Darker Than Night

1999

batcave — Bat cave at the Blijdorp Zoological Gardens in Rotterdam. On the left we see the batbot (hanging upside down) and on the right we see an Egyptian fruit bat flying within the batbot's ultrasonic range.

Darker Than Night is a telepresence artwork which explores the human-machine-animal interface and telepresence as a means of mediating relations of empathy. In this interactive piece, participants, a telerobotic bat (batbot) and over 300 Egyptian Fruit Bats share a cave at the Blijdorp Zoo in Rotterdam. The cave is dark at all hours and has 15 meters in diameter and 20 meters in height. To see the bats the public peers through a window.

At the exhibition site participants stand outside looking into a spacious habitat, a dark cave where the batbot continuously sweeps through the space with its ultrasonic emissions. The batbot, the central element of the work, contains a small sonar unit on the back of its head, a frequency converter to transform bat echolocation calls into audible sounds, and a motorized neck which enables it's head to spin.

install diagram — *Darker Than Night* diagram

echo diagram — The batbot's echolocation calls are emitted from the back of its head. When the participant wears the VR headset the batbot's head swivels 90°, producing a 15° ultrasonic beam with 25 ft range. The batbot's emission signal peaks at 45 kHz.

The sonar unit on the back of the batbot's head scans the space at 45KHz and is wired to a computer taking in data and providing visual feedback to local participants. The batbot is a telepresence medium through which participants enter into the cave via a virtual reality headset.

vr headset — With the headset on, the viewer's sight is transformed into the batbot's point of view.

Participants wearing the VR headset experienced the cave from the batbot's point of view in realtime. The outer semicircle represents the walls of the cave.

bat headset view — The crosshair at the center marks the position of the batbot in the cave. The image of the bat represents the moment when the sonar emissions of bat and batbot cross each other.

This work brings the participants together to foster an interspecies, dialogical experience. The behavior and the biosonar of the Egyptian Fruit Bats in the cave will affect the participants, while the behavior and the telerobotic sonar of the participants in the body of the batbot will affect the Egyptian Fruit Bats. Both groups will become aware of their mutual presence and actions, since they will be able to hear and track each other.

Darker Than Night emphasizes the barriers that prohibit each individual to move beyond one's insular, self-reflective experience. The bat, a rarely understood, enigmatic, flying mammal, represents the mystery and nuances held within each individual's consciousness.

Read "From a Bat's Point of View", an article by Suzana Milevska about Darker Than Night, originally published in: Dobrila, Peter T. and Kostic, Aleksandra (eds.), Eduardo Kac: Telepresence, Biotelematics, and Transgenic Art (Maribor, Slovenia: Kibla, 2000), pp. 47-52.

Darker Than Night Credits

Darker Than Night Bibliography