Locating Echoes

These three video works were made as a kind of loose artistic diagram or visualisation of how bats see with their ears, to accompany Tessa Laird’s essay 'Locating Echoes' which attempts to bridge the existential void that separates us from bats. Responding to Nagel’s 1974 text What is it like to be a bat? Laird writes, “I fling myself across the abyss of species difference. I am a bat, imitating a human, imitating a bat.”

Each video work extrapolates on a different aspect of this listening: the way sound travels through their enlarged cochleas; an imagined correlation between the spectral changes in the echoes bouncing off moving targets to colour sensing; to an illustration of how bats emit high-pitched sonic pulses that bounce off their environment in order to echolocate. The audio, composed by Joel Stern, layers and manipulates bat detection, echolocation and ultrasonic recordings drawn from various online archives into an impressionistic collage.

Throughout the text, Tessa Laird gives the human scholars she is quoting the names of various bat species. This artifice, however wishful, allows her to imagine that she is writing about bats, with the bats themselves. The way she chooses which bat species to ghost which author is generally based on the bat species’ binomial nomenclature and the name of the human scholar sharing a few letters in common.

Sound design: Joel Stern

Animation: César Echevarría

You Can’t Trust Music (YCTM) presented by e-flux is a research project connecting sound-based artists, musicians, writers, composers, and writers and exploring the way that landscape, acoustics, and musical thought contribute to the formation of social and political structures.

Thank you to Keith Rodger and Bemis Center of Contemporary Arts, and YCTM curator Xenia Benivolski.