Objects in Flux - RMIT Research Repository - RMIT University

5.
Telling Stories
Cylindric ultrasonic bat detector
Published Sunday, 10 April, 2005
http://www.openobject.org/objectsinflux/?p=16
African heart-nosed bats can hear the footsteps of a beetle
walking on sand from a distance of more than six feet.
[Amazing Bat Trivia] 1
That’s really got nothing to do with echolocation (the sonar
system used by bats) or the device I’m about to describe, but
it’s a pretty stunning piece of trivia.
Bats are fascinating creatures and here in Melbourne they
are a common sight. At dusk streams of grey-headed flying
foxes leave their camp in the Royal Botanical Gardens to
plunder fruit and nectar from suburban flowering gums. The
number of urban bats has swelled in recent years, giving the
impression that the grey-headed flying fox is thriving, but
in reality Australia’s bat population has decreased by 30%
over the past decade. The increase in urban bat colonies is
the result of ongoing destruction to the bats’ native feeding
grounds. The Melbourne Royal Botanical Gardens is
now the only breeding colony of grey-headed flying foxes
1/ Amazing Bat Trivia, http://www.batcon.org/discover/
trivia.html accessed 20 July 2006.
5.1 Introduction
The chapter presents two parrallel naratives.
The central body of the page is given over to
stories developed through the modification
practice while the academic text is relegated to
the margins. The stories written while engaged
in acts of object modification take the form of
personal narratives that document various proj-
ects carried out during the PhD research. i As re-
search documentation, these narratives do not
claim an objective, elevated position. But rather,
they construct partial knowledges from within
the practice (Law, 2000). Initially published on
my research blog, the texts mirror established
forms of user-generated content and actively
engage a diverse community of amateur prac-
titioners. Re-presented here, the texts act as
i. For a complete collection of research
narratives refer to the research blog Objects in
Flux, http://www.openobject.org/objectsinflux.
[Figure 5-1 – facing page]
Searching for bats with the Cylindric Ultrasonic
Bat Detector, Melbourne, Australia, 2004.
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