duet perhaps https://youtu.be/o78t9xr6xl0 video http://www.alansondheim.org/grackle.jpg no, i'm not giving up digital work for nature and scrub imagery. azure and i out walking about and i have a garkleinflote, the smallest member of the recorder family, with me. and there is a grackle. and before that i would have played by the bay, but there were people and i had no interest in that. on the way back from the bay, there was a grackle calling and no one around and i starting playing in return. i did not see him. i think it was a male. and that was all. when i record in second life or local opensim, it's like that, only with a different semantics, that of a human language and a human interpretation, mediated by language generation in response. we, the bot and i, inhabit the appearance of a shared semantic space, instead of a broken one. the bot was designed by humans with a human language, english, at the core. the grackle and i shared a somewhat different space within which semantics and 'understanding' were in a complex dance that could neither ravel nor unravel. so that is here and it is part of, for me, another relationship to language and non- human organisms including bots who may not exist within the usual phenomenology of comprehension. so this is a learning on my part and most likely nothing but the appearance of a nuisance to a bird. there is something additional, that the grackle per se has been on this planet a great deal longer than humans, and may outlive, outexist them, but most likely not, if the latter continue their destructive paths through ecosystems - which always seem to get in the way. we can only deconstruct ourselves so far, because the power of tyranny much farther, and is accorded that greater distance by a complex internetworking of controls backed by physical force that cares nothing of grackles or the rest of it. i move among these worlds, scrublands and digital programming, commands, and virtual spaces, riparian communities and electrical protocols, transmissions, and interpretive apparatus at each and every step. the interplay and garkleinflote was an aside, realized by none of us, or is that truly the case, how can i speak for anyone else, much less the umwelt (if i can use the term) of another creature both familiar and utterly unfamiliar simultaneously - i cannot - in any case, this is the result, one or another way, one or another path, not taken, taken. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour