Artist Highlight - Marcus and Esme

Listening is usually treated as a form of understanding. We hear something, identify it, name it, and place it within what we already know. New Ways of Listening, a collaborative project by Marcus and Esme, asks whether that habit is also part of the problem. The work brings together artificial intelligence, speculative design, sound, and ecological thinking, but its starting point is very simple. Visitors are asked to crawl into a human scale bird nest and listen. There is something immediately strange, even funny, about this action. The body has to bend, crouch, and fit itself into a space that does not quite belong to it. It is not a comfortable viewing position, and that is exactly what makes it work. Instead of standing outside the installation as an observer, the visitor is asked to enter it physically. The shift is small, but it changes the terms of the encounter. Inside the nest, the body becomes more aware of its own scale. The viewer is no longer looking at nature from a safe distance, or listening to birds as background sound. The work creates a temporary space where human comfort is not the default measure. That physical awkwardness gives the piece much of its strength. What interests me most is the way the project uses AI without treating it as a tool of authority. In many current discussions, artificial intelligence is framed through control, prediction, replacement, or corporate power. Here, it is used in a quieter and more specific way. The system reads patterns in birdsong, but it does not attempt to translate birds into human speech. That decision is important. It would have been easy to make the work about “what birds are saying”, but that would also risk turning birds into simplified versions of ourselves. Instead, Marcus and Esme avoid the fantasy of perfect translation. They do not make birds speak in our language. They work with sound, emotion, and uncertainty. The result is more careful than a direct translation would have been. The installation does not tell the visitor what a bird means. It asks the visitor to spend time with the possibility that another form of intelligence is present, even when it cannot be fully understood. The humour in the work also matters. A nest that uses AI to interpret birdsong could easily sound absurd, and the artists do not hide that. The slight ridiculousness of the situation makes the work more open. It allows people to enter a conversation about technology, ecology, and non-human life without the heaviness that often surrounds those subjects. At the same time, the humour does not make the work less serious. It makes the ethical question sharper. Why do humans so often need to translate other beings before we can respect them? Why does communication only feel valid when it resembles our own? Marcus’s interest in speculative design and material practice meets Esme’s work with ethical AI in a way that feels grounded rather than overly theoretical. The project suggests that technology does not always have to be distant, extractive, or impossible to understand. It can be small in scale, specific in purpose, and shaped around care. This is where the work sits strongly within The Strange Everyday. Birdsong is one of the most familiar sounds in daily life, but it is also one of the easiest to ignore. By placing it inside an unexpected structure, the installation makes that ordinary sound feel unfamiliar again. It asks the audience to listen with more attention, but without assuming ownership over what is heard. The work is not trying to solve ecological collapse, and it does not pretend to decode nature. Its strength lies in something more modest and more useful. It changes the way we notice what is already around us. After leaving the installation, birdsong does not feel quite as passive. It becomes harder to treat it as background noise. That change may be small, but it is not insignificant. New Ways of Listening reminds us that listening is not always about extracting meaning. Sometimes it begins with recognising that another voice exists beyond us, and that we do not need to fully possess it in order to care.