Bat Billboard, 2010

an interactive billboard creating novel social interactions between bats and humans. The habitat uses the structure of a billboard and provides luxury housing for bats, addressing the environmental health emergency faced with New York bats known as White Nosed Syndrome.

WHY BILLBOARDS:
1) Underutilized Structure
2) Opportunity for visibility
3) Create previously unseen living brand advertisement
4) Easily adapted with habitat housing
5) Interfaces for understanding eg. tweeting

Bats and birds with their "seed rain" rival humans in their imprint on the terrestrial ecosystems. Bats manage mosquito populations more cost-effectively (up to 20 000 mosquitoes can be devoured by a single bat and turned into potent rose fertilizer) and sans nasty uncontainable poisons. They are the insect control super-force. Bats can be attracted through providing a habitat with dampened temperature cycles such as found in caves, restricted openings, cling able surfaces and proximity to insectivorous resources. The proximity to water can add waterborne insects to a healthy varied diet. The moth attraction of the ubiquitous street-lighting in an urban context provides the equivalent to fast-food fly-thru outlets for the bats.

Bats navigate with echolocation to precisely locate insects in the dark. These ultrasonic bat calls can be made audible to the human audible range with bat-detectors. Bat calls often sound like beautiful patterns of clicks that are very similar to electronic music. Biologists are building libraries to map bat chatter, towards an understanding of their social conversations. Through voice (bat call) recognition software, the billboard can become an interactive display and a public face for the bats and can enable them to communicate with us about their needs in the urban environment. This communication can be playful and has the potential to create a previously unseen form of viral advertising, as well as an ongoing attention to fostering, studying, and maintaining the bat population therein.

The new 2012 revision of the Bat Billboard has spurred a great deal. We did more research in the new and promising strategy of holding the temperature above that which the white nose fungus (Geomyces destructans fungus) can survive. http://www.esajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1890/080187 and has resulted in some real design improvements/developments for a modular temperature controlled system to create thermally stable refugia. We can also work with the relative humidity http://icb.oxfordjournals.org/content/51/3/364.short which may be useful.

The habitat can be build out of of cheap Insulation Foam material lined with with soil propagation mats to adjust and understand preferences of Bats towards Temperature Controlled habitat in conditions where the fungus is unlikely to grow.

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