I
This short essay is part of our continuing interest in ecologies of computation and media where computational culture is read through animal energies and forces. In the context of the ongoing environmental datafication, we are interested in how this can invert into a project on histories and art methods that deals with computation and data through nature – not merely as a financialised object but as the primary assembly of what we might even later understand as technical media. This is one way of conducting elemental media studies, though it also links to many adjacent fields in art, Science and Technology Studies, and infrastructural studies. This short text articulates this through an existing infrastructure of bird sensing and a new artistic installation by Abelardo Gil-Fournier.
II
One of the collateral damages of Russia's invasion of Ukraine was the pausing of the ICARUS project, an international research project led by the Max Planck Institute. The purpose is straightforward: to attach miniature geolocation sensors (“wearables for wildlife”) to the bodies of animals on a large scale – mostly migratory birds. This is done in order to track and analyse their movements. This data, in turn, is read in relation to climate change, habitat transformations and the impact on endangered species (https://www.icarus.mpg.de/en).
Like the namesake Greek character, Project ICARUS fell from grace, albeit due to the war and not because of solar rays that melted the waxed bird feathers. The data was meant to be sent via the International Space Station as part of the GPSification of animal observation. Data transmissions ceased in March 2022, however an alternative infrastructure was developed by November 2025: the international project has just announced the launch of its own satellite, GENA-OT, onboard a SpaceX mission partly funded by the National Geographic Society (https://www.icarus.mpg.de/126426/news_publication_25661928_transferred).
ICARUS stands for "International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space”, which leads us to ask if it signals other – or many – kinds of falls also? Does ICARUS thus stand for a proxy of fragility of infrastructure of international collaborations at the face of geopolitical tensions and wars? Such geopolitics are furthermore emphasised with the growing popularity of far-right populism where funding cuts of environmental science (and humanities) might be another jeopardising element at play. At the very least, “cooperation” also involves the question as to which political economies support animal observation, and where does the data flow beyond the scientific institutions?
While such political contexts are of importance, we do not approach the topic only in the sense of an accident or breakdown, but as lowering the focus from orbital infrastructures to other levels of aviation and flight, namely of birds themselves. ICARUS sandwiches airborne animal data between the earth’s surface and the orbital data sphere, offering a particular kind of a view to data off the earth surface, and computation that is infrastructure across the planet.
III
What seems clear is that the initiative led by Martin Wikelski, director at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour, appears to have more in common with the machinations of the inventor Daedalus than with the tragic fate of Icarus, the son. The project's slogan is clarifying in this regard: "Global Monitoring with Animals". The fact that it is "with animals" rather than "of animals" is an important detail. Like Daedalus' inventions –which turned the landscapes of an island into a labyrinth and adapted bird feathers to a flying device – the technology behind the project is, in a sense, hybrid: it is not about knowing where the animals are at all times, but rather about recording their movements as a way of observing their collective intelligence in action, in times of major atmospheric changes. It operationalises sensing on sensing already in action.
One can refer to this as the AI of animal intelligence: with the feathers of large numbers of migratory birds in flight, ICARUS pursues an alliance of sorts with a variety of animal intelligence and sensibilities. This alliance comes at a time of planetary turbulence, where such data can help to consolidate better models of global climate and of its impact on the interconnectedness of life on Earth. In this sense, ICARUS is a project in line with others such as the Internet of Trees, or broadly smart forests, where so-called natural domains are transformed with the aid of networked sensors into technologies for managing environmental change (Gabrys). Of course, it is unavoidable that some such projects are very much about data gathering for financial purposes.
But not all sensing is necessarily surveillance capitalism (Bratton). Similarly as Paolo Patelli has recently written about landscapes as “dynamic sites of interactions among organisms, matter, energy, and information” that are infrastructures for the infrastructure of scientific knowledge, we are interested in investigating such recursive dynamics of computation and ecology. Our approach, though, takes a decisively artistic turn in composing genealogies and curatorial situations of computation with birds and other animals (Parikka, Insect Media). It joins other projects of recent times, such as the technological system of “wild life” as part of rewilding the Northern bald ibis as presented in the award winning diagram by Vladan Joler, Gordan Savičić and Felix Stalder: Infrastructure of a Migratory Bird (https://latentspaces.zhdk.ch/imb/).
As their audio tour of the diagram says: the ibis “does not fly only through air, but also through data.”
Fig. 1 A detail from the infrastructure of a migratory bird-diagram detailing the data tracking of the Northern bald ibis, also connected to the Max Planck Institute research. Image credits and permission from: Vladan Joler, Gordan Savičić and Felix Stalder.
IV
To be clear, we are not saying that birds or other animals are computers. What we are interested in is how unfolding “media” from the perspective of different natural agencies shifts beyond functional accounts to account for experimental practices that rub against computing as mere human technological accounting.
We want to emphasize how this hybridization might also speak to a different aspect: how computation has always been not only about hardware but about protocols and practices of systematic observation and parsing of animal movements. In this manner, Abelardo Gil-Fournier’s new project on natural computation unfolds a more implicit imaginary media history of birds. The project taps into similar questions as the large scale infrastructure of ICARUS, but does so through art methods.
Artificial Divination (2025) is a work that proposes a genealogy of computation that shifts the focus from mechanical machines – water clocks, gears, automata, or looms – to much older practices of observing and translating the living world. The work poses a key question: to what extent do human techniques for reading animal behaviour already constitute forms of information processing and technical reasoning similar to computation?
Fig. 2-3 Installation views of the panels of Artificial Divination. Image used with permission from Abelardo Gil-Fournier.
In ancient Roman times, Marcus Tullius Cicero referred to practices such as ornithomancy as artificial divination. Ornithomancy is also an observational art of natural signs, connecting our interest in infrastructures of human and non-human observation with such earlier cultural historical practices. Far from being magical or intuitive, these practices responded to the human desire to access other forms of knowledge and sensitivity, specifically animal ones, through protocols of reading, recording and interpretation.
Gil-Fournier’s piece draws on this lineage to think of computation in continuity with the techniques of observation, codification and prediction based on the behaviour of birds. However, in this case, birds are the primary engine of computation, teased out and made visible by the translations that the work enacts.
The work consists of three suspended panels, formed by cards joined with rings, in an allusion to the punch cards used in computing up until the 1980s. Using a specifically designed laser-cut writing system, each panel transcribes fragments of historical treatises on divination based on the behaviour of birds, establishing a material and conceptual dialogue between these texts and contemporary environmental computing. Becoming environment and becoming infrastructural are conjoined (https://transmediale.de/en/event/becoming-infrastructural-becoming-environmental).
The first panel contains excerpts from the Hittite divination texts CTH 513 and 564 (14th–13th centuries BCE), originally written on clay tablets in cuneiform script. These records meticulously describe the movements of different birds, as if they were readings produced by a primitive sensor system: "Behind the river, three šalwini birds came in the back up from the favorable side, then they came diagonally and they came across the river. One of those šalwini birds, up from the river, came in front from the favorable side and it came back to the river. Then, it flew lengthways from the favorable side. Instead, the two remaining salwini birds flew diagonally."
The second panel uses excerpts from the Bṛihat Saṃhitā, a 6th-century Sanskrit encyclopaedia written by the mathematician and astrologer Varāja Mihira. In particular, it reproduces chapters devoted to the interpretation of bird flight, structured using protasis-apodosis conditional formulas (‘if X occurs, then Y will occur’), which are close to the logic of programming languages, IF/THEN: "If the crow be seen to stand on one leg turning to the Sun and scratch its wings with its beak, the chief person will suffer at the hands of his enemies."
The third panel presents a transcription of the epigraph “Artificial Divination” from Cicero's treatise De Divinatione (44 BCE). In this dialogue, Cicero critically confronts the validity of omens derived from observation of the natural world, listing predictions and contrasting them with their historical outcomes. This sceptical gesture introduces a fissure and a fall: the moment when the unity between animal observation and prediction begins to break down.
Fig. 3 The texts are transcribed using a custom typographic system inspired by the EURING bird-ringing standard. Nineteen ring sizes correspond to a reduced 19-letter alphabet, ordered by letter frequency. Rendered as half-rings forming mountains and valleys, the text becomes a visual score echoing birds’ movement or singing. Image used with permission from Abelardo Gil-Fournier.
V
One of the traits of such work is not to denounce computational knowledge, but rather to expand contemporary infrastructures into a dialogue with historical practices. In short, we need more computation, but so that it is reinvented beyond the financial and corporate data capture that haunts many of the larger projects. From smart urbanism to smart ruralism, environmental data is a key driver of financial models – but what other approaches might we discover, or invent?
An inventory of “natural computation” is a project that collects existing practices in experimental computation that piggyback on the natural history of logistics, as they do on contemporary projects. Whereas slime moulds and other emergence optimisation structures were more frequently discussed in the earlier decades of digital computing, we should compose a systematic cartography of such other computations.
In our work, we have addressed some of this: one example is the recursive history of “living surfaces” that define another genealogy of visual media and operational images in scientific and other sensing of plant surfaces (Gil-Fournier and Parikka). Another strand is the notion of a “natural history of logistics” that pitches a similar experimental approach: to detach from the military-corporate capture of imaginaries of logistics and to track them in view of different ecological forces, elemental media worlds and capacities of computing, sensing and organising.
In Artificial Divination, Gil-Fournier’s work adds to such a repertoire with artistic methods. Cultural techniques of parsing, inscribing and noting animal movement turns back into an experimental language of sorts – one that is inscribed already by bird flight.
REFERENCES
Bratton, Benjamin. (2021). The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World. London and New York: Verso.
Engelmann, Sasha, and Derek McCormack. (2021). “Elemental Worlds: Specificities, Exposures, Alchemies.” Progress in Human Geography 45(6). First published February 4, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132520987301.
Gabrys, Jennifer. (2020). “Smart forests and data practices: From the Internet of Trees to planetary governance.” Big Data & Society, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951720904871
Gil-Fournier, Abelardo and Jussi Parikka. (2024). Living Surfaces. Images, Plants, and Environments of Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Parikka, Jussi. (2010). Insect Media. An Archaeology of Animals and Technology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Parikka, Jussi. (2023). “A Natural History of Logistics and Other Studio Briefs: Problem Spaces for Planetary Design.” Cultural Politics 19(2): 177–199. https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-10909672
Patelli, Paolo. (2025). “Landscapes as Media Infrastructures” e-flux architecture, November 2025. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/technoecologies/6783017/landscapes-as-media-infrastructures
