Originally published in: Dobrila, Peter T. and Kostic, Aleksandra (eds.),Eduardo Kac: Telepresence, Biotelematics, and Transgenic Art (Maribor,Slovenia: Kibla, 2000), pp. 47-52.
Suzana Milevska
In his book The Conscious Mind, David J. Chalmers states that "fromthe physical facts about a bat we can ascertain all facts about a bat exceptthe facts about the conscious experience. Knowing all the physical factswe still do not know what it is like to be a bat" [1]. We may agreewith the assertion that if we know everything physical about certain creatureswe can still not be certain if they are conscious (in the sense that weconsider ourselves a conscious species). We may also agree that knowledgeof physical facts about animals does not allow us to know what their experiencesare like. Agreeing with both premises does not imply that we should giveup on trying to get closer to those unfamiliar "others" and quitthe attempt to explore the question "what it is like to be" [2]other than ourselves. For artist Eduardo Kac the question offers a uniqueopportunity to stimulate our imagination.
"Darker Than Night" was a telepresence artwork realized byKac from June 17th to July 7th 1999 with a robotic bat ("batbot")and approximately three hundred Egyptian fruit bats living in the caveat the Blijdorp Zoological Gardens in Rotterdam [3]. This work is a profoundattempt to investigate the possibility of empathy towards creatures (notnecessarily only bats) that are different from us due to their specificsensory and motor system--the physical facts that determine their actionsand experiences. In "Darker Than Night" Kac addresses the human-machine-animal relationship with a complex interface, enablinghumans and bats to become mutually aware of their presence in the cavethrough the exchange of sonar emmissions. Humans can experience the cavethrough the batbot and can visualize the behavior of the bats through aspecial interface. The bats, on the other hand, can hear the sonar emmissionsof the batbot.
Kac's provocative work is stimulated by the awareness that we cannotaccomplish a thorough understanding even of our own consciousness and selfand the fact that "no one has seen or ever will see a center of gravity,or a self either" [4]. This understanding echoes David Hume, who in1740 wrote in his "Treatise of Human Nature": "I never cancatch myself at any time without a perception and never can observe anythingbut the perception" [5]. In "Darker Than Night" Kac employstelepresence as a vehicle to investigate the link between perception andconsciousness. "Darker Than Night" is not only about our abilityto see or to adapt to conditions that are not ordinary for us and are naturalto the bats but it is also about self-perception and the experience ofperception and understanding of others.
The question posed here is not whether we can understand the physicalfacts about how bats move and communicate with each other. These factsare the subject of a body of scientific research which is widely available,and which Kac has studied. Through his writing [see note 3] the artistmade sure that all details about echolocation as technique for orientationin dark space are transparently explained. In so doing, he makes us awareof the relevance of the scientific basis of the project and its establishingof a circuit of information, exchange and adjustment between the fruitbats,batbot and the visitors. However, the physical facts become only startingpoints for Kac's treatise on their own limitations. In "Darker ThanNight" the biosonar echolocation system of the bats is converted toaudible waves accessible to the human sensory system. As Eduardo Kac createsa world in which humans can have similar empathic experiences with anotherspecies, he expands the field of impact of his project from technologyto culture.
Thomas Nagel warns us in his seminal article [see note 2] that it willnot help us to try to imagine what it feels like to perceive the surroundingworld by a system of reflected high frequency sound signals (fruitbatsecholocate usually with 30,000 to 80,000 hertz that human ears can nothear). This warning is taken by Kac as an exciting challenge to our artistic(not scientific) imagination. Kac translated the sonar signals into thehuman audible range by a frequency converter placed inside of the headof the batbot. "Darker Than Night" is a network of relationships,a complex circuit of signals that circulate between human (visitor witha headset), animal (bats emitting and hearing ultrasounds as their "senseof vision"), and machine (batbot that simulates the real bats whileecholocating in the same manner as them). This net of mutual experiencesquestions the problem of understanding the "other"--a memberof another species, race, or culture.
"Darker Than Night" reminds us that all relevant physicalfacts are not enough to provide us with proficient answers to the question"what is it like to be". Given all accessible information, theproblem of our unique experience (which forms the basis of our imagination)remains unsolved. It can obviously help us to try to understand what itwould be like for us to behave as a bat behaves but it will not help usto know what it is like for a bat to be a bat [6]. Although the work extendsour abilities beyond human perception, it seems that the main obstacleis still our restriction to the natural resources of our body and mind,which are, obviously, inadequate to the task. According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty,there is no method that permits us to extrapolate completely from our owncondition to the inner life of another creature. We are determined by ourown bodily structure and innate capacity, which sets limits to the humanexperience [7]. In other words, ultimately human experience can not beanything like the experience of other animals, no matter how close theyare to humans on the phylogenetic tree.
The question of transferring data pertaining to one's inner experiencesis closely related to the question of evidence for the existence of otherminds pointed at the beginning of this text. The questions "what kindsof minds are there" and "how do we know" emerge from thefact that each of us know only one mind from the inside and no two of usknow the same mind from the inside [8]. The substantial disagreements amongscientists about the existence of other minds comes from the impossibilityto confirm the coincidence of one's inner with one's outwardly observablecapabilities for perceptual discrimination, introspective avowal or intelligentactions [9].
Obviously, this problem is not limited only to radically different creaturesfor it exists between one person and another. The subjective and nontransferablecharacter of experience is evident among people and is an inescapable obstacleto any complete understanding of and communication with each other. Moreover,"once that the ability to represent your own structure has reacheda certain critical point, that is the kiss of death: it guarantees thatyou can never represent yourself totally" [10]. Cognition of selfand in general "is not only representation but also embodied action:the world we cognize is not pregiven but enacted through our history ofstructural coupling" [11]. Therefore, the different subjective experiencesprevent us from having the same "self" story to tell. Every humanmind is culturally redesigned so that only our ability and desire to beengaged in "presenting ourselves to others, and ourselves" [12]and representing ourselves "in language and gesture, external andinternal" [13] make us different from other creatures.
This idea that cognitive structures emerge from the kinds of recurrentsensor-motor patterns that enable actions and experiences to be perceptuallyguided might give the wrong impression that perception is direct and thatthere is no need for any kind of representation. In this sense, "Darkerthe Night" is more than a metaphor for the good human will to understandhow it feels in one's skin. The batbot, the virtual reality headset, theconverter of the high to low frequency sounds, the interface generatedon a computer, all those elements may give the false impression that hightechnology is the "missing link" in the natural history driftthat can help us to overcome the gap in the evolutionary history. However,Eduardo Kac has only used the technological devices to make and to provokeus to make the step forward to "a middle way" of understandingthe relations between the mind and the world: not in opposition to eachother but rather mutually constitutional. "Darker Than Night"shows how "knowledge depends on being in a world that is inseparablefrom our bodies, or language, and our social history - from our embodiment"[14].
The "middle way" would mean that we should accept as factsthe capacities that are rooted in our biological embodiment but we shouldalso accept that they are experienced within the domain of "consensualand cultural history"; that the idea of the world existing somewhere"out there" independent of the knower will never challenge ourinherited conclusions of what the mind is. For the mind is not "aspecial inner arena populated by internal models and representations butis rather the operation of a profoundly interwoven system, incorporatingaspects of brain, body and world" [15].
NOTES:
1. D. J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind - In Search of a FundamentalTheory, Oxford University Press, New York, Oxford, 1996, p.103
2. This question originates from the well known text by Thomas Nagel"What is it like to be a bat?", first published in 1974 and reproducedin Mortal Questions, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1979, pp.165-180
3. The visitors view the bats and the batbot in the cave through a smallwindow but they are given virtual reality headset so that they can receivethe audio and visual information. Thus, the viewer's sight is transformedinto the point of view of the batbot's sonar. The viewer sees a seriesof real-time kinetic white dots against a black background. The white dotsrepresent obstacles encountered by the batbot's sonar. For more completedescription of the project see: http://www.ekac.org/darker.html
4. D. C. Dennett, "Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity"in F. Kessel, P. Cole and D. Johnson, eds, Self and Consciousness: MultiplePerspectives, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1992
5. D. Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, I, IV, sec. 6, quoted acc. D.Dennett.
6. T. Nagel, p.169
7. H. L. Dreyfus, "The Current Relevance of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenologyof Embodiment", The Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy, 4 (Spring1996)
8. D. C. Dennett, Kinds of Minds - Toward an Understanding of Consciousness,Basic Books, New York, 1996, pp.1-19
9. D. C. D. "Consciousness" in The Oxford Companion to theMind, Ed. By Richard L. Gregory, Oxford University Press, New York, 1998,p. 161
10. D. R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach - an Eternal GoldenBraid, Vintage Books, New York, 1989, p.697 There is interesting analogybetween mind and ant colony that Hofstadter has developed in his book alsoquestioning the existence of mind among animals.
11. F. J. Varela, E. Thompson, E. Rosch, The Embodied Mind, MIT Press,Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, 1991, p. 202
12. D. C. Dennett, "The Origins of Selves", Cogito, 3, 1989,p.169.
13. D. C. Dennett, "The Origins of Selves", p.169
14. F. J. Varela, E. Thompson, E. Rosch, The Embodied Mind Ép.149. Further on, in the chapter "Steps to a Middle Way" (pp.133-217)the authors discuss the Cartesian anxiety: in their opinion the extremetreating of "the world and mind as opposed objective and subjectivepoles".
15. A. Clark, "Embodiment and the Philosophy of Mind", Trendsin Neuroscience,19, 2 1996, p.36
Suzana Milevska is an art historian and theorist of visual culture from Skopje, North Macedonia. Milevska holds a Ph.D. in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths College in London (2006) and she was a Visiting Tutor at Goldsmiths (2003 to 2005). In 2004, she was a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar at the Library of Congress. Milevska was appointed the first Endowed Professor in Central and South Eastern European Art Histories at the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna (2013-2015). She was teaching in parallel visual cultures at the Technical University in Vienna (2013-2016). She edited The Renaming Machine (Ljubljana: P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Institute, 2010) and On Productive Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency (Sternberg Press, 2016) and published her book Gender Difference in the Balkans (Saarbrucken, Germany: VDM Verlag, 2010). She lives and works as independent scholar in Skopje.