The Mainz exhibition “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” wants to show that there are other intelligent systems in addition to human perception, such as the echolocation of bats. Interim director Yasmin Afschar sets an impressive accent in the art gallery with the video works and installations of the exhibition.
Colorful spectrogram depicting the echo system
The bat is a special case: it’s a mammal that can fly, which doesn’t really go together, it raises questions and confuses our system. In the exhibition we can at least partially experience what it’s like to be a bat. In the first room we see and hear a work by the artist duo Zheng Mahler. The colorful spectrogram is the visualization of an acoustic signal – at the same time you can hear the sounds of a bat population.
“The duo dealt with the text ‘What is it like to be a bat’ by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, which deals with subjective and objective experience,” says curator Yasmin Afschar.
Difference between subjective experience and objective knowledge
Nagel uses bats as a metaphor to illustrate the differences between subjective experience and objective knowledge. Even after we have researched and experimentally proven everything imaginable about how bats function, such as the way they find their way around using echolocation, Nagel says it will still be impossible to understand how a bat actually perceives its environment.
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