TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

I’m proposing an artist talk for the 2025 conference "Taboo - Transgression - Transcendence in Art & Science” about my ongoing artistic research on language, translations, sound, mimicry, empathy and interspecies communication. I’ve studied particularly bird languages and spectrograms as visualizations of bird sounds, aiming to show the connections between the human and bird languages.

The works I present during the talk are Birdsong, Etudes for birds and Decoy. In the piece Birdsong (2019) my aim is to bring the languages of people and birds closer to each other by creating an alphabet for birdsong, by translating bird sounds to images and human alphabets into sounds as spectrograms. For the piece Etudes for birds (2020) I’ve imitated the bird vocalizations by drawing, then translated the drawings into sounds as spectrograms and finally collected the drawn sounds into a constructed soundscape.

For the piece Decoy (2022) I’ve studied decoy whistles used for hunting. I’ve built whistles that mimic the vocalizations of other animals, especially birds, from different mostly recycled materials. Learning to build and play the instruments helps me to better understand sound as phenomenon. I also explore the connection between mimicry and empathy, as well as the dark side of empathy; reading someone’s mind with the objective to harm them.

Through my research, I’ve developed a speculative theory on how the auditory bird vocalizations could have synesthetically effected the development of the visual forms of the human alphabets. I’m working on a zine to show how google translate image recognition can recognize human texts in images of birdsong spectrograms. I’ve also studied the idea of mimicry as an interspecies pidgin language. Mimicry can work as a communicative bridge between species, but it can also work as an exercise in empathy. Through mimicry and empathy, I explore the potential connections between species.