ENTOMOGRAPHIES

2024
2′ 40″

In this new venture, Xavi Bou directs his spotlight onto the world of insects, a realm currently facing significant population declines, yet whose intricacies often go unnoticed. With this project, Bou endeavors to shed light on the plight of insects while highlighting their aesthetic allure.
 
Entomographies is the result of a collaboration with entomologist and videographer Adrian Smith from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. Smith’s expertise, in dialogue with Bou’s visual research, provides a solid foundation for this artistic vision. Bou meticulously processes the recorded material, utilizing his artistic sensibilities to reveal the mesmerizing patterns of insect flight.
 
Through this collaboration, Bou aims not only to showcase these aesthetic marvels but also to spark conversations about the importance of preserving insect populations and their habitats. Entomographies stands as a testament to the power of art to captivate, educate, and advocate for the preservation of our natural world.

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.

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 was created through a collaboration between Xavi Bou and UCLouvain University as part of the European project Reveal Flight. It began during the pandemic lockdown and reached its first public exhibition in early 2022. Departing from Bou’s typically poetic approach, the work becomes a more discursive, speculative pause to examine the rise of artificial intelligence and its promise or threat to reshape life.

The film opens with a provocative question: will we ever be able to count all the birds in the world? In a culture obsessed with data accumulation, the question becomes a critique of the drive to monitor, catalogue, and predict even wildlife. To test this, Bou and the university developed a computer vision system trained on bird silhouettes, able to detect birds in flight, frame them, and assign coordinates, turning their presence into a cold, computable number.

In parallel, a second AI appears: a text-generating model predating ChatGPT, answering the same question with grammatically correct yet meaningless sentences, producing an illusion of thought.

EMERGENCE

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.