Crowbot Jenny is a shy and reclusive girl preferring to spend time surrounded by animals rather than with humans. One day she creates the Crowbot, a robot which vocalizes a variety of crow calls to control and converse with her newly formed bird army – but just what exactly will she do with her new powers?
Inspired by the book “When Species Meet” by Donna Haraway, the project sets out to explore the world of animal intelligence and animal-human interactions. Sputniko! worked with two world specialists in crow intelligence, Prof. Nathan Emery and Prof. Nicola Clayton, who provided her with samples of rook calls (the ones flocking in London parks are usually ‘rooks’, not crows) The calls were reproduced to communicate, attract, repel and engineer the behavior of rooks in Finsbury Park and Hyde Park, London.
The robot makes four different crow calls - "I'm dying" "I found food" "Hello" "I'm in a fight so please come help me" in an attempt to communicate with the crows in urban wild life.
A video from Sputniko!’s initial tests conversing with crows in Finsbury Park
