The inaugural Sfer Ik Award, a $100,000 prize launched by the eponymous art centre near Tulum, Mexico, went to the French artist Antoine Bertin, who will use the money—and accompanying two-month residency in the Mayan jungle—to create an “interspecies installation” that incorporates artificial intelligence (AI) to record and process the “language” of bats, per a project description. The prize was awarded to Bertin during a ceremony on Tuesday (5 December) at Superblue in Miami.
The Bat Cloud is a collaboration with Mirjam Knörnschild, the head of the behavioural ecology and bioacoustics lab at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin. The multi-pronged project will include a habitat for bats, a station for scientific monitoring, an art studio catering to the activities of multiple species and a public listening space where visitors can hear bats’ conversations, which will be processed with the aid of machine learning.
“I have been dreaming of an opportunity to further explore the intersection of AI and listening,” Bertin said in a statement. “I am looking forward to starting work at Sfer Ik during the residency, and to sculpting meaningful and transformative interspecies conversations between humans and bats.”
In addition to $100,000 for The Bat Cloud—plus a residency for Bertin at the Azulik Uh May campus near Tulum, with access to its research and studio facilities—Sfer Ik awarded the Brazilian artists Leandro Lima and Mari Nagem with a special-recognition prize that comes with $20,000 and a 30-day residency. The Lebanese artists Rana Haddad and Pascal Hachem received a second-place prize, with the international trio of Mika Revell, Alex Finnemore and Graeme Revell earning third-place honours.
The Sfer Ik Award’s $100,000 purse makes it one of the largest prizes in North America for both art and technology projects, and contemporary art in general.
