Installation with video (color, sound), screens, and printed panels, 3:50 min, dimensions variable; device: polystyrene, acrylic, Arduino board, speaker, and amplifier

23 5/8 x 11 13/16 x 3 7/8" (60 x 30 x 10 cm)

The artist known as Sputniko! explores technology, feminism, and pop culture by collaborating with scientists on works that suggest possible intersections among these fields. Crowbot Jenny, inspired by Donna Haraway’s philosophical memoir When Species Meet (2007), is a solitary girl who, despite her generation’s tendency toward communication overload, has trouble relating to her peers. In fact, Crowbot Jenny prefers to talk with animals and uses the Crowbot, an instrument that replicates a range of crow calls, to commune with her army of birds. Sputniko! collaborated with Nathan Emery and Nicola Clayton, specialists in crow intelligence at the University of London and University of Cambridge, UK, respectively, who provided her with sample calls collected in London’s Finsbury and Hyde parks. From that collaboration she learned that crows are capable of advanced social communication, and even of reading other animals’ minds. Crowbot Jenny contemplates the potential of cross-species interaction, suggesting a scenario in which technology lets us, as the artist says, “re-realize the urban animals surrounding us.”