Birds | MoMA R&D Salon 58 | MoMA LIVE

Why It Matters

Understanding birds bridges art, technology, and ecology, driving innovative design solutions and heightened environmental stewardship.

Key Takeaways

• Birdwatching surged during COVID, now one in three Americans watch birds.
• Cornell's Merlin app uses AI to identify birds by sight and sound.
• Artists use bird songs to highlight environmental loss and acoustic ecology.
• Historical attempts to train birds reveal ethical tensions in interspecies communication.
• Celebrity birds in cities spark public engagement and conservation awareness.

Summary

The MoMA R&D Salon #58, hosted by Paola Antonelli, explored the multifaceted role of birds in art, science, and everyday life, positioning them as both aesthetic muses and ecological indicators.

Antonelli highlighted a pandemic‑driven boom in birdwatching, noting that roughly one‑third of Americans now regularly observe birds. She praised Cornell’s Merlin app for its AI‑driven identification of species by sight and sound, and traced the lineage from 19th‑century field guides to today’s digital tools. The talk also examined how composers like Vivaldi and Messiaen have translated bird song into music, while environmentalists such as Rachel Carson have used avian decline as a warning signal.

Concrete examples ranged from Bernie Krause’s 5,000‑hour sound archive to Raven Chacon’s "Aviary" project documenting extinct and endangered calls, and Paul Klee’s "Twittering Machine" that critiques mechanized mimicry of birdsong. Antonelli cited historic attempts to train birds—serinettes, wartime messenger pigeons, and modern installations like Bick Van Der Poel’s "Speechless"—to illustrate ethical tensions in human‑bird communication.

The discussion underscored birds as a lens for interdisciplinary innovation: they inspire design, inform technology, and galvanize public concern for biodiversity. Recognizing avian patterns can guide sustainable practices, shape acoustic‑ecology policies, and deepen cultural appreciation for non‑human neighbors.

Original Description

There is a long history of human-avian relations. In antiquity, for example, both Romans and Hittites made political decisions using the practice of augury, which divined the will of the Gods by observing the flight of birds. In Taoism and Chinese culture, the red-crowned crane is a profound symbol of longevity and spiritual elevation, and birds are similarly mediators and messengers in most systems of belief. Charles Darwin observed finches in the Galápagos to develop his theory of evolution. Rachel Carson wrote of the lack of bird song as a harbinger of ecological collapse. Maya Angelou wrote of a caged bird’s song as a metaphor for her own childhood traumatic experience of racism. From the mythical phoenix to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s albatross and Edgar Allan Poe’s raven, humans have long imbued birds with mythological, poetic, political, and divine–in addition to scientific–meaning.

Scientifically speaking, birds are taxonomically diverse–with over 11,000 known species occupying land, sky, and water, though this number continues to decline. Migratory birds traverse vast distances multiple times a year, without regard for human-imposed borders. Evolutionarily linked closely to the dinosaur, birds connect us to the deep past. Thinking with birds requires taking on new planetary vantage points and occupying nonhuman scales space and time. In this salon, we will consider birds as animals, birds as symbols, birds in art and mythology, and the birds-eye-view as a mode of seeing. We will think alongside birds about flight, music and migration.

Some questions we will ask: Why are birds such an enduring symbol in art and mythology? What can birds teach us about extinction? And about freedom? What is it like to fly? What can birds show us about movement and migration? Why is birdwatching such a pervasive pastime? What can we learn about ourselves by observing them? What can we hear when we listen to birds? Are birdsongs music? How are we behaving with birds, from owls to chickens? How do we make the city more inhabitable for them? Can we create a new, contemporary symbolic and ritualistic role for birds in these anxious times of intolerance and insecurity?

Indigo Goodson-Fields is a writer, poet, and birder based in Brooklyn. Her forthcoming book, entitled Essential Birding is an anthology about the importance of birding in the lives of Black birders across the U.S. and will be published by OR Books in fall 2026.

Khaled Malas is an architect and art historian from Damascus currently based in New York City. His research focuses on the role of images and image-making technologies in producing and challenging the potential of places, real and imagined. He is the principal of Sigil, an art/design collective exploring the metamorphoses of Arab landscapes marked by historical and contemporary struggles.

Gal Nissim and Leslie Ruckman are longtime collaborators. Their interactive works blend art, science, and design, utilizing living organisms to probe complex scientific themes. They’ve exhibited their work at the New Museum, Pioneer Works, NYCxDesign Times Square, and Science Gallery Detroit, among others.

Maria Popova is a reader and a writer, and writes about what she reads on The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings), which is included in the Library of Congress’s permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. She is the author of Figuring, coeditor of A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader, and the creator and host of The Universe in Verse.

Aimy Wissa is an Associate Professor in the Mechanical Aerospace and Engineering Department at Princeton University, which she joined in January 2022. She is also the director of the Bio-Inspired Adaptive Morphology (BAM) Lab, where she focuses on the modeling and experimental evaluation of dynamic and adaptive bioinspired structures and systems, such as avian-inspired and insect-inspired wings and robotic systems with multiple modes of locomotion.

The presentations will be accompanied by the screening of a series of short videos cut specifically for Salon 58

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The comments and opinions expressed in this video are those of the speakers alone, and do not represent the views of The Museum of Modern Art, its personnel, or any artist.

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