.”