The (m)Otherhood of Meep (the bat translator)
- Artwork
- The (m)Otherhood of Meep (the bat translator)
- Artist
- Alinta
- Info
- The (m)Otherhood of Meep (The Bat Translator), is a digital artwork/work of electronic literature and fully-functioning AI interpreter for flying fox vocalisations. It draws from scientific research on flying fox vocalisations to interpret grey-headed and black flying fox voices into English using tensorflow. It aims to evoke an interspecies bridge between humans and an extremely ecologically important and threatened keystone mammal, that is at the centre of global human/wildlife conflict and cultural vilification. The work aims at a future for machine learning technologies where corpuses of human language/actions are decentred, and their technological use is recentered around posthuman interspecies relationships that contemplate human/wildlife geographical boundaries.
This significant work of artistic creation and machine training has been built using a methodology of interspecies care, diffracting actual wildlife rehabilitation care practices of living with and caring for bats, with digital creative practices that attempt to help us understand and empathise with nonhuman creatures. While I am the artist, I am also a registered wildlife rescuer specifically trained for working with bats, and this project has been born of these real-life experiences of deep interspecies care, nursing bats through to release back into the wild, and going through processes of bonding and unbonding with wild animals during bushfires and other environmental destructions that put them under my care.
It required considering poetic form and reflecting on methods of interpretation, anthropomorphism, and connections between poetry-as-communication and scientific research into vocalisations. - Use with bats
- https://www.alintakrauth.com/bats (and see below for set up video)