The Eye of the Other

How does a bat see the world? How can we understand another form of life whose language goes unheard and unexplored by us?

This multimodal piece explores non-verbal communication between humans and bats, through the study and the translation of the bat’s sensorial systems. While humans distinguish fruit from foliage visually, bats don’t: Nectar-feeding bats find flowers by sorting the environment using visual and sonar information. The geometry of a single flower can be recognised by generating ‘echo-fingerprints’. These fingerprints are translated into audible frequencies and visual, sensual patterns comprehensible to human senses. The aim is to transcend human limitations by exploring the deeper meaning of mutual relationships and interspecies communication between humans and animals, the animal's gaze in juxtaposition with the human gaze. The work translates the nectar bats’ perceptual world into perceptual patterns a human can understand – from echolocation to our senses such as hearing, seeing, and touching.

This work was realised within the framework of the European Media Art Platforms (EMAP) programme at Antre Peaux (ex Bandits Mages) (FR) with support of the Creative Europe Culture Programme of the European Union.