Pigeon Robots

The other day I was sitting outside my studio in Venice, just soaking up the weather, and then this hummingbird darts by. I look up to the tree it zoomed past and there are sparrows all around, perched like they’ve been watching me this whole time. What if that wasn’t a bird? What if that was a robot?

A low-key pigeon-shaped robot. Just chillin’. Perched. Maybe shifting side to side on a telephone wire or branch. Doesn’t need to fly (yet). Just hanging out and listening.

Now imagine it’s got a little chip in it, specialty silicon, baked to do one job well: listen, process, and transmit. Transcribing convos, mapping ambient sound, keeping tabs on the rhythm of a place. Perhaps it’s used for espionage, or perhaps the bird tweets twice when a plant needs watering in your backyard that it sees wilting.

We’ve already got fake palm trees that are cell towers. This is just the next layer: camouflaged contextual sensing. Feels less like surveillance and more like ambient awareness. Something closer to nature. Closer to the way we already live.

You’d walk by and think: oh, just a pigeon. But it’s actually a tiny scout, perched in the flow of everyday life. Kind of beautiful. Kind of bonkers. Fun to think about….I want to make one now…