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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 sc
ales 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 th
e 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 approximat
ely 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 thr
ough 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 i
mages 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 o
f 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 dig
itally 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 l
ike 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 t
he 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
[Applause]
[Music]
 you