ENTOMOGRAPHIES
2024
2′ 40″
ONE FOR SORROW
2024
4′ 33″
The short film invites us to step into the skin, and the gaze, of the augurs: to watch flight until it starts to speak.It begins with a direct, unfiltered gaze and gradually introduces the ornithography trace until the sky becomes a space for reading. The final mirror sequences of swifts heighten the sense of signs and emerging forms.
The short film invites us to step into the skin, and the gaze, of the augurs: to watch flight until it starts to speak.In ancient Rome, augurs were priests who interpreted the world by observing birds in flight, trusting that the sky could offer signs to guide personal and collective decisions.
The piece opens with unfiltered footage of birds in motion, as if simply watching a landscape. Gradually, flight shifts from movement to clue: the drawn trace appears, accumulates, and turns the sky into a space for interpretation. The ending, multiple sequences of traced swifts with a mirror effect, pushes this ambiguity further: patterns double and invite the viewer to perceive shapes, as if the sky were returning a symbol.
The song adds a popular layer: “One for sorrow” comes from a traditional rhyme linked to omens, counting birds to anticipate fortune or misfortune, and speaks directly to a human impulse to search for meaning in what moves above us.
The film is part of For the Birds: The Birdsong Project, a collective initiative bringing together diverse perspectives on birds and their presence in the world. In this context, flight becomes a meeting point between what we see and what we think we recognize.
TOUS LES OISEAUX DU MONDE
2022
5′ 13″
This short film has emerged from Xavi Bou’s artistic residence with the UCLouvain university in Belgium within the Reveal Flight project. Xavi Bou raised the project with this almost science-fiction question; Will all the birds in the world be counted one day?
The trend in our society is towards having more data and monitoring any parameter that is useful to it, including wildlife. Xavi Bou wonders if in the future it will reach the point of having every living being on this planet registered.
To show this paradigm, the author proposed to the university to generate a model that would allow identifying the birds that appear in his videos.
To do this, he used an artificial intelligence model that, from a bird database, “learned” to recognize what a bird is in flight. The model was able to detect the position of the bird’s body and define it within a rectangle. It was decided to count the individuals that appeared on the screen and add the coordinates within it.
The speech that we hear in the short comes from a text that arises from asking the question: Will it be possible to count all the birds in the world one day? To a text generator model by artificial intelligence.
The answers have been voiced by another model that generates voice from these texts. Because we are at an early stage in the field of Artificial Intelligence, mistakes are very common, sometimes even naive.
The errors that appear when detecting the birds, as well as the speeches, which although they seem convincing, are not endowed with any sense, give them almost human peculiarities, generating an atmosphere of strangeness when observing the result.
2021
4′ 16″
Emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties that its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviours that arise only when those parts interact within a wider whole.
Working from real footage of flocks of starlings in flight, and extending the research begun in Murmurations, Bou shifts attention to each individual bird and to its complex relationship with the flock, playing with perception in two ways: by inverting the footage and slowing it down.
The soundtrack was created by slowing down real bird calls between ten and twenty times, drawing from different species, including the Common Nightingale, the Tawny Owl, and the starlings themselves. These intricate flights, which seem to be orchestrated by a higher intelligence, are in fact the result of each bird following a few simple rules that guide its movements.
This does not occur only among birds, but also in the cells of a muscle, in the formation of a snowflake, and in the way a virus spreads. This is Emergence.
MURMURATIONS
2020
2′ 36″
Murmurations focuses on starling flocks that draw shifting shapes across the sky, a behaviour closely tied to defence. It often intensifies in the presence of raptors, functioning as a collective strategy to confuse and protect.
Using the Ornithographies effect, the flock becomes readable as a moving system. The traced lines reveal how form emerges from many local decisions with no single leader, a clear image of collective intelligence. And in sequences where a peregrine falcon attacks, something essential comes into view: the “sculpture” is not created by the flock alone, but shaped through its interaction with the predator, which pressures, splits, and reorganises the group in real time.
In this way, the film invites us to see murmuration as an ephemeral architecture made of relationship: a decentralised organism and an external force that continuously remoulds it, leaving a momentary imprint suspended between beauty and threat.
ORNITHOGRAPHIES
2016
3′ 16″
Ornithographies arises from a concern for capturing those unnoticed moments and from an interest in questioning the limits of human perception.
This project focuses on birds, capturing in a single time frame the shapes they generate when flying, making visible the invisible. It is a balance between art and science: a nature-based project and a visual poetry exercise, but above all an invitation to perceive the world with fresh eyes. The soundtrack was generated from the waveforms of the birds that appear in the film.
