A Little Bird Told Me

The A Little Bird Told Me project engages with the emerging debate on the ethics of recording, translating and communicating with non-human species. The power dynamic between recorder and recordee is challenged through sonic collaboration with a chattering community of Common Starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) inhabiting London’s largest public square, Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Starlings are known for mimicking other birds and non-avian sounds such as car alarms, mobile phone ringtones and human speech. Their expert mimesis raises questions about how starlings participate in the oral histories of their human co-sounders. What are the ethics of starlings? Do starlings do ethics?

Through a combination of performative and speculative practices, including an unstable choral workshop in collaboration with starlings, Logan and Thompson explore where the agency of humans and non-humans begins and ends.