Data-Phantoms: Impossible Nests (Memories Post Extinction)

Recent studies show that in ‘anthropogenic landscapes’ birds have been forgetting how to sing and build nests since their parents die earlier and their communities are forced to be fragmented. Dialoguing with the Sub-theme “Symbiotic Imaginaries: Inventing Worlds,” the work “Data-Phantoms: Impossible Nests (Memories Post Extinction)” (2022) explores the phantasmagoric aspect of raw data coming from ‘nature traces’ of six (6) bird species declared extinct in nature along sequential morphogenetic transformations from numbers’ lists (birdsongs used as primary data), to geometrically complex and irregular data sculptures. The paper presents a discussion around the poetics that refers to an ongoing endeavor in exploring and discussing metaphysical aspects of data visualization embedded in the tools and processes chosen for parametric modeling and digital fabrication. The work intends contributing to reinforce our "symbiotic imaginaries," ‘inventing new worlds’ in which humans together with all living beings coexist and collaborate in their surviving efforts. The six data-sculptures—imperfect or ‘impossible nests’—are tentative explorations of the sublime in dystopian data-visualization aesthetics, manifesting in its irregular and messy geometry, the impossibility of birds, in broken ecologies, to perform their birdsong and successfully mate, to learn from their community how to build an ‘optimum’ nests and prosper.