Every sound you hear in the Bat Cloud installation and on this website, comes from recordings made locally around the SFER IK museums. Each call has been shifted gently into our auditory spectrum so the voices of these nocturnal beings can meet ours. Listening can be personal or collective, biological or computational. Ultimately, listening is a conversation across beings, and part of a broader practice of caring for lifeforms.
Bats are essential to human survival in ways we often overlook. Many species consume vast numbers of insects, especially mosquitoes, helping keep ecosystems, and us, in balance. Others pollinate plants that could not exist without them: agave (the source of mezcal), bananas, mangoes, cacao, and more. Bat guano, one of the most powerful natural fertilisers on Earth, sustains agriculture worldwide. Although many cultures fear bats, this fear is unfounded. Bats and humans share far more similarities than differences—which may be why they unsettle us at first. We are both mammals, deeply social, remarkably vocal, and shaped by intricate forms of intelligence and sensitivity. Bats teach their young how to communicate. Their vocalisations vary across regions like dialects, carrying moods, needs, and emotions. We do not yet understand their language, but we know it is far richer than we can currently decode.
The Bat Cloud is built on a machine-learning system designed to listen to bat vocalisations, map their communications, and explore how humans might speak back—carefully, respectfully. The system builds on the work of biologist Mirjam Knörnschild, local traditional knowledge, and interactive experience design to create a moment of listening between humans and bats. Using thousands of bat calls recorded around the SFER IK museums by Antoine Bertin and Mirjam Knorschild, a map of bat conversations was created and annotated. Think of it as a constellation of meanings: each point a bat voice, and clusters of points forming patterns of behaviour.
In the artwork, this map is projected into water, like light reaching the depth of a cenote, revealing seven facets of life as a bat: Echolocation, Fear, Attraction, Solicitation, Attention, Territory, and Arousal.
The Bat Cloud oracle listens to the ripples created when humans address a question to bats—through seeds, gestures, and voice. It maps these signals onto the constellation of bat vocalisations and returns the behavioural cluster closest to the human offering. In this way, the computational oracle produces liquid and acoustic waves that travel back through the forest, allowing bats to hear us as we listen to them.
Every three days, the pond is emptied to water the garden. The seeds offered by visitors are planted to grow into flowers and fruits for bats. Listening extends into vegetal and liquid forms, becoming part of the cycles of nourishment that sustain this shared place.
