B2 is back! We’re excited to bring you the first live performance in the ATLAS Black Box by a B2 Center for Media, Art and Performance resident artist since the start of the pandemic. Brad Gallagher’s “Cowbird” is also the first show to combine B2’s recently installed ambisonic and motion capture systems for a performance in front of a live audience.

“Cowbird” is a dance-triggered multimedia performance that relates the story of a parasitic brood species of the same name. Female cowbirds lay eggs in another bird's nest, disposing of one of the host bird’s eggs to make room for their own. Gallagher’s performance explores this unique reproductive strategy and evolutionary relationship using motion capture technology to trigger 3D ambisonic sound and the mixing of HD video animations created by a text-to-image artificial intelligence. Recorded as it is generated, the media creates subtly unique standalone audio-visual experiences.

About the artist

Brad Gallagher’s practice-based research interrogates philosophical posthumanism through creative writing and coding. He most recently published his short story, "Fat Lab," in Entropy Magazine as a part of a series called "The Birds." For the Electronic Literature Organization’s 2021 festival and conference, Platform (Post?) Pandemic, Gallagher introduced a web-based artwork, "Gnarly Posthuman Conversations: John Ashbery, W H Auden, Wallace Stevens, and GPT-2," and shared his accompanying paper, "Transformative Reading and Writing Synthetic Archives with Language Models."