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[Music]
all right
hello this talk will be done by Gordon
savich an artist critical engineer with
an impressive track record of worldwide
expositions and Felix staler professor
of the Durk University of the Arts they
will talk about artistic research in the
study and visualization of the rewarding
of a migratory bird from assisted
migration to social technological
information and ecological aspects thank
you give it up for
[Applause]
them um thank you for the introduction
and good morning uh thank you for coming
out so early my name is Felix Shala yeah
hi everyone my name is Gordon
saage and we are part of an artistic
research project called latent spaces at
the Zurich University of the Arts and
the larger context framework is that we
investigate the ambiguity of data that
is always present despite the data's
numerical
precision and as the data scientists in
the room will know ambiguity is usually
regarded as a bad thing
there are lots of techniques of curve
smoothing and cutting out the
outliers that are used to get rid of
ambiguity and get uh
unambiguous uh
result but we actually see ambiguity as
something
positive because it opens up about the
spa a space for discussion on different
meanings that we want to IMU
and the consequences of these
meanings for our dealing with the data
and the world mediated by it we started
by looking into the publicly available
data of wild animals and the
technologies that are used in these
projects we are interested in how they
transform our notion of what a wild
animal
is and also what we can learn about the
role of technology in supporting rather
than destroying
Natures as a disclaimers we are not
biologists we are not responsible for
the rewilding project per se but we are
um uh working quite closely with the
biologists as artists and media
researchers one of the heavily data
fight animals is the northern Bal Ibis
[ __ ] in German
it's about 1.4 kilogram bird so it's a
fairly large bird 1.3 M wingspan and it
can grow up to 30 years
old it's a migratory bird it has a
natural migration in the summer it
spends its time and the northern slopes
of the AL so in southern Germany
Switzerland and Austria and the winter
it usually spends in the warmer regions
of the Mediterranean what you see here
is a drawing from
1555 and for centuries this was the only
drawing of this bird that existed
because the bird went extinct in Europe
in 162 in
1621 in
1977 it was put on the critically
endangered list uh globally because
there were only about 700 Birds
left and there has been a rewi project
in Europe uh that started in 2013 By The
biologist Johannes
Fritz it's an attempt to reverse a local
Extinction so birds were imported uh and
raised in
zoos and the rewilding now is not simply
opening the door of the cage so to speak
and releasing the animals but actually
creating conditions for the bird to
become wild again in a region where it
hasn't been wild for you know roughly
400
years so what does it take to make an
animal wild again well there's
technology on the bird itself and we
will talk about this in more detail in a
minute but we discovered that the
technology on the bird is actually only
a small part of a vast more than human
infrastructure on which this bird is
becoming Wild
again and to map this vast
infrastructure we created a map together
with the artist Vlad danola last
year and um I'll quickly run through the
map and we'll zoom into it throughout
the talk at the center of the map there
are four quadrants on the top right
there are the technological elements of
this um infrastructures on the top left
they are the social elements of the
infrastructure kind of the how the
public is involved on the bottom left
there are the ecological elements the
kind of the discontiguous areas in which
the bird lives and on the bottom right
are kind of the scientific and
institutional elements of the um that
you know produce and and create meaning
and finance this
infrastructure
um and while the center of the map shows
the relationships between the different
elements uh there are also three scales
on the top there's a spatial scal that
starts from the planetary dimensions of
thousand of kilometers and zooms into
the millimeters scale through TS through
steps of
100 it just supposes the elements and
the data that you already see in the in
the diagram a second time but in new
relation in terms of of spatial scales
on the left there is a monetary scales
because we live in a world in which
everything has a
price and but not all of these
um values actually make sense but our
our society our system needs monetary
values for everything so examp for
example uh they they need to quantify in
in monetary terms the value of a dead
bird which of course is hard to do and
there are different ways of doing it
coming up with with wildly different uh
figures but you need to put a figure uh
on a dead bird on the bottom
um there's uh uh the time scale the
temporal axis and it's separated into
three different categories there's a
geological time that starts with the
with the genetic age of the bird which
is about a million years old much older
than
humans and um goes down to a bi iCal age
of kind of LIF time and through what we
called Atomic uh time
scales um down to the nanc uh of of the
GPS um that allow us to observe the
rhythms and events that relate are
related in this
project and all of these different
scales the time scales that they need to
work together for this project um to
stabilize the re Wilding as I already
mentioned started in
2013 uh after about 11 years of
preparation feasibility studies and um
raising funds and it will end uh
according to plans but very few things
go according to plan in
2028 uh with the goal of creating a
fully self- sustainable population and
that means it needs a at least
357 rewi Wilder bird for the population
to be H safe against catastrophic events
enough genetic diversity and so on after
that
um this uh infrastructure will be
downscaled uh but it's unlikely that
we'll ever fully
disappear and we'll come back to that
point of you know what does it mean for
nature to to to be left to itself uh
throughout the
talk because we get this often quite um
um uh this question quite often why
can't we leave nature simply alone isn't
nature best left alone and we already
heard about this yesterday in respect to
climate
engineering there are two main reasons
why we can't leave nature alone I mean
the most obvious is because we don't we
interfere massively uh in nature and uh
one of the of the effects of that that
we are currently in the GD sixth grade
Extinction the rate of Extinction is
about 1,000 to 10,000 times that of the
normal rate of Extinction so we
massively
intervening and um so the question is
not really can we leave it alone because
we don't but the question is can we
repair at least some of the damage that
we are doing and there's the second
reason why we can't leave nature alone
and this obviously is climate change
nothing is left alone from climate
change the climate zones move move north
about 400 m a year and this is you know
1.25 M every day so for a um a plant to
stay in the same climate zone and be
left alone it would have to move 1.5 M
every day which obviously is a hard
thing to
do and we'll see later that you know
climate change already affects these
projects quite uh dramatically so
there's simply no nature no prehuman
Baseline to which we can uh return when
we leave nature alone so for the better
or worse mostly for the worst but maybe
also for the better we have to intervene
in some way hand over to kod I'm going
to talk about some of the technological
elements we discovered also in our
research and well one of the um reasons
why we count only the cage as Felix
mentioned for rewi Wilding is the
challenge of migration for this uh
specific bird um so the birds they have
a natural tendency towards migration but
the roots and the destination they are
actually socially learn from their
parents but since the rewilded young
birds actually have no Elders to learn
from um it's basically the humans to
take on this role and of teaching this
migratory rout and they doing this with
this um ultralight airplane which is an
extremely complex task also needs lots
of logistics but it also actually gives
the advantage that they are able to find
a suitable habitat for the winter region
uh in Europe like Central Europe which
is um very densely populated and
agricultur um area um but also there is
a very intensive phase of bonding so
there are two foster M mothers who spend
actually three to four months in very
close contact
uh to the birds and they feed them and
care for them and this creates a mutual
bonding and adaptation um and also the
Foster mothers actually they get to know
them very very well the birds they can
actually identify them very individually
but just like looking at them um and one
very important thing to remember is also
the birds they don't follow the airplane
by Nature it's they follow the people
like they follow um those two foster
mothers on their migration
and after the migration this bonding
process is actually extremely like is
reversed and the birds are released um
when they are released they get fitted
uh a tracking device um which is like a
GPS tracker and well it's not easy to
mount so they they they are wearing a
little harness the weight of the tracker
is about 1 to 2% of the entire Bird's
weight which is um well in the regions
of um what is supposedly like in
scientific terms acceptable mass that
the the bird can carry uh but actually
what they found out is that the
aerodynamics are heavily impacted by
wearing such a device on on its back and
so how do we or how do you optimize
aerodynamics well you actually test it
in a wind Channel and um so they
actually started to build a wind channel
in order to find the balance between uh
like a functional tracker a device that
is big enough to have a battery and
everything but also has the least
minimal aerodynamical impact so there's
an optimization going on and some birds
were actually specifically trained to
fly in this wind channel that was set to
45 km an hour as a fun fact this was
built in a former diary barn and it's
actually cohabitated by domesticated
wild Peak uh on the right side also in
the entire wind Channel design is
actually open source so there was a
paper being published last year if
everyone is interested for 25k
approximately material costs you can
build your own wind channel in in order
to do some aerodynamic testing which is
quite quite a um interesting thing to do
um focusing back on the on the tracker
itself on the tracking device this is in
this specific project they use a a
device that's called onit TR 20 uh 20
indicating the weight of the device for
20 G
this contains a GPS uh receiver at data
upload uh we wi the GSM or the 4G
network a solar charging module and a
tiny battery and an Accel meter and a
magnet meter there's no external antenna
which also sometimes causes actually
problems in terms of
aerodynamics and uh an interesting thing
also that the tracker actually has to be
built for very extreme conditions in
terms of water uh heat of direct sun
exposure uh rough or cold weather in the
mountains and actually the birds are
much more robust than the tracking
device itself which is also
hilarious um looking at the data flow uh
so first the tracking device uploads
actually its GPS position wire a 2G
network or new ones via 4G network to
the manufacturer which is the server
based in
Lithuania uh called the Ornella but also
from there on the data is being synced
to movebank which is a pre-existing data
repository for animal location data
maintained by the max Blanc Institute in
movebank you have um roughly 8,000
studies that are being um collected
within this repository and there are
roughly like 4.8 billion um data points
location points and uh about 800
peer-reviewed papers actually came out
of this Repository just to give you an
idea also about the the importance of
this the northern Bal Ibis project it
has about roughly 13 million data points
and about 80% of the animals of the
rewinding project are wearing a Tracker
um and what interested us is basically
well move Bank provides a web interface
for two public studies um this
is addressed towards uh scientific
Community but there is also um
like um a representation for more for
the general public which is like
expressed through this um app it's
available for Android and iOS uh this is
called animal Tracker app which provides
almost real time observation of animal
movements um so we discovered this app
also and we wanted to get an idea of the
activity on this app uh we wanted to an
analyze analyze this and obviously the
user interface is a bit
tiresome to interact with um so we were
looking for a programmatic approach to
receive the data from the app uh and we
started a kind of a man in the- Middle
uh proxy an interactive httpx uh https
proxy and an old ulator running Android
an old Android version so we could
intercept the network traffic and get
actually found an API which is was
expected but um we actually found also
some API end points
uh where we could actually then scrape
the entire database of all animals
available in this animal Tracker app we
could have also just asked but this was
more fun to do and we discovered the end
points also to HTML pages on the back
end of the app uh which are being used
to show like sighting reports so people
can upload a sighting report of an
animal if they if they actually see that
animal in the wild and we did another
round of
scraping um and then we discovered that
actually the most tracked animal within
the animal Tracker app is indeed the Val
drop um followed by the White St who has
roughly half of the sightings and The
Spooner so they are all somehow birds
that are relatively large animals uh
just to give you some numbers also that
there are roughly
7,300 animals within this animal Tracker
app and we discovered that uh roughly
10% of these animals have a recent time
stamp so they had an update within the
last 24 hours uh with a new location so
uh what we found interesting is it's not
just about like tracking the animal but
also the engagement this produces so
this a part of a larger process to
create space for this animal in public
awareness um so as I said like through
the scraping we found out that there
were more than 1,200 postings with
images and B Bal IIs had most of them
and so some are really this kind of
professional camera shots with a huge
telephoto lens where you capture the
perfect moment of a burer and some are
showing also that there are troubles
transferring sometimes the image to to
the smartphone so there are screen uh
photos of the
screens um also sometimes you see this
fruit binocular so it's more like the
traditional burer aesthetic as we call
it um some are Selfies
and sometimes they're just screenshots
from the phone or even like uh photos of
a newspaper articles so it's like a
second second Inception citing somehow
um this looks well a bit messy but this
is also a good thing as we discovered
because it allows people to participate
with what they already have uh in ways
that works for them so it's uh not about
learning the uh proper technology of
making a perfect bur shot but
they can just you know participate in
this platform very very openly um it
sometimes it Al creates some weird
um kind of glitches as this example
shows that people triggered a false
alarm of a bird that needs urgently help
because it says here it's in German but
it says basically that this bird doesn't
move since the day because it's stuck in
this black container and it's just like
didn't get the GPS update and people
actually taking this GPS position way to
literal because obviously there is like
a plusus 10 m um um offset and um yeah I
think talking about the GPS position
maybe you want to
yeah so what is being done other than uh
feeding conspiracy theories uh with this
data and the standard way of using this
location data is to plot it on a map and
uh what we've done here is we took out
one bird in with the ID ring uh
233 and and took all the measurements
from one year
2021 in which the bird has flown about
6,600 kilometers and created 16,000 data
points this looks like uh Latin America
but this actually um the top is the
region around Lake constant and the
bottom is
um uh
Tuscany so with this we can kind of
watch the bird as it move through kind
of a natural uh landscape and this is
also what the uh animal track app uh
allows us to do to see the bird uh
moving but it's actually uh it's a
two-way process uh it's not only that we
are watching the bird it's also that the
bird is watching the infrastructure
through which it moves because uh in air
the bird which I saw suddenly
disappeared uh from the A and why
because it was in Switzerland and
Switzerland turned off the GMS Network
at beginning of this
year um so the they had a relatively old
bird with an old tracker that was
relying on
G2 uh 2G um connectivity and you know
that was deemed to be uh outdated so was
turned off but it wasn't turned off
entirely uh but sporadically for
probably some very local reasons
somebody you know have an important
application maybe for agriculture that
was occasional uh antennas were left on
so what you could see is actually the
the bird
mapping these these uh antennas that
were still uh ongoing there was of no
use in in terms of biological or other
observation of the bird because was too
intermittent and too random in terms of
where these are but suddenly you could
see a kind of a decaying infrastructure
through that
um uh through through the bird so the
bird was mapping the infrastructure for
us uh but let's zoom out a little bit
and move away from this one particular
case and ask ourselves what can we learn
a bit more generally about the role of
Technology uh as a support mechanism for
a planet on the brink of
breakdown well the first thing we
learned is that technology is not the
solution technology plays an important
role but it's still a small role because
there are many more important actors in
these large scale highly independent
Network and important is not so much a
technology in and of itself but really
how it transforms these actors and how
it binds them together in these
networks and to capture that we need
perhaps another narrative an antidote to
the big Tech Narrative of saving nature
through some you know complicated uh new
uh technology and we could call this
perhaps a mundane technology technology
that's part of the everyday that is
socially smart rather than
technologically or artificially
intelligent yeah so we identified this
kind of mundane Tech and what are the
characteristics of this um as Felix
outlined it's not about maybe Cutting
Edge uh not the latest and greatest um
as we've seen also this GPS tracker is a
pretty basic device also frugality is
something important don't think what the
tech could do but what you really have
to do and and obviously a long-term
aspect so long term is more important
than state-ofthe-art uh why because you
have minimal upgradability so once you
deploy the tracker on the animal you
it's very hard to to catch the animal
back and to put in some updates or like
to upgrade the hardware um but there's
also the um an important aspect of like
a long-term cost Factor um it's offthe
shelf stuff and easy to use but still
the tracker costs about like €1,000 it's
a onetime fee but you have an ongoing
data plan plan um which involves several
Euros per month um which add can add up
if you tracking like 170 or 8 200 Birds
Um this can add up also depending on
where the bird flies so if it flies into
a uh very uh expensive roaming region
you know this this yeah factors can add
up um but also stability and reliability
can be actually affected from outside
the project as we've seen with with the
um switch off of the 2G network so this
is also like you're like embedded within
larger techno environment um one the the
case for 2G showed exactly this
dependency on a long-term Endeavor
speaking on long term um one of the
badrock tech that this project also and
one of the traditional techniques maybe
to to track Birds is the ring ID is a
technology about 130 years old um is
the most long-term the least invasive
and has almost no maintainance costs or
no maintainance costs uh it's also tag
that has been enhanced digitally in the
past because now this number is an
additional information um on the on the
ring itself but also it refers now to an
online database ID that enables
informational reference about the bird
history and stuff like this but also
people identify birds actually more
easily because uh if if we are taking
really highr photos now they can
actually really read the ring ID on on
on these images when they heavily zoom
in um well the elephant in the room is
well this is surveillance Tech right and
it's easy to imagine how to abuse this
and I think the particular difference
here lies in the projects in the in the
objectives of the project and the more
human relationships this creates um the
tracking of these animals it allows to
see them also as individuals and you can
relate to them so it creates an effect
and empathy for the people who are like
following them also two things to note
on this picture um this again this one
of these birds is anir who put his nest
on a window seal uh this year at the
Harley-Davidson center near the surich
airport and also the web they put up a
webcam after they discovered this nest
and it's very private sensitive by
pixelating actually the public street
but also so then just don't look at the
window
reflection um also when it's too much
actually trackers are being switched off
sometimes as this quote um shows #
animal stalking um so it's also not
about having like a completely
autonomous uh Fleet of birds that are
being tracked but it's actually really
um and like a constant maintenance and
Care is necessary through so-called bird
managers
um also it's the GPS locations as we
discovered is not only about
surveillance or like tracking them uh
the GPS location actually this graph
shows the departure date for the Autumn
migration of the birds which you can
identif which you can read through and
through um some statistical processes
you can you can set when actually the
the date for the uh Auto migration
started and this has been shifted like
in the even only in the last 10 years um
by one month um later so the most likely
reason is yeah well climate change uh
because the birds don't have the
necessary termal winds to pass the Alps
uh uh which meant actually for this
project that they had to change the
migration route uh not they not flying
anymore over the Alps but uh to the
south of
Spain yeah and when we focus on kind of
a mundane technology it makes it also
easi to see that technology and uh
nature are actually a continuous we
heard about this already yesterday again
in the talk about climate engineering
there's no deep
separation uh between technology and
nature and obviously technology is made
out of natural materials we know this is
a very destructive and extractive uh
process it has a mostly negative impact
on nature but also in times of Crisis uh
there is a need for that what we see on
the picture are the biologists cleaning
the nests of the wild
birds uh mostly from Plastics that are
picked up from the area which is a if
you go and look at the area it's
actually a very beautiful and clean area
but still full of plastic that's
damaging to the
birds so we can't simply leave it alone
in the age of climate change and Rapid
transformation of ecosystems we are in
this larger planetary context and we
need to think and act locally and
globally and all the more is this aspect
of of care uh technology which again you
know stresses the long-term aspects
rather than the
one-term uh fix mundane technology also
helps us to perhaps get rid over this
idea that technology is about control
and this idea really lies at the heart
of our cybernetic world put there by
norber WEA right at the beginning when
he claimed that technology that
cybernetics is about control and
communication in the animal and machine
and this idea of control of using
technology to control nature to control
each other created all kinds of problems
that we heard yesterday and we'll hear
in the coming days um and not the least
it creates the fantasy of omnipotence of
complete control and Mastery we have to
move actually we think in an opposite D
direction we have to embrace the limits
of control and the limits of knowability
certain things we simply don't know so
we should treat him with respect and
humility so we need uh to increase uh
the autonomy of humans and nonhumans but
never not in the sense of of complete
you know leave them alone everybody can
do whatever they want this is not a
useful way of autonomy but increase the
degrees of freedom to choose how to
relate and to relate to
whom and we need to build into these
systems the conditions for happy
surprises we should see a surprise as
something positive rather than something
that you know speaks to to a breakdown
of control so in such a project um and
the technology it uses is really not
about scaling up it's not about reaching
Global scales but to create the right
conditions for scaling
down um to to finish uh some references
on the on the website that you you see
below uh you can see the the map and
also get some tours audio tours through
the map but obviously you can also and
we had a recommend to check out the the
biologists uh the project uh directly we
also have a few print outs of the map
there's a a PDF on the website that you
can download but you also have a few
printouts here obviously we forgot them
in the hotel but we'll bring them
tomorrow so if you catch us tomorrow you
we we can get you a print uh thank
you thank
[Music]
you
[Applause]
all right well will people line up oh no
yeah will people line up I actually have
a question and it's about um if you can
show back the image of like uh the
parents or the mothers like transporting
the birds around did they really fly
like all the way from essentially Italy
all the way up to I don't know it was at
least the height of inbr or Munich uh
they fly down
yeah they had to fly in that thing for
how many kilometers um initially when
they I mean they have to only fly down
oh okay because once they're there they
they remember where they come from and
the next year they remember where they
go to it's only one time but in the
initial routs it was about 800 km and in
the new route they have to take around
the Alps because they can no longer go
over the Alps because they leave too
late and it's 2,300 km
so it takes them about a month or six
weeks okay the birds alone would be much
faster but the light plane is slow so
they have to teach the birds how to SL
fly
slowly nice also technically speaking
it's like the destination uh of the
South migration is burned like an abam
so it's stays in their memory forever
they also can find the way back where
they were breeding without any
assistance
nice well question one yeah thank you
for your very interesting talk I have a
question so um what comes to my mind
first is uh the technology route which
you did not uh encourage to follow so uh
to make it simpler to make it cheaper
use an air tech for instance to track
those birds but what is actually your re
recommendation uh as a technique to use
I mean I my takeaway was we shouldn't
leave them alone so should we observe
them uh use the app make a photo
and so track the birds non invasively in
order to follow them mhm I think there
are different uh levels of tracking
involved one is the biologists that are
very closely work with the birds and
care for the birds and support them and
you know teach them and all of that uh
and they learn a lot through the the the
tracking and the other part is that the
that we need eat in our imagination
public imagination places for wild
animals and most of us living in cities
and highly cultured areas we never
encounter wild animals and uh if we
encounter them they're
Anonymous so this allows this form of
tracking but also of sighting of uh
allows to to get to to create other
narratives and other ways of relating to
the Bird that's neither a pet that's
fully controlled but it's also not an
anonymous animal but it's an animal with
its own characteristics you know this is
that age last year you know had this
traumatic accident or whatever or two
two kids and and and and you you get to
sense that this is a a full being rather
than just you know some random thing
walking
by hi did you ever think about building
your own track device GPS tracking
device and make it open source like the
wind
tunnel um actually no we we haven't
thought about building our device just
um actually lack of time maybe but
actually we we asked the the
manufacturer if they would release the
the designs open source but there was a
clear no for them even though they're
like also I mean their background is
like they're on ontologists and also
scientists but for some reason they were
not so interesting in releasing their
schematics well one from the signal
Angel well there are currently two
questions uh from the net first question
is by Paul fer uh who's wondering
whether the sound of the paramotor
engine was a problem when training the
birds yeah that is a huge problem that's
why they also having like this kind of
training with the birds um what they're
doing with the young birds they kind of
get them used to the to the airplane so
they make like little little flights
around the breeding grounds before
undertaking the the long migration
route and the second current question by
hirro um he's wondering or they are
wondering uh whether the drought in
Spain is uh affecting the current
migrator migratory
routs
um at the moment it
doesn't because they don't
really uh spend too much time you know
eating and picking
uh uh worms while they are
migrating and um at the destination in
Andalusia there's actually another
uh kind of rewilding
project that uh um you know has does
some basic care and
maintenance uh but at the moment this
seems not to be a problem the main
problem really is um that when they move
when they take off too late from
northern Europe the winds over the Alps
are no longer sustainable for them to
you know to rise with the thermal winds
that's that's the main problem at the
moment thanks for a really interesting
project um I want wanted to ask about
the people because it sounds like a very
diverse project with people from many
different disciplines working together
for Tech that is as you said socially
smart so I was wondering if you had
examples or experiences of how you
brought these people together um and
what worked well for this very
multi-disciplinary project if you make
it short I you have yeah um actually
since we are mostly observing the
network rather than building it we're
not the biologists um I can't really say
anything specific to
that okay the last one on mik
four um hi uh I just wanted to ask if
it's possible to recover the tracking
devices uh after a few years or if that
is not
feasible it's actually uh difficult to
recover them I mean on the live Birds
when they you know die then it's easy
um but simply because the longer the
birds are out there the more stressful
it becomes to catch them again even
though we we said they were reversing
the bonding process it's never fully re
reversed the the Foster mothers
recognize the birds and the birds also a
few years later still recognize the the
people uh but catching them is really
really stressful and they want to avoid
that at at as much as possible so no
it's not really possible so they they
sometimes fly around with broken
trackers they no longer send
anything great thank you so much thank
you thank
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you