The Woodiest, Nevermore-A-Matic, and other of my robots are included in Madeline Schwartzman’s new book, Alive, along with an excellent collection of the work of many fantastic artists, engineers, and scientists. Review on Bookpage: www.bookpage.com/reviews/aliv...

Last week of the exhibition, AI Ecologies, at Artphy curated by @petervanderputten.bsky.social and Roland van Dierendonck. It includes two of my robots plus many other fantastic works e.g. a device that finds faces in grains of sand, a machine-constructed alphabet from the bark patterns of a tree.

Excited to share our new paper on genetic rescue in the Pacific pocket mouse! To conserve this endangered species, we sought to understand whether small populations at risk of outbreeding depression are better managed in isolation or with gene flow. @science.org www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

AI Ecologies opens in two days at Artphy. The exhibition includes The Woodiest, a robot that, in the performance Nobody Told the Woodpeckers, explains climate change to woodpeckers. www.artphy.nl/2025/06/20/a...

AI Ecologies at Artphy opens in two weeks. I will have robots in the exhibition. Curated by Peter van der Putten and Roland van Dierendonck. www.artphy.nl/2025/06/20/a...

I will have robots in this exhibition on AI Ecologies at Artphy: www.artphy.nl/2025/03/28/a...

When I was a youth, I ate many tiny, tiny shrimp. I found a good source of tiny, tiny shrimp recently and, eating them, have been thinking of them as krill and of myself as a whale. I drink them in water, press the water out through gaps between my teeth, and lick the filtered shrimp into my gullet.

I had Hedgehog going all the way and defeating Polar Bear in the final. I cannot resist supporting the underhedgehog.

"We propose an alternative lightweight computer vision method for fish counting based on analyzing echograms" Make everything a computer vision problem 😆 Cool study from @sarameghanbeery.bsky.social et al. Might be more broadly applicable to PAM and acoustic behavior? #prattle 💬 #bioacoustics

We have two openings for stipended ugrad fellows at the Conservation Technology Lab at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. One is in CV/ML for field camera systems: us242.dayforcehcm.com/CandidatePor... Second is in field device design (image or sound): us242.dayforcehcm.com/CandidatePor...

Vocal communication in corvids: a systematic review. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti.... In our new paper we review 130 papers and summarise empirical evidence for socioecological factors affecting vocal communication, as well as evidence for vocal learning in different corvid species.

When the earth is no longer a suitable home, the earthworms will transmogrify into beings better aligned with an increasingly plastic world.

This paper is a fantastic resource for researchers doing biodiversity monitoring, especially occupancy modeling. Check it out! Congrats & thanks to @ben-r-goldstein.bsky.social, @kendallcalhoun.bsky.social, @drpheebs.bsky.social, and other authors :)

I started to put together a starter pack for research in AI+Ecology, check it out and let me know if you would like to be added! go.bsky.app/8zugFF6

🎯 How can we empower scientific discovery in millions of nature photos? Introducing INQUIRE: A benchmark testing if AI vision-language models can help scientists find biodiversity patterns- from disease symptoms to rare behaviors- hidden in vast image collections. Thread👇🧵

Looks like a cool #bioacoustics gig

If you're looking for bioacoustics tips and help, check out the #Bioacoustics Resource Page (run by Sam Lapp and the Kitzes Lab) - bit.ly/bioacoustics-resource-page It has links to tons of tutorials, datasets, software, forums, #AudioMoth info, and more

Searching for #bioacoustics tools to classify species, organize data, triangulate sounds, ...? 🦉🐋🦇🦗 Check out the (newly updated) Bioacoustics Software Database! rhine3.github.io/bioacoustics...

A wee woodland robot called Lizardless Legs competes for territory with local lizards. The robot’s body is reduced to the bare minimum necessary to execute the territorial push-up gesture the lizards use to claim their diminutive domains and to fight their bloodless ceremonial bobbing battles.

The Conservation Technology Lab at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance has an opening for a postdoc from computer science or a related field with strong experience in machine learning to work on bioacoustics projects in ecology and conservation: us242.dayforcehcm.com/CandidatePor...

In Nobody Told the Woodpeckers, a robot called The Woodiest translates territorial drumming between closely related woodpecker species that might encounter each other for the first time due to habitat disruption. Then it explains anthropogenic climate change to them in Morse Code on the tree trunk.

A rat king is a mischief of rats entangled at the tails, forced to live every moment of their lives together. In the installation Rat King, rats are re-embodied as robots entangled into the neglected spaces of the building that the rats call their home.

The feathery robotic being On Beyond Mother Goose has two dance partners to guide her pirouettes and tail flicks: her mate On Beyond Father Gander–far away yet mirroring her moves in perfect synchrony–and the Earth’s magnetic field that they both feel flow through the sensors at their core.

The turtle’s eye at the boundary between water and air.

My collaboration with Theun Karelse, Deep Steward (2018-present), is included in the 2-year exhibition “Dutch, More or Less: Contemporary Architecture, Design, and Digital Culture” at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, opening this Friday, May 31st. nieuweinstituut.nl/en/projects/...

Tomorrow, I am giving a talk about my robots for animals following the “Of Beasts and Bytes” film program of the Go Short Film Festival. www.goshort.nl/en/program/?...

Are the mitochondria the pearls of the eukaryotic cell?

Become a forest. Speak to an ocean. I am very pleased to have work in the bright, buoyant show, Y3K: On Distant Keys, at UMass Amherst with a fabulous group of artists and other collaborators. It is open till April 26th. www.umass.edu/humanities-a...

Having my first real look at “The Field Guide to Machine Wilderness” book that documents the various projects at ARTIS Royal Zoo done during the Machine Wilderness residences, including mine. Wonderful illustrations and texts by the organizers, Theun Karelse and Alice Smits, and the artists.

A Whiskerer is a rat re-embodied as a robot that gently whisks flowers with its whiskers. www.ianingram.org/m/a-whiskere...

The soul of the soil permeates the vermiform robots, making them yearn to shed their plastic shells, become flesh, and dig to the Earth’s core.

The robot Nevermore-A-Matic tells our stories about the end of the world to ravens through beak wipes. Using human language coded in machine language coded in the beak wipes—a signal with significant salience to the birds—it tries to relate the apocalypses that we have imagined or might create.

The robot Nevermore-a-Matic feels the coming winter and prepares to once again tell its tales of gloom and doom to ravens and crows.

In Nobody Told the Woodpeckers, a robot called The Woodiest translates territorial woodpecker drumming signals between species that might meet for the first time in mega-anna due to habitat disruption. It then tries to explain anthropogenic climate change to them in Morse Code on the tree trunk.

In the museum, the sod surrounding Danger Squirrel Nutkin slowly dies, revealing the deathlessness of the robot’s tiny square patch of ersatz lawn.

The robot Danger Squirrel Nutkin and a park squirrel try to see tail to tail.