Avian Encounters: Bird/Human Relations Session with Ryan Bishop | September 21, 4-5pm SAST

You are warmly invited to the seventh session in a new seminar series on Monday 21 September 4-5pm SAST

Avian Encounters: Bird/Human Relations

Convened by Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall

Abstracting Flight: Datafication and Divination, or Birds and/as Media Technologies

Presented by :  Ryan Bishop

Please find Paper here and Zoom link here

Lifting off a short piece of writing by Abelardo Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka, this presentation considers multiple ways in which bird flight and song connect with divination and datafication, as well datafication as divination. As such, bird flight is not only a medium between the earth and the sky (humans and the gods) but also a medium that allows us to chart the long transition from a mechanistic universe to a probabilistic one. Bird media scales and travels. The talk touches on a range of phenomena such as chronophotography, avian automata, ornithomancy, murmuration and Boid algorithms, environmental crises (Project ICARUS), and writers/artists including Derek Walcott, William Kentridge, Heba Y. Amin, and Gil-Fournier. 

Ryan Bishop is Professor of Global Art and Politics at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton (UK) and Research Fellow in WICDS at Wits University. He is lead editor of the journal Cultural Politics (Duke UP) and for its attendant book series also with Duke UP as well as co-editor with Jussi Parikka of the book series "Technicities" (Edinburgh UP). His forthcoming book, Cold War Imaginaries: Temporalities, Technologies, Cultures, co-edited with John Beck, will be out in early 2027 with Edinburgh UP.

In an age of extinction, partial adaption and survival, what would a better understanding of the lives of birds afford us – and perhaps them?  Unlike humans, birds travel anywhere, sing in a manner no other animal can and hear sound at distances undetectable to us. They forge or disavow encounters with humans that suggest complex relationalities. How to bridge the bird/human divide, drawing on the strengths of the humanities?  Birds have been overfreighted with human meaning: as messengers of the gods, harbingers of the seasons, symbols of captivity and freedom, portentous flocks – not to mention the perspectives of the hunter, the cook, the meat-eater, the pet-owner, the ornithologist, the farmer, the birder. Yet, are there more flight-enabled perspectives* that shift us away those above? What is the birdness of birds - and how are they seen to embody their own lives? What might a history of the grey parrot tell us – about parrots and about us?  What do art works using bird acoustics reveal? How do birds redefine geographies of air, water and land? What can film and other media learn from avian perceptual worlds and modes of seeing and looking? How are bird migrations changing with climate change? This series approaches these and other avian-inflected questions with a particular interest in African and Indian-Ocean oriented archives and hemispheric media drawn from literature, science studies, climate sciences, migration studies, and visual and film studies.

*With thanks to Olga Petri and Michael Guida (Winged Worlds Common Spaces of Avian-Human Lives, 2023) for this phrase

Avian Encounters: Bird/Human Relations follows three previous highly subscribed Series, Heated Conversations; Breathing In: Air and Atmospheres; and Plant Lives: Critical Plant Humanities from the global South, convened by Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall