Event #1 : Pigeon Art Studio

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On Wednesday, April 24th, I had the opportunity to visit the Pigeon Art Studio and learn more about the hard work that led to the creation of "Pigeon Art". The overarching goal of Professor Blaisdell and his team is to "understand the 'why' and 'how' of why pigeons make art" to hopefully use them as a stepping stone into understand the fundamentals of human art (Blaisdell).

One of the featured birds at the exhibit was Darwin, the star of their event. She's described to be a gentle and sweet bird with the intellect that surpassed the lab's understanding at the time. She was the first pigeon to figure out how to paint using the touchscreen and filled countless screens with imaginative shapes and colors. After years of contribution, Darwin has gone to learn more advance skills; like fast mapping, which is a type of quick learning that ties into the language learning skills seen in children.

A photo of Darwin's art piece

Another integral pigeon in their care, and my personal favorite, is Meatloaf. Meatloaf originally came from a different lab where he used for visual cognition research and is now in Blaisdell's lab to study the relationship between "food reinforcement and food provisioning behavior affect[s] behavioral variability."

A photo of one of Meatloaf's last art piece
During the presentation, the topic of temporal and spacial clustering came up. MDPI defines the topic as "a process of grouping data with similar spacial [or] temporal attributes... from which many significant events and ... phenomena can be discovered." Many scientists rely on this data collection method to predict natural events like earthquake and the weather while others can use it to study a city's history and land. That's how the program was able to create intricate artworks of the birds, they focused on the clustering of their pecking. There was even a computer there where you could create your own pigeon-inspired artwork.
A Pigeon named Yoshi creating their artwork on the same one offered in the studio.

Overall, this art studio is a wonderful example of how art is being used to further develop technology. Pigeons and humans have no way to understand one another through verbal communication but technology has made it possible for us to take the first step into understanding pigeon's thinking prowess. They are remarkable beings and with the help of technology they have shown us that their pecking is completely intentional, the same way each step a human take is planned and coordinated.

Pictures

  1. Darwin. (2022). Darwin (03/08/2022). photograph.
  2. Meatloaf. (2023). Meatloaf (11/27/2023). photograph.
  3. Yoshi creating art. (2024). Yoshi (04/19/2024). photograph.
References
  1. Blaisdell, A. (2024). Pigeon Art Studio. Pigeon Art Studio . https://artsci.ucla.edu/node/1710
  2. Shi, Z., & Pun-Cheng, L. S. C. (2019, February 28). Spatiotemporal data clustering: A survey of methods. MDPI. https://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/8/3/112#:~:text=It%20is%20a%20process%20of,are%20extended%20from%20spatial%20clustering.

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