A group of scientists attempts to study the foundations of consciousness by intervening in the neural activity of eight lab-born fruit bats. Using custom neural tags, their experiment amplifies known dynamics in interbrain synchrony. When the bats unexpectedly flee the lab and disperse into the surrounding desert, the open-field data reveals an anomalous neural pattern, named State X. This activity doesn’t seem to belong to any single bat, but forms in interactions between them. As the scientists continue to monitor the colony through continuous, sensory feedback, they find themselves increasingly entangled with their subjects.

Shape of Language emerged from the Enter the Hyper-Scientific residency at EPFL in Lausanne. The project premiered in June 2025 as a two-channel expanded cinema installation at the EPFL Pavilions as part of The Solar Biennale, hosted by mudac, the Museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts in Lausanne. Next to a filmic narration, an ambient, site-specific information display converted small mammals’ neural data provided by the Buzsaki Lab into light patterns. 

The project was developed as a close collaboration with creative technologist Sakander Zirai and composer Studio Øraya. Besides engaging with EPFL’s many experimental laboratories, including the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems and the Soft Transducers lab, we founded the project’s world-making in direct engagement with West Coast research communities focused on animal perception and consciousness research. This included fieldwork at the Anza Borrego state park as well as participation in the AI for Animals conference and a “salon” organized by the California Institute for Machine Consciousness (CIMC). 

The film’s entire soundtrack is composed from processed ultrasonic bat vocalizations recorded by naturalist Don Endicott in the Anza-Borrego desert, as well as of continuous radio signals (pulse, wingbeats, environment) of a migrating bat, provided by the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. These recordings formed the raw material for composer Studio Øraya, who employed techniques of spectral stretching, spatialization, and dynamic resynthesis to search – in a playful way – for latent rhythmic and tonal structures embedded within the data.