Daisy Hildyard: One of the things that’s distinctive about Mirror Test is that it draws together very different worlds, but it’s a whole, with its own atmosphere. There’s a jackdaw inside the home she shares with humans, with small glimpses of their existence (used teabags and bitten fingernails). Over this, we hear trails of audio – more from the humans here – they speak carefully, in English with German accents. They run a corvid sanctuary and they are thinking about animal behaviour, care, and human-animal relationships; they’re also remembering their former lives in the GDR, protests, uneasy jokes. And then throughout, the film engages conceptually with the mirror test in a playful way – it articulates ideas and images concerning how we might find self in relationship, or not – the camera and the jackdaw are fascinated by reflective surfaces, windows, frames, lenses, gazes, and with each other. But they’re always up to their own business too.

I love that there are all these different but very specific stories, of communist surveillance, avian physiology, behavioural science, posthuman interactions, philosophy of self – and it’s all situated in, and excavated from, the domestic material, so they feel continuous with one another because they are in a literal way. Could you tell us a little about how that uncovering happened?

Duncan Marquiss: Mirror Test was commissioned by Projections at Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle, run by Adam Pugh and Tess Denham Cleaver. They invited artists to make a short work that would be screened unannounced before a feature film. 

At the time I was interested in animal intelligence, as I was developing a film about ethology and AI, and the 'mirror test' came up in my research around that project. This notion of psychologists presenting animals with a mirror struck me as a powerful image. I was also thinking about a film being like a behavioural experiment in some sense; a captive audience presented with a visual stimuli, and thinking about the cinema screen as a mirror that reflects behaviour. Magpies, and other corvid species like jackdaws, have allegedly ‘passed’ the mirror test. So I thought it could be interesting to film a magpie reflected in a mirror.  

I was then looking for someone who had a captive magpie and that’s how I met Stephan and Kerstin, who run a corvid sanctuary. They suggested that the magpies in their care would probably be disturbed by my presence, but one of their jackdaws would be comfortable being filmed. This particular bird, Jackie, was raised by a human. When she was brought to Stephan and Kerstin she couldn’t integrate with the jackdaws in their aviary, so they decided to keep her in their house with them. I think they felt that this would be the best life they could offer her.

I filmed over two visits, and on the first trip I brought a mirror to see how Jackie would respond. But after a cursory look at herself she showed no further interest. So I decided to just observe her as she went about her business. Sometimes Jackie was curious and would come close to inspect the lens, at other times she just ignored me. It was quite strange to see a bird freely exploring a domestic interior – a creature that you normally see outdoors, indoors. 

Whilst I was filming, I spoke to Kerstin and Stephan about their work caring for birds, but they also discussed their past growing up in East Germany. I hadn’t planned to interview them but this conversation was the backdrop to my filming, so I recorded a conversation just in case. When I began editing, I was intrigued by the associations that emerged between the image and the voices, and this became a sort of puzzle for the viewer – what’s the connection between all these elements? 

DH: That’s exactly it – something you usually find outside, inside. And I see that in the film’s structure and its subjects – historical, biological, theoretical – they’re able to inhabit one another here in a way that’s un-artificial and unusual. But it’s also a real outdoor bird inside a human home. I think that was what I saw when I first watched it – the way Jackie’s presence and the puzzle of the film keep overriding one another. I’m tuned in to the voiceover, or the image is clarifying, but then she is peering into my face quizzically – quite impolite – and then I see a fuzzier bit of her, and I’m drawn back into the human voiceover. I like the way she comes right up to the camera. She seems to like to know what’s what. She’s got presence and force, like a character a fiction writer would want to create, but she’s looking right out of the work. I’d like to know what you looked like to yourself, reflected in her eyes? 

DM: Jackie does have a strong presence and she often demanded attention from Stephan and Kerstin. I don’t know if she viewed their family as a colony and related to everyone in terms of a jackdaw social hierarchy, but certainly she dominated the house sometimes. It does feel like she has a particular character, and Kerstin and Stephan mentioned how each bird in their care was an individual personality to them.

The shots of Jackie’s eyes looking directly into the lens are striking. This might be partly due to her pale grey irises. Jackdaws nest in dark cavities and their light eyes help the chicks to identify their parents apparently. Maybe the pale iris make them look slightly more human though, compared to other corvid species at least. Jackie’s unflinching gaze suggests she’s not burdened with self-consciousness, but then I don’t know if she was aware of the eye behind the lens watching her. Maybe she was just curious about the camera as a new object, and the strange person behind it.

It was funny watching the close-up shots of Jackie in the cinema when the film was screened at Tyneside. Seeing her projected on a huge scale and looking down at the audience, as though the humans were being scrutinized by the bird. 

Thinking about your question ­– “what did I look like to myself, reflected in her eyes?” – I’m not sure. I was interacting with another creature that looked familiar but felt alien and inaccessible. I'd find myself trying to interpret Jackie’s behaviour, or ascribing intentions to her actions, but then feel that these were just my projections – that I was anthropomorphizing. It did remind me of spending time with birds when I was growing up though. My father often handled wild birds in his work as a biologist, and we had a ‘pet’ heron at home for a few years too, a foundling. 

DH: It’s intriguing what you say about not knowing if she knows that there’s an eye behind the lens. I wonder whether she distinguished between you and your camera – whether the lens was an eye to her, or whether Duncan Marquiss was a hybrid human-camera species. In earlier work, you’ve explored zoological stories alongside search engines and data retrieval technologies, which makes me want to know where, for you, technology might stand in relation to (or enmeshed in) human-animal encounters?

DM: There were some moments of interaction with Jackie when I wasn’t filming, so I think she did distinguish between me and the camera. But your description of a ‘human-camera hybrid’ makes me think about Marshall McLuhan’s view of media as bodily prostheses – the camera as an extension of the eye, or video as an artificial form of memory. 

Your question also made me wonder about the technologies of other species. There were some recent studies of New Caledonian crows using sticks and wire to make tools for hooking food out of tubes. Maybe animal tool-use decentres human intelligence a bit, it reminds us that we’re not so special, as many other species make things and manipulate their environment too. 

I guess many human-animal encounters are mediated by technology though. To think of some quotidian examples; I’ll catch spiders in my flat with a glass tumbler and a postcard, which is simple technology. Or I’ll look at Photoshopped images of goshawks on Instagram, which are constructed and consumed digitally. For my previous work, Search Film, I filmed my dad while he was studying goshawks in the north-east of Scotland. We spent long periods in the woods but never actually saw a goshawk up close, as they’re so elusive. He tracked the birds by searching for signs of their presence, feathers or prey remains, so the bird was always at a distance. 

Maybe the technologies involved in our interactions with animals tell us something about human agendas, how we value (or don’t value) other species. On Instagram, an image of a goshawk is currency for the photographer and for Facebook. For private landowners who own shooting estates in Scotland, goshawks are pests that prey on their game bird livestock – they’re seen as a threat to profits and are often persecuted. Class can affect the kind of encounters people have with wild animals too. In the UK, hunting is a hobby for wealthy people who kill for fun. As an industry, it monopolises habitats that should be public commons. Conversely, the aesthetic appreciation of nature is often presented as a middle-class leisure activity, or a form of entertainment, which doesn’t necessarily value animals in and of themselves either.

This reminds me of the role of animals in Philip K. Dick's sci-fi novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, where animals have become so scarce that they're sold as luxury commodities, or status symbols, and those who can't afford them buy artificial pets. That scenario doesn't seem so unlikely just now!

DH: The decentring of human intelligence is something that comes forward in Mirror Test. It plays with my visual priority and the scales on which I’m habituated to experiencing things. Some images are blurred or the focus is very close, it’s not always easy for me to tell what I’m looking at. Recently, I hear people talking about ‘attunement’ and if I’m honest, I’m not always sure what they are talking about. But the idea of attuning made sense to me as something that happens in Mirror Test, in that it drew me out of my habits of seeing and into an estranged way of experiencing the world, and this seems like a useful and political thing to do. It makes me wonder what comes after that attunement or retuning. I wonder where this work has taken you and where you’re looking, currently?

DM: I used a macro lens for shooting some of Mirror Test and the depth of field is very limited in low light, which causes the shallow focus and blurred image. I like that ambiguity as it leaves room for the viewer to imagine or speculate. It’s a bit like a horror film trick; what you can’t see, or what’s suggested, is often scarier than anything the filmmaker can put on the screen, as it remains undefined in the viewer’s mind. 

Maybe a magnified perspective can encourage us to consider how other creatures experience the world; being estranged from our usual viewpoint has a political potential, as you say – imagining a different set of priorities. What comes after attunement though, I’m not sure, maybe acknowledging differences without trying to capture or instrumentalise them is important. 

That relates to the project that I’m working on just now, which is a documentary exploring connections between ethology and artificial intelligence. Ethologists study animals in their environment and through their particular sensory modes – or their ‘umwelt’. So a dog lives in a world of smells, a bat lives in a world of sound, and to study their behaviour you need to think on their terms.  

AI is often seen as an attempt to build machines that mimic human behaviour. But some autonomous systems and algorithms have emergent properties, or unintended consequences when they interact with the world. In a sense, these uncontrolled aspects of ‘machine behaviour’ are more life-like than an automata that simulates human behaviour in a literal way. And that sort of inverts the question; it’s not a matter of whether machines can imitate humans, but of whether humans understand machines.

The notion of machine behaviour also makes me wonder about the language used to describe AI, which is often anthropomorphic. It’s potentially problematic as it encourages us to think about AI as having an agency or consciousness that’s person-like, when intelligent machines are tools created by someone, for some purpose, they’re objects that can be bought and sold.  

It’s interesting to think about the language used in biology too. Behaviour can be described in mechanistic terms as ‘fixed action patterns’ or ‘optimal strategies’ while genetics uses ‘information’ and ‘coding’ to describe organic processes. I don’t think that biologists view these metaphors literally, but I’m curious if those analogies encourage us to compare animals and machines, or see them as related somehow on a deep level. 

Thinking about the emergent properties though, for me as an artist, I often find that the most interesting parts of my work are the surprises that occur in the process of making. Things that I didn’t anticipate at the outset, like the interview in Mirror Test. I wonder if this is the case for people creating in other fields too, whether it’s devising a behavioural experiment or designing an intelligent machine. 

DH: I like the idea that reattunement and horror might come via the same technologies. There’s an element of the uncanny in both, as with humanised AI. Again, I see this in your other work too, which makes things I might overlook or walk past – an old dress in a museum, a feather in the undergrowth, a volume of air full of midges – have a weird new presence. But if this estranging makes new connections by destabilising the way I’m looking, and showing ghostly and unheimlich qualities in the everyday, Mirror Test also has this – to me – very heimlich atmosphere. I could happily play it on a loop while I sleep. The margarine tubs saved for reuse, the still damp grey day outside, the household sounds, soft conversation and birds crooning. Do you want your work to be comforting or unsettling, or neither, or both? 

DM: I don’t know if I want my work to have one particular effect, and often the feeling of a piece only becomes clear once I’ve started making it. Some of the feel of Mirror Test was due to the environment it was shot in, and the weather outside on the day. But I guess the conversation also describes ambivalent feelings, like Stephan and Kerstin’s account of their life in the GDR. My work has been described as uncanny before though and it seems to come out that way regardless, so there are aspects of it I’m not in control of, maybe. But then I often try to find constraints in a project that make choices for me somehow, to help me work in a new way. 

The last thing I made was a piece for The Common Guild in Glasgow. They commissioned artists to make sound works for people to listen to on headphones whilst out walking during the lockdown. I was thinking about birds’ contact calls at the time, their call and response patterns and their ability to be heard within noisy environments. So I thought I’d try to make music that left space for the listener to still hear their surroundings to some extent. I tried reproducing the high pitches of bird calls with the guitar, which left a lot of empty sonic space underneath. I also mimicked their phrases and patterns, which created gaps in the music. This approach made me play in a very different way but the finished music still sounds quite familiar to me. 

Some of my early work did come out of attempts to understand affective responses. I’d wonder why a certain image or piece of music created a particular response, and I’d try to mimic or reproduce the effect. I remember going to see Claire Denis’ film Trouble Every Day and almost fainting in the cinema during the violent scenes. I knew the violence wasn’t real, but my body seemed to take it very literally.  

That sort of relates to the current project on ethology and AI too, as a lot of ethology experiments used artificial stimuli to trigger animals’ responses. And the same logic is there in affective computing and social robotics, which attempt to model human interactions – in a very reductive way anyway. I suppose what’s troubling about simulating affect is whether we care about what another feels on their end of the line. Do we care about reciprocity? When we stroke a dog or a cat, we both get a hormone buzz from the exchange. You could build an artificial cat that purrs when you stroke it, and that fake signal might even be comforting, but the shared experience is absent and that seems really lonely.