The Nightsniffing Walks were the culmination of Nightsniffing as a project. These explorations reimagine urban bat walking through the introduction of datasniffing devices. These enable ambulatory encounters with city planning records. Placing data and bats in the same sensory world creates tension between them, which participants resolve by making unexpected connections between planning data, the environment and the bats.
Creating a route at each location required iterative map making and many nights of scouting, locating where the bats frequent, where planning activity feels heaviest, and assessing safety and accessibility. What resulted from such planning and scouting is a partial composition of space, a sketch to be filled out by its many participants – not just the humans, but the datasniffers, heterodynes, cars, trees, databases, streetlights, foxes, terraces and of course the bats.
