Psychogeographic visualizations: or, what is it like to be a bat?

Abstract

What is it like to be a bat? is an artistic experiment that uses brainwave visualization as a way to speak about affective, cognitive, and imaginative geography – partly through the generation of real data sets and partly as metaphors for what data metrics can never really account for – that is, the incommensurability of experience. The project involves recruiting participants (mostly, but not exclusively, students) to imagine ‘what it is like to be a bat’ as a practice-based critique of Thomas Nagel’s 1974 rejection of the imagination as a useful tool for consciousness studies (Nagel’s essay used the bat as a metaphor, hence our choice of focus). Using electroencephalography brainwave sensors, we mapped and visualized participants’ brainwaves as they imagined, creating what we think of as ‘imagination portraits’. The project is then theorized for the ways it illuminates the limits of visualization and the imagination’s importance as a praxis for qualitative research. As a conceptual guide, we use a creative re-interpretation of psychogeography; however, in our work psychogeography is less about the psychological dimensions of real space and more about the mind’s spatiality, by which we mean the consideration of different forms of imagining as ‘places’ a mind can be taken to, reconfiguring psychogeography from the inside-out. In this way, we are interested in how a geographic understanding of the imagination might allow for conversations about different psychological landscapes of cognition.