Rick Silva's website bills him as an artist whose work explores "notions of landscape and wilderness in the 21st century." His latest project looks forward to the weird wildlife of the 31st.

The Silva Field Guide to Birds of a Parallel Future is basically what it says on the label. In short video clips, rendered in graphics software like Cinema 4D, Silva shows us 18 ornithological specimens of the future. They're glitchy, curious things—some mesmerizing, some arresting. One heron-like beast, cycling through psychedelic colors, moves by slowly swooping not just his wings but his neck and tail feathers, too. A swan glides peacefully, his wings raised upward surrounding a featureless white orb. One entry is little more than a Borg-like cube of feathers. You wouldn't necessarily want these guys stopping by your bird feeder.

Silva made the first of the birds when he was in the air himself, stuck on a flight to Munich. The recipe was none too surprising: "I had recently bought a Sibley’s Field Guide to Birds and so that was on my mind, and had also read a bit about multiverse theory," he says.

The artist has long been interested in mediating the natural world with technology. For a recent project, En Plein Air, he took his laptop out into nature and created digital imagery inspired directly by the sights around him. After over a year and a half of that, he welcomed a license to get more speculative, though this project did come with "a tension between how far to push the bird-ness vs. abstractness of each animation," he explains.

Bird trails. GIF: Wired Design/Source

Indeed, some of the specimens might stretch our definition of what a "bird" could possibly look like. But remember: you can't just to shoot a video of a bird if it's in an alternate Earth. Silva drew inspiration from researchers who use all sorts of interesting visual techniques to model the flight of more familiar birds today, and it's fun to think of these clips as similar efforts by our own future scientists. "I did think about the specific alternate universe some—how the physical laws or evolution might have been different in a parallel dimension," he says. "But also about how the device used to capture this bird’s rendering and shape might be different—how it’s maybe a piece of technology from our universe that is peering into another, and what we are seeing is somehow a translation." These aren't the birds of the parallel future, strictly speaking. They're just the best look we can get at them.

You can check out all the birds here.