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 and machines’ imagination, sing birdsongs reimagined for the dispersed Anthropocene?"
Free as Birds is an interdisciplinary exploration of the parallel journeys of birds and humans in the Anthropocene. The project interrogates humanity’s primal and universal association of birds with freedom-a vision now reshaped by contemporary realities of displacement, restricted mobility, and environmental devastation.
By merging the human voice with AI language models, it aims to bridge the most ancient forms of communication with those being redefined in the modern era. This synthesis evokes themes of linguistic barriers in human migration and posthuman imaginings of cross-species destinies.
Artist and vocalist Tianjun Li imagines themselves as a bird searching for a new homeland after catastrophe. Adorned with fragile wings crafted from fragmented maps, they sing in AI-reimagined bird languages—interpretations of traditional folk songs about migration from diverse cultures. On a three-meter-long scroll of Chinese xuan paper (宣纸), they inscribe "the language of birds," while stretching their five-octave vocal range to mimic both natural and social landscapes, creating imaginative dialogues between humans and birds.
Li’s performances, filmed in various natural settings and transformed by AI into surreal dimensions, are presented through multi-channel video installations. These overlapping and intertwining human voices form a multicultural, cross-species AI-Bird Song Choir, an immersive experience that blurs the boundaries between species, cultures, and the real and imagined.
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" and transform the films into surealist landscapes. Tianjun Li further integrates these AI-generated outputs into their vocal performance, using their expansive vocal range-spanning over four octaves-to mimic bird calls and create a surreal dialogue between himself and the birds.
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
MANIFESTO Berlin 2025