4K, 7'06', Single-channel video installation with sound, Photography Series, 2025
Filmed and developed during Öres Residency, Örö Island, Finland
Installation Preview, Öres Residency, Finland, 2025
“Free as Birds V: Imagine” is a chapter in Tianjun Li’s ongoing transdisciplinary project Free as Birds, which explores the parallel trajectories of birds and human beings through themes of migration, voice, and the fragile promise of freedom developed across multiple islands. Developed during a residency on Örö Island - an isolated former military fortress in the Finnish archipelago - this work brings together performance, voice experimentation, AI-generated choir, and site-specific intervention.
Clad in a feather-adorned costume that simulates wings, the artist performs a mournful, hybrid bird-being atop the rusted metallic shell of a coastal gun emplacement. Channeling a species in grief - part avian, part human, part spirit - the artist sings fragments of Imagine (John Lennon, 1971), a pacifist anthem recontextualized here as a lament in the face of ecological collapse and historical violence. The voice modulates between birdsong, human breath, and vocal distortion, allowing the artist’s voice to physically resonate through the hollow metal structure, turning the former fortress into a sounding chamber where the body meets acoustic memory.
In the final section of the performance, an AI-generated choral sequence emerges: the original Imagine lyrics are algorithmically translated into the vocal patterns of local swans, then re-synthesized into a speculative birdsong. This speculative “avian choir” is combined with machine-simulated versions of the artist’s own voice: siren-like, mechanistic, and uncanny- suggests both the technological augmentation of nature and the eerie militarization of sound.
Stills from Free as Birds V: Imagine, 2025
Installation View, Öres Residency, Finland, 2025
Free as Birds V: Imagine advances a compelling and self-reflexive methodology that intersects posthuman vocality, ecological grief, and speculative translation. It challenges the viewer to consider how language - whether human, nonhuman, or algorithmic, is shaped by power, loss, and longing. By turning a war remnant into an instrument, the work reactivates colonial and militarized landscapes through acts of embodied re-voicing. It also probes the ethics of using AI as both tool and co-performer, raising urgent questions about authorship, agency, and sonic identity. The piece is an elegy that listens to the spaces where human and more-than-human histories collide. It listens not only to what is said, but to how it reverberates.