Birdsong, 2023, Watercolor & Graphite on paper
From February 2022-February 2023, the first act in my day was to step outside my front door with the Merlin App, a bird identification application created by the Cornell Lab for Ornithology. Merlin uses AI to identify birds within the hearing range of my phone. Typically, Merlin’s ability to hear outpaced my own; I listened alongside the app for sixty seconds, yet typically saw or heard only some of the birds that Merlin was able to identify. In my sketchbook I kept a written record of each species identified. This data was used to create an abstracted visual representation, a master key where each species is represented by a watercolor sphere, sized and rendered to be species specific. Each week culminated in a sound drawing, a visual record of the unseen: The birds that Merlin heard during the week, arranged by date and time.