Free as Birds
2024-ongoing
Video Installation, Sound Art, Photography, Performance
Excerpt of Free as Birds (2024-Ongoing)
人声，机器和想象，我们如何在流散的人类世唱出转译的鸟歌？
"How can we, through human voices, machines, and imagination, sing birdsongs reimagined for the dispersed Anthropocene?"
Free as Birds is an interdisciplinary exploration of social displacement and ecological loss, intertwining the paralleled journeys of birds and humans in the Anthropocene. Through video installation, photography, performance, AI-generated bird’s lyrics of folk songs from various cultures, and vocal experimentation, the project critiques the fragility of migratory species and displaced individuals, while reimagining the concept of home as a shared yet precarious process of negotiation and transformation.
The artist and vocalist, Tianjun Li, imagines themself as a bird in search of a new homeland after catastrophe, wearing fragile wings crafted from fragmented maps of places left behind and destinations imagined. On a three-meter-long sheet of Chinese rice paper (xuan paper 宣纸), they inscribe "the language of birds," an AI collaborative translation of folk songs about migration from various cultures. In natural settings, this paper becomes a flag symbolizing identity, freedom, and the documentation of ecological change, interacting with the sounds of wind, waves, and birds in its surroundings. Their performances—set against global natural and symbolic backdrops—trace migratory paths, from gazing at nests in trees to confronting the stark reality of borders.
Li stretches their four-octave vocal range to simulate natural and social landscapes, creating imaginative dialogues with birds. Videos of Li’s bird songs singing, recorded at multiple locations, are presented through multi-screen installations, where overlapping and intertwining human voices form a multicultural, cross-species imaginary choir.
A central element of the project is the artist’s use of AI to reinterpret traditional folk songs about migration as imagined "lyrics of the bird songs." This process creates a poetic dialogue between human cultural memory and machine-generated abstraction, exposing both the creative potential and limitations of technology in interpreting complex human experiences. Tianjun Li further integrates these AI-generated outputs into his vocal performance, using his expansive vocal range—spanning over four octaves—to mimic bird calls and create a surreal dialogue between himself and the birds. His vocal experimentation blurs the boundaries between human and non-human voices, reflecting on the hybrid identities forged through migration.
By combining AI-driven language experiments, symbolic performances, and soundscapes layered with human and non-human voices, Free as Birds reflects on the interconnected destinies of ecological and human migrations. It questions the promises of freedom and belonging in a world shaped by inequalities and environmental crises, presenting a critical and imaginative narrative on the shared future of humans, machines, and the natural world.
Original Folk Song Lyrics
Wild geese soar in the sky, flying in rows side by side.
The river flows long, autumn grass turns yellow,
And the melody on the grassland carries sorrow.
Wild geese head south, gliding over the reed marsh.
The vast heavens stretch endlessly—where will the geese go?
In their hearts lies the homeland in the northern skies.
鸿雁天空上，对对排成行，江水长秋草黄，草原上琴声忧伤。 鸿雁向南方，飞过芦苇荡，天苍茫雁何往，心中是北方家乡.
- 吕燕卫《鸿雁》
New Bird Lyrics by AI language Model
Chiir-chiir koo-koo,
ki-ki ka-ka koo,
ri-ri laa chaa-rii,
chir chir waah hoo.
Waa-ka koo koo,
li-li cha-koo waah,
chir chir waa koo-ka,
ki-laa koo chir ka.
Stills from Free as BIrds (2024-ongoing)
Installation and Performance at YÖ Galleria, Helsinki (FI), 2024
Performance at Demo Day 2024, Aalto Media Lab