[deutsch]
„A short guide to becoming-bat“
Curated by Stefano Perna
„Men have always learned from animals, and even in this age of
electronics and atomic structure we still have much to learn.“
Donald R. Griffin
Radio is not a privilege of the human species. With radio humans are
caught in a becoming-animal that brings them closer to other regions of
the living kingdom. Ethologists and natural scientists have shown that
long time before humans began to exploit the properties of the
electromagnetic spectrum to link each other at great distances, animals
had already developed a sophisticated system for the manipulation of
waves and the transmission of sound signals for the purpose of
communication and orientation. Many species of dolphins, whales,
insects and birds are in effect radio-creatures.
At the heart of this non-human radio-world we find the bat, the
blind-flying mammal, a true FM-creature, able to modulate a system of
echoes and resonances that define a non-visual space within which it
moves, avoid obstacles, locate prey, hunt, communicate. Scientists call
this ability echolocation. In the complete darkness of a cave, bats
build an undulatory space made of signals and calls, of frequencies and
amplitudes, a radically temporalized space, a pulsating space, that
constantly changes, evolves, expands and contracts. Bats inhabit a
radiophonic-world rather than a photo-optical world..
Years ago Rudolf Arnheim, in one of the earliest theoretical texts on
radio, wrote about a "praise of blindness", a sort of an invitation to
all the radio-listeners to becoming-bats. With the radio on, the
listener enters the cave, the darkness falls and its space is suddenly
changed. This spatiality defined by sounding coordinates – and
that of sound waves preserves especially the quality of spread and
contraction, of contagion and reverb – conflicts with the
tangible places that surround our body. Listening to radio puts
ourselves at the center of an ambiguous place – both concrete and
mental – that is no longer designated by what we see around us.
Where exactly are the sounds and the voices I'm hearing? And where
exactly am I when I listen to the radio? Once abandoned the
perspectival space of our home, of our kitchen or our car, we enter
into a waveform space, whose geometry is unknown to us, a kind of
non-human spatiality populated by forces and signs to which our
perceptual system is not perfectly tuned. To understand and manage this
uncanny space that materializes every time we turn a radio device on,
we need – most of the time unconsciously – to quickly
reposition ourselves into a new "place" made of a matrix of spatial and
temporal relationships defined only by the propagation of waves, data
and sound signals. In other words, to inhabit this place we are forced
to practice a rough form of echolocation. Equipped with a
radio-prosthesis this human-hybrid begins to wander into a kind of
space somewhat similar to that of bats, insects and whales. From this
point of view the man-with-a-radio-device is closer to the mythical
figure of the Therianthrope rather then to the postmodern figure of
Cyborg.
The series of works presented here are focused on the conceptual
implications and on the metaphorical exploration of this transversal
connections between different species, this strange form of kinship
between bats (and insects, and whales, and birds…) and humans as
living forms immersed in a radio space. Artists were invited to create
pieces that could work as a sort of imaginary instruction booklets to
guide the listener on the way to this technologically mediated
becoming-animal.
Episodes:
1) "1799. How to become-bats?" by Stefano Perna and Ventriloque Media Collective
2) "Unseen Forces" by Pietro Riparbelli
3) "L‘Amicizia con la ciòca (In friendship with the bell)" by Davide Tidoni and "It's all so dark!" by Anna Raimondo with Younes Baba Ali
4) "Music for becoming-insect" by Sec_