Tous Les Oiseaux Du Monde

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.