Nightsniffing: figuring bats as unruly stakeholders through ambulatory interfaces with urban planning data

Nightsniffing is a practice-based inquiry that works generatively between two key problems – the difficulty of figuring the city’s multifarious multispecies inhabitants in urban decision making, and the challenge of repoliticising digitised systems of governance reshaping urban space. It focuses on London’s urban bats, elusive but exuberant echolocators often unnoticed by the human they share space with, but who can tell us much about the environmental health of our cityscape and help us sound out the challenges of multispecies spatial governance. This is in part thanks to the complex relations bats have with cities and society: vulnerable to changes in the built environment, they are enveloped in a thin tissue of legal protections that give them a role in community alliances against development. Engaging with technologies that make bats enchanting to encounter, and planning resistant to community participation, Nightsniffing developed novel devices and staged walking events in London that brought obtuse data systems stutteringly to life. These activities engendered different conversations regarding who and what are cities are for, how spatial decisions are made, and how they could function otherwise.

The commentary demonstrates how Nightsniffing adds to a constellation of practice concerned with just relationality in the exploration and generation of space, data, and more-than-human life. It constructs this from two bodies of work. First: forms of Critical Technical Practice, critical making and feminist making otherwise. Second: works utilising situated aesthetics, that critically enfold environments, movement and participation to question the structures enabling oppression. Conceptually, it builds on accounts of affect and charisma in conservation and technology, Barad’s agential realism and Simondon’s philosophy of technical objects to craft a framework for signal mixing the affective logics of diverse practices and fields. These affective logics produce patterns of inclusion and exclusion that shape who and what is given weight in decision making. Cross-pollinating them lets us refigure who/what matters and counts in our cities.

The ground is laid through a two pronged investigation: the bio|audio mapping of bat walking experiences and a co-inquiry into the structures of planning data systems. Insights from these investigations informed an expanded and critical making practice, generating lines of intelligibility between these different spheres. From this, I created a handheld contraption for taking on bat walks – the London Development Datasniffer – that articulates nearby planning applications as mechanical vibrations sensible to humans, bats and heterodyne bat detectors. The planning database is parsed through the datasniffer to enter the affective logic of bat walks, but in turn necessitates a reconfiguring of bat walks into a practice of Nightsniffing: nocturnal ambulatory inquiries into layerings of ecologies and socio-economic decision making regarding urban space. The commentary analyses the making process and participant experiences to consider how the practice generates novel spatial affects from bureaucratic data systems within an ecological engagement practice. The project documentation includes digital artefacts from the preliminary investigations, designs and software for the datasniffer and documentation of the final walking events.