bird/brain
Jenny Lee
Advisor: Simone Salvo
bird/brain explores emergent, relational, more-than-human intelligence. In a speculative world uniting ecological knowledge and consciousness research, a scientist invents a machine for translating you into another intelligent form.
Project Description
bird/brain is an immersive digital experience that merges fiction, research, and digital experience. It acts as a portal into alternative models of intelligence. The project imagines a speculative future where ecological knowledge and consciousness research have converged. At the center of this world is a rogue scientist-inventor who has created a machine capable of translating human consciousness into alternate conscious forms.
Rather than reinforcing anthropocentric or artificial models of cognition, bird/brain invites users to engage with intelligence as something distributed, embodied, and interdependent.
Through a combination of narrative, interaction, and speculative science, the site offers an expanded way of thinking about mind and identity—one that blurs the boundaries between species, tools, and ecosystems. As a web-based platform, bird/brain is designed not only to tell a story but to provoke a shift in perception. Visitors don’t simply observe; they are implicated in the experiment. By asking what it means to know, to be, and to connect in a more-than-human world.
Technical Details
This is a hand-built website live on the domain birdbrain.world. It uses Python servers (Flask) hosted on DigitalOcean, JavaScript, and libraries like Three.JS for various interactions and visuals. TouchDesigner was used for editing videos.