Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas

So I started with what I knew, which was my dog.

I built him this ball device which recognized when he carries it and when he moves it around and his leaning behaviors, and it would video call me from a TV that I set up in our lounge.

I gave him this device whenever he was home alone, and I waited to see if he would ring me.

What I found is that he would ring me a lot.

He started video calling me and developing these routines.

Typically he would ring me often in the morning and then later on in the evening.

But sometimes these calls became a bit too much.

Sometimes he would ring me back to back to back, and I would talk to him about our daily life, but eventually I'd just run out of things to talk about.

And so what I did was I flipped the camera in my phone around, and instead I started showing him my world.

I showed him the people I was with, I showed him the food I was eating, buskers in the street, wherever I was is what I showed him.

And in many ways, the technology then became a tool for him to have a portal beyond his home.

But there was still a problem here that me as a person wasn't always available, which is why I was often out of the house.

I was in meetings.

I couldn't keep running this study of picking up these phone calls.

So I started to wonder, what if animals could ring each other instead?

And we just cut people out.

And this brought me to parrots.

Parrots are really highly social creatures, often live in big groups, really complex, and have really deep and meaningful relationships with each other.

And yet when we keep them as pets, we often keep them alone.

So I started to wonder, would a parrot video call another parrot if given a choice?