Last night at Fusion Arts saw a completely packed house for Lost Communications, billed as a truly one-of-a-kind audiovisual collaboration between electronic musician An-Ting and creative technologist Ian Gallagher. Indeed, it was packed quite a bit earlier than I was expecting - thinking that the show started at 8:30, I arrived in what I thought was good time only to have to surreptitiously shuffle my way to the sidelines so as not to interrupt the evening’s last-minute opening act, Tender Twin, mid-song. It was hard not to feel for her, as other punters had clearly missed the same memo I had, and after each track a new string of guests ducked inside.

If ethereal, balladic verses are your jam, Tender Twin is a hard recommend - her dextrous guitar work and rich transitions from chest to head voice call to mind Eliza Rickman or Anaïs Mitchell (though for my taste, I sometimes found the lyrics too unspecific or obscure to latch onto). Her haunting soundscapes do great work in setting the scene for what’s to come - though that being said, it is a bit of a shame that, given the size of the crowd, the darkness of the venue and the time limit in between sets, we’re only to take in the gallery’s current exhibit from Ismael Rodriguez, Sanctuary by the River, in passing. Rodriguez’ hanging canvases and sculptures, meshing human features with animal anatomy or the textures of soil, sand and wood, carry a frenetically expressive, earthy spontaneity in harmony with his use of natural materials and fibers - coconut shells, palm fronds, branches. It, too, seems a fitting companion piece to the night’s performance, and warrants a more lengthy visit in the daylight.

And with that, onto the main event. I had settled in expecting something soothing, ambient, almost meditative. I was dead wrong. I’ve never seen a show sober for which I still felt I required a trip-sitter. Lost Communications sets its foundation on a fascinating premise. On their travels, An-Ting and Gallagher have recorded birdsong from right here on our doorstep in the UK to Mongolia, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Sichuan. From there, An-Ting interpolates the songs of each bird with multilayered electronic arrangements, sometimes altering pitch or adding delays for compositions that bristle, crackle and soar. I would love to see these compositions in play at a venue where people were free to move - the drama of some of her bass drops, especially on ‘Taiwan Yuhina’ or the set’s closer, ‘Red-Whiskered Bulbul’, would rival any underground DJ set.

The clincher, though, is the marriage between An-Ting’s sounds and Gallagher’s visual programming. The software Gallagher utilises is trained to respond in real time to An-Ting’s instrumentation, and the result is nothing short of operatic. Against a projected forest, fungi, algae, moss bloom, teem and fizzle with the jerky speed of time-lapse or stop-motion. Familiar structures shift and mutate into the alien and uncanny: toadstools morphing into otherworldly, jellyfish-like structures; tendrils shifting like nebulae, synapses or neurons. Boughs of trees flicker and blink out of existence as though hopping between parallel universes; reaching branches distort into capillaries. It’s just…cosmic.

The moments when this is most explicitly brought into conversation with the birdsong captured, as on their second track ‘Willow Tit’, reflect on the question at the project’s heart, “What would birds tell us if we could hear?”. Having seen the show, I’m not quite sure if that’s the question that gets answered here. The better question might be, “How can we use our experience of the natural world to better understand ourselves?”. The birds are, in a sense, collaborators, but their sound has been mixed and manipulated - any meaning that we might derive from it is one that has been curated and projected by human actors. Their presence in the visuals reflects this, ever shifting positions, colouration, species - by capturing birdsong and turning it into an instrument, it is made as mutable and malleable as the images being generated.

And yes, the term ‘generated’ is loaded here, because now we have to get to the part that didn’t sit right with me. Gallagher uses generated AI to come up with the images that accompany An-Ting’s soundtrack. Though the press release makes no secret of this, I wasn’t aware of the use of AI going in, but it became so much clearer the second humans started appearing on the screen - the slightly-too-smooth movement, the airbrushed rendering, the blurred and indistinct backgrounds. The sequences are, to my mind, much stronger when leaning towards abstraction rather than hyperrealism, where the uncanniness feels deliberate rather than accidental.

To their credit, the pair lean into the bugs and glitches in a way that still makes for something visually arresting; that’s not really my objection here. The environmental damage of generative AI being as enormous as it is, it just seems perverse to me that a show that explicitly urges its audience to be made “more aware of different life forms on this planet and inspire greater kindness toward other species”, would do so while so heavily employing tools that are contributing to their destruction. If we could hear what birds are telling us, it’s pretty likely a substantial part of it would be, “Stop using Dall-E or we’ll be wiped off the face of the earth!”

I don’t want to make assumptions about Gallagher’s coding - it’s probably far beyond what my philistine brain can grasp. Maybe he found a way to offset the programming power this project required, and his particular software doesn’t cannibalise the works of human artists in the way we’ve come to expect from larger scale AI projects. Coding is hard, and I have no doubt this was a very complex feat to pull off. But I would have loved to have seen a version of this show where I knew the full extent of that human endeavour, one that could have come from human animators and videographers over text and image prompts.

So I’m left in a strange position here. Was I swept up in this seamless melding of sound and vision? Absolutely - I’ve truly never seen anything like it. But I don’t think that I can endorse it in good conscience. I agree with what An-Ting and Gallagher are trying to say - we should live our lives in conversation with the natural world, and draw upon it for inspiration and creativity. But the tools employed to tell that story are just as easily exploited at the expense of that world and the ability of others to nurture that creativity. Humans create as birds sing - it’s in our nature. And I can’t in good faith put my backing behind technology that alienates us from that nature. This is probably the most imaginative use of AI in an artistic sense I’ve seen - but for me, at least, it will be one night, and one night only.