Eduardo Kac
»Darker than Night«
1999 - 1999
Documents
Technology

Installation Requirements / Space
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 man-made "natural habitat", a dark cave where the batbot continuously sweeps through the space with its ultrasonic emissions. The batbot, the central element of the installation, contains a small sonar unit inside it's head, a frequency converter to transform bat echolocation calls into audible sounds, and a motorized neck which enables it's head to spin. The sonar unit scans the space at 45KHz and is wired to a computer taking in data and providing video output to local. The batbot is a telepresence medium through which participants enter into the cave via a virtual reality headset. With the headset on, the viewer's sight is transformed into the point of view of the batbot's sonar. The viewer sees a series of real-time kinetic white dots against a black background. The white dots represent obstacles encountered by the batbot's sonar. Since bats fly through the space, the white dots will change constantly.