Animoid Song, a solo exhibition by Heyse Ip, blurs the boundaries between human, animal and machine within a fictional yet eerily familiar environment. Creating a new speculative landscape, the installation utilises repurposed urban materials and artificial interventions intended to deter wildlife from the hidden and undesirable spaces within a city.

The exhibition offers layers of sensory and spatial dissonance. Amplified mechanical hums and vibrational resonances evoke the intensity of urban conditions. Large-scale bird netting partitions the space, dividing viewer and artwork. It forces the visitor to take on the role of the animal and to instinctively react to the overwhelming interventions. What appears from afar as lush, vibrant grass reveals itself to be an illusion—synthetic green bird spikes act as defensive architecture. Mechanical bird deterrents fill the air with haunting yet realistic bird sounds, while screen-based performances depict the artist’s absurd mimicry of bird calls. However, without a single bird in sight, the fabricated sounds of birds linger as a ghostly presence of ‘nature’. 

Animoid Song urges us to reconsider our position within the ecosystem, confronting the consequences of our interventions in the dense confines of urban life. Where do the boundaries between nature and humanity lie? Often defined as untouched, seen as separate from us, nature itself is an arbitrary construct—it becomes the object of our projected fantasy whilst also representing an untapped wildness for humans to control. How has humanity’s systematic control, reshaping and deterrence of the natural world created new forms of resistance? In this speculative habitat, have our deterrents ultimately led to the banishing of birds, leaving only mechanical echoes in their place? Or, has their decline left us longing for their songs once more, making us create new forms of ‘animoid’ replication? Either way, what remains is a distorted reflection of ourselves and our actions.