On our favorite low attention content website, [Kelly Heaton] recently began to share a series of “printed circuit birds”. These are PCBs, shaped like birds, looking like birds, chirping like birds – they are completely similar! This sound is generated by a network of oscillators fed into each other. Once tuned, it is difficult to distinguish it from the bird calls that may be heard outside the window. Careful care and care bring this bird to life – it perches on Kelly’s arm, its legs are woven from monofilament, and its claws are made of tht resistors, just as you want an ordinary bird to sit on your arm – that is, if you are lucky. This is not just a bird – there is also a family of captive animals, including a goose, a crow and even a cricket.
Why do these animals have life – metaphorical, but also literal? There must be a lot of such an extraordinary project. We asked Kelly. These birds are part of her project to explore the model of consciousness in a way we don’t usually use. Our habit is to deal with complex problems in the digital field, but we often miss the elegance and simplicity of analog circuits. After all, even our traditional understanding of neural networks is a matrix of simulation coefficients, and then we adjust it, which is a primitive imitation of how we assume the human brain works – it is this “simulation” method that has recently brought us closer and closer to reproducing “intelligence” in computers.
Kelly’s work adopted a concept that made the digital toolkit available to many of us and made it as wonderful as using a small bundle of simple parts. This is a challenge to our beliefs and methods, forcing its elegance, and urging us to consider and respect analog circuits when it comes to modeling awareness and behavior. If it is so simple to model the sound and behavior of biological organisms, we need to write DSP and mathematical code to copy on the microcontroller, what is missing from our model?
Kelly has more PCBs to arrive soon to prepare for her exhibition in New York in February. She will definitely post updates on her twitter page! We have reported her work before. If you haven’t seen it, her 2019 super conference speech on electronic naturalism will be a good start! Such projects often encourage other hackers to establish other non-traditional projects, and this twitter pendant follows Kelly’s footsteps! The direction of this adventure reminds us of many beam robotics. We recently recall these technologies, which have influenced generations of hackers to look at the electronic products we create from a completely different perspective.