The installation is a proposition for interspecies encounter. An offering to bats in the form of water, plants and insects. An invitation for humans to ask bats a question. The work was conceived by following intuitions, sounds and echoes of the mayan forest: the ways in which the mineral, vegetable and animal have co-evolved by listening to each other, across deep time.
Ancestral knowledge and artificial intelligence are different in nature. Yet, they share an interest for finding patterns in our world, beyond the limitations of our senses and lifetime. In doing so, they weave pathways to dimensions vibrating beyond our reality.
Recent developments in the field of machine learning have showed that languages can be described as a maps, known as latent spaces, where each word is given a set of coordinates, according to their distance in meaning. This technology has lead to the hypothesis it might be possible to decrypt other-than-human language within our lifetime.
For the bat cloud, a map of bat communications was created through a collaboration with bat biolinguist Mirjam Knörnschild. Together, the artist and the scientist have spent several weeks recording bat ultrasounds around the site where the artwork now lives. Using these communications from local bats, an AI model was trained resulting in a map of bat language.
This map, projected every evening at the bottom of the pond, shows 7 distinct clusters of sound, corresponding to 7 distinct behaviours of the bat world. When you throw a tree seed in the pond, 3 hydrophone analyse the position, trajectory and loudness of the seed in relation to this map.
In Mayan divination practices, it is know that the ways in which a seed reaches the map, isn’t the fruit of randomness, but the result of the interdependency between what brings you here and now, and all other lifeforms of the universe.
Take a seed in your hand, voice in your mind a question that matters to you. Let bats answer your question by yes or no. Let the AI cloud deliver their answer to you in the form of ripples. Count these echolocations at the surface of the water to get a complete answer. Report to the cards on this website or on site for interpretation. Remember. If a bat makes an echo at the surface of the pond just after you’ve asked your question, you should count it as part of your answer.
An artwork curated by Marcello Dantas.
Made possible by the Sferik Art in Nature Award.
Thank you to bats for their inspiration and guidance.
Thank you everyone who brought this project to life:
Estefania López Barrera, Manuel Sandoval, Doria Reyes, Anastacio, Alejandro, Marco, Alex
Benjamin Cabral, Cesar Salgado, Dorian Valencia, Photo bats
Marina, Elliot
Special thank you to: Roth, Marcello, Cristina Ochoa, Pierre-Henri Samion, Juan Francisco Garcia Nuño, Marlène Huissoud, Ohm Dive, Veronica Zamora-Gutierrez, Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute.
This artwork is dedicated to bats,
and to the memory of Karen Bakker.
