Jake Elwes’s “CUSP - Marsh Birds” is part of his CUSP series, where a familiar childhood location on the Essex marshes is reframed by inserting images randomly generated by a neural network into this tidal landscape. The machine has been trained on a photographic dataset, learning the qualities of marsh birds and in the process producing images that fluctuate between species, with unanticipated variations emerging without reference to human systems of classification. The animation migrates from bird to bird, accompanied by a soundscape of artificially generated bird song. The setting of the AI-generated work on a screen in a natural environment enables a rare form of dialogue between native birds and the artificial ones, augmenting and disrupting the ecology of the location. In this edition we watch 12 mash birds from the project as they flow between recognizable forms and dissolve into textures of water and mud.