The Creative Pigeon
By Aaron Blaisdell, PhD
A dim bulb gave off a wan light. Most illumination came from the glow of the 15-inch screen filling one wall of the box. The box was small, with black walls and black door, just the right size for a pigeon. A pigeon? Indeed, the comparative cognition lab I direct at UCLA has one main goal: to uncover the hidden secrets of the animal mind. Rather than using exotic animals known for their braininess, like parrots or porpoises, apes or elephants, my lab uses rats and pigeons. While many may scorn rats as vermin-ridden pests, and pigeons as statue (and car) defacing vandals, I view them as intelligent species, worthy of the dignity of a clever animal mind lurking behind their beady eyes and bobbing heads. Many others in my community feel the same and have uncovered a dazzling array of amazing intellectual abilities of the pigeon.
Our pigeon stands poised in front of a blank computer screen. She thrusts her head forward and a peck lands on the surface. A touchscreen sensor acknowledges the peck and leaves a mark on the screen. Wait, what? Did the pigeon just place a green line on the display? The pigeon, Darwin is her name, in honor of one of the greatest biologists of all time, begins to pick up speed. Pecks land here and there on the screen, now on the left side, a moment later the right. Some pecks make broad sweeps across the surface leaving big, bold strokes, while others are collections of rapid bursts, leaving a scattershot of points clustered together like buckshot from a riffle hitting its mark.
Darwin continues for a good 10 minutes, engaging with the screen, then stepping back as if to assess her work before leaning in for the next stroke. You see, Darwin is now a painter, creating digital artworks. She’s not the only one. Over two dozen pigeons have been engaged in making digital artwork in my lab. It’s one of our latest research projects. The goal is to better understand what art is and why we humans love it and are driven to create it. Often, the road to understanding human behavior and psychology involves understanding the behavior and intelligence of other animals. What is unique to humans? What is merely a manifestation of a psychology we share with our animal cousins?
Human art stretches back in time by at least 30 or 40 thousand years, or perhaps as far back as 500,000 years. Handprints on a rock outcropping. Cave-wall images of animals and stick-like humans with bows and spears depicting ancient scenes of hunting.
Pigeon art goes back to May 28th, 2021, at 3:07PM PST to be precise. Indeed, we know the exact moment the first pigeon ever made its first recorded artistic creation. It was a Spring afternoon at the UCLA pigeon lab, and Darwin had just completed her daily round of testing in an experiment studying mental imagery in pigeons. A graduate student went to collect her from the operant box and discovered that, somehow, Darwin had closed the end screen of her test program, opened the paint program, and made some artwork on the screen! A pale, half-moon filled the lower half of the screen, and some black scratch-mark lines lay across the moon’s surface. The student realized she discovered something incredible and had the good sense to take a picture of the artwork with her phone.
When she showed the picture to me a few months later, I was stunned. At the same time, the proverbial light bulb went on in my mind. It just so happened I had been taking a deep dive to learn as much as I could about NFTs (short for Non Fungible Tokens — to be contrasted with Fungible Tokens like Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies). NFTs had been around for a few years, but in 2021 they were becoming the talk of the town — well, some small villages here and there on the interwebs. My lightbulb moment was realizing that we could use this chance discovery as an opportunity to study how and why pigeons create art, and what it tells us about human art and aesthetics. Simultaneously, we could curate the best pieces from our artist flock to sell as NFTs to support the project! This was a perfect use-case for NFTs, to support the arts and sciences, especially those areas that are woefully underfunded by federal agencies and private foundations alike.
Here’s the plan — we develop an app that provides the pigeon artist a set of tools to use in the Touchscreen Operant Chamber (TOC). Using these tools, each peck or set of pecks on the screen results in digital marks — like brushstrokes on a canvas. We started with three tools: shape, color, and line width. At the beginning of each session, the pigeon is presented with a blank canvas (screen) and the three tools are set to specific parameters randomly chosen by the app. For example, a pigeon could start a session with pecks creating green triangles with thick lines wherever the pecks occurred on the screen. Any shape beyond a point (i.e., straight line or more complex figure) required two consecutive pecks to generate the shape. For example, in the line setting, the first peck determined the start location of the line on the screen while the second peck determined the end location, whereupon the line would appear as soon as the second peck was made. Likewise, with the drawing of triangles, squares, and polygons. The first and second peck determined the start and end locations, respectively, of the sides of the figure, with the figure filling the space between pecked locations as soon as the second peck had been made. This process continued until the canvas was filled with an extensive array of shapes and colors created by the pigeon artist.
We put 27 pigeons on this task. Almost every bird in our colony had an opportunity to create art. Some took to it with alacrity, while others barely made a mark. If a pigeon did not show any interest in painting after 5 or 6 opportunities, we retired them from the program. Some retired after only making a few paintings. A few birds were prolific. Darwin, our OG artist and star in more ways than one (she also starred in Episode 3 of a Netflix show called White Rabbit Project), was no slouch, completing 24 quality paintings. But the real high achievers were Evaristo at 32 completed works, Herriot with 34, and Iggy with a whopping 38 quality paintings! Moreover, these birds were actively engaging in the task of their own volition, with no incentive through food reinforcement. And it seemed as if they were enjoying it too!
To keep things interesting for the pigeons (and us!), we set the app to randomly select three new parameters every 60 seconds. Most pigeons spent about 5 or 10 minutes working on their painting before declaring their masterpiece finished, often indicated by stepping back one last time to admire their work. The completed works varied from a sparse collection of simple lines or shapes with just a single color or two, to covering the entire canvas with a dense mass of color, line, and shape. The density can be so thick it is reminiscent of the works by Jackson Pollock — if he was hopped up on amphetamines. In between these extremes were some very beautiful paintings that compare favorably to the abstract art created by the early to mid-20th century abstract artists such as Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee, and of course Jackson Pollock (this happens to be my personal favorite era of art). As our artists generated more artwork, we began to see that the gulf between human art and animal art shrink.
We’re just beginning to scratch the surface of the potential for pigeon painting. What can we learn on this journey? There are so many questions that it is challenging to decide where to begin. Do the pigeons enjoy making art? That is, are they intrinsically motivated to create? We haven’t been giving the pigeons any food reward for their efforts, so it seems as if they are. Do they feel the emotional aesthetics of their creations, or indeed of any visual artwork? How do people respond emotionally to the pigeon art, and does it make a difference if they know the artwork was by a pigeon? (Are we going to dump on their paintings, the same way pigeons dump on…well, our sculptures?)
There are many parallels here to how humans perceive and react to artificial intelligence (AI) created art. Some love it, some hate it, and some question whether it’s the AI robot that created the art or merely the programmer who designed its algorithm that is the true artist. Yet, the same concern cannot be said for our pigeon’s art, as we did not program them! Indeed, unlike AI and other computerized algorithmic processes that are completely bottom-up machines, merely reflecting the data they’ve been fed, pigeons and all other animals (including us!) are both bottom-up and top-down machines. Pigeons don’t just learn through accumulated experience, but also form ideas about how the world works. They hypothesize, build mental models, and simulate the world around them. Pigeon art may embody the true creativity of an intelligent mind, just like human art.
If pigeons are truly creative, we can explore how similar they are to human artists. Can a pigeon be trained to replicate what it sees? That is, can it copy and imitate? Children learn to draw by copying what they see. This starts as crude circles with dots for eyes and maybe a line for the body. Then complexity and sophistication develop with practice. If we train pigeons to copy lines and simple shapes, will they also develop more sophistication in their art? Will they incorporate what they learn? Can they be taught to draw what they see? If we then give them a photograph of a real object or scene, can they reproduce elements of it — a sketch if you will? There are so many fascinating questions we can ask with this simple yet powerful technology of pigeon plus touchscreen canvas.
Going forward, our next steps will include further development of the art app but giving more choice to the pigeon. We can provide virtual buttons for them to select their desired shape and color, and to freely change their choices at any time during a session. This will open the possibilities of what the pigeons can create, as well as inform us about their own individual preferences and styles. Even with the relatively restricted app currently in use, we already see the emergence of individually different styles. Darwin loves to fill the canvas with line and color, while Dio’s paintings are sparer and sparser. Offloading more choices to the pigeon will increase the variety and uniqueness in each artist’s style.
Our ambitions go well beyond these fascinating questions about pigeon art. We plan to make these art tools available for use in zoos and animal welfare sanctuaries. We see art as a means for environmental enrichment in captive animals to nourish their curiosity and drive for exploration. The art created by zoo animals can also be used to raise awareness about animal welfare and especially of endangered species. Imagine driving down the highway and seeing a billboard showing a photo of a panda bear and one of its paintings. This will drive more traffic to the zoo, which in turn will allow zoos to raise more money to support animal care and conservation efforts. The artworks themselves can be sold on stickers, posters, and on items such as mugs and t-shirts, and even be minted as NFTs to fundraise to support the animals themselves. [In fact, we’ve already begun our own genesis project to mint our pigeons’ NFTs to support research on the animal mind and intelligence (https://pigeonart.xyz/)]. Children often identify with a plushy toy of their favorite animal they saw at the zoo. Adults, however, might be more attracted to owning a piece of art from the animals they observed and formed a bond with. Indeed, the same artist-collector dynamic that supports so many human artists could apply to animal artists as well.
As I said earlier, we’re at the beginning stages of our ambitious and exciting journey. This essay is itself the first of many steps to tell both our story and the story of our pigeon artists. It’s the first step to using the web3 NFT community to raise funds to support our pigeon artists. Please consider collecting one of our pigeons’ paintings. Form a relationship with a new species of artist. 100% of all primary and secondary sales of the pigeon NFTs will be directed right back to supporting the welfare of our pigeons and the research projects to which they are our faithful collaborators. If you do collect an NFT, head over to our Discord group and join the conversation about pigeon art, animal art, human and AI art. By collecting an NFT, you can become one of our Bird Brains to help guide the direction of our research. Join us in exploring the evolution of art!
Back in the dark box, a soft glow suffuses gray and white feathers. An open eye, alert, reflects an image filled with line and color, shape and texture. Another artistic creation for Darwin to share with the world.
