Last Monday morning, I went looking for a cuckoo.
The one I was searching for was the yellow-billed variety, a robin-sized bird with a white breast and long striped tail. They have thick curved beaks whose bottom halves are the exact color of a lemon. Cuckoos shouldn’t be tough birds to spot, but they are. Notoriously, emphatically so. They’re unreasonably good at staying out of sight. My friend Mike gave me a solid piece of birding advice a few years ago: Never chase a cuckoo. By the time you get to where the bird had supposedly been, he told me, they’d always be gone. Disappeared like the feathered ghosts that they are.
I happened upon a cuckoo this April while I was trying to follow a sherbet-colorer tanager high up in the crown of a paulownia tree. Last year I spotted two in Prospect Park while I was trying (unsuccessfully) to find a tiny vagrant warbler. When I saw my first cuckoo in 2021, after a good many failed chases, I was hurrying to pick up my son from summer camp. I didn’t have my binoculars, but it didn’t matter; the bird was sitting on a low branch directly over the path, no more than ten feet away. All of these experiences have taught me that the most reliable way to find a cuckoo is to not be looking for one. Instead, you extend an invitation for a cuckoo to appear, by going out and being in a place with trees.
I realized while I was walking last week that I could look back on my portfolio of work — as an artist, a writer, a teacher, a coder — as a long series of invitations. The first visualizations I made were brash, unruly things, that trampled over all of data’s rules. They made a fair number of people angry, but others saw possibility through those broken-down gates. Ten months later I was working in the New York Times R & D department, following new paths and tasked with toppling more fences.
After the NYTimes I started the Office For Creative Research. Our core practice as a studio was to find new possibility spaces; and then to get our hands dirty and try to grow things there. An outsized (and ultimately oversized) portion of our projects were self-funded, work the was meant to show what could be made at the nexus of data, art & communities. We put data sculptures in the middle of Times Square, converted high school gymnasiums into community mapping centers, turned theater performances into data representations, all to say: look, this is possible. When the OCR closed, I wrote Living in Data as a call to others who might feel the same conviction as I do that there are better futures to be found with tech and data.
I was thinking about all of this, on the way to the cuckoo, for a reason. At the end of last month I stepped away from a project I’ve been working on for a decade, and I find myself with more space and more intent than I’ve had in many years. Space and intent to find some new work to do and some new people to do it with.
It is a time, I think, for invitation.
These days I find myself most interested in the counterweights that we might set against the extractive forces of big tech. How we might defend and deflect their rapacious incursions into our data, our attention, our wild spaces, and our ability to envision different futures. Counterweights and counterexamples. I’m excited about solarpunk and mutual aid, iNaturalist, research labs in libraries, and map lichens. I’m excited about feminist bird clubs and funding for infrastructure and mechanisms for data sovereignty. At the center of it all, I suppose most of all I’m interested in care, and how we can propagate it. Care for each other, care for the places we live, care for non-human things, care for better futures. If these things feel exciting to you, or to your organization, we should talk. And then we should get our hands dirty and try to grow things.
I got to the place where the cuckoo was spotted and I scanned the branches of a small grove of quaking aspens. I looked for ten solid minutes. The cuckoo was gone, because of course it was gone.
Never chase a cuckoo.
What had I been thinking? On my way back home I walked across a small patch of lawn, and out of the corner of my eye I caught a flash of movement. A bird alighted onto a low branch and I managed to get a look with my binoculars. It was a yellow-breasted chat, a bird that is even more of a phantom than a cuckoo. They’re notoriously difficult to spot, quick to disappear; to see one off the ground and in open was a gift. I held my breath.
For a moment the bird looked right at me. Then, with a flick of its wings, it vanished.
9/16/24
jer.thorp@hey.com
