UMEÅ.- With AI-generated birdsong under an artificial dawn sky, Machine Auguries warns of our infatuation with technology at the expense of nature. Using thousands of field recordings of wild birds, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg has trained a pair of neural networks to develop their song in dialogue. In her immersive installation, a real dawn chorus is slowly taken over by synthetic birdsong, and when it falls silent, we are no longer sure what is real. Machine Auguries reminds us of the impossibility of recreating nature and of the urgent need to protect it. As human actions decimate bird populations, the artist offers a false copy of the dawn.   

Bildmuseet brings together three iterations of Machine Auguries for the first time. The first two recreate the dawn in London, 2019, and Toledo, Ohio, 2023, and are presented throughout the exhibition. In January 2025, a site-specific Umeå chorus will be added to the series. 

“As an artist record of the experience of a place, Machine Auguries is an expanding archive of vanishing local realities. This collection celebrates the uniqueness of ecosystems but reminds us of their interconnectedness, as bird species repeat. As we play back these imperfect copies of the dawn inside the gallery, Ginsberg’s work reminds us of the impossibility of reproducing nature once it is lost.” —Sarah Cook, Curator

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg (b. 1982) is a multidisciplinary artist based in London, examining humans’ fraught relationship with nature and technology. Her work has been shown worldwide, including at MoMA, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Royal Academy, London. She has a PhD from the Royal College of Art. In 2023, she won the S+T+ARTS Grand Prize – Artistic Exploration from the European Commission for her interspecies living artwork Pollinator Pathmaker. This is the artist’s first solo presentation in Sweden. 

Machine Auguries, developed with Curator and Professor Sarah Cook, is the first of two exhibitions at Bildmuseet that explore our future with AI technologies. 

The exhibition is produced by Bildmuseet with support from Kempestiftelserna, the Arctic Centre at Umeå University and WASP-HS (Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program – Humanities and Society). Special thanks to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology/Macaulay Library for their support of this artwork.