SEISMA: 03 ENTOMOLOGY

Cover image: Time of Death (detail), 2017, Swallow (taxidermy), greenbottle flies, nylon, in vitrine, 77.9 x 46.6 x 71.4 cm. © Claire Morgan, Courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve, Paris, Köln, St. Moritz. Photo: David Lawson.

03 ENTOMOLOGY

SEISMA MAGAZINE PUBLISHED BY PARABOLA PRESS EDITOR IN CHIEF MELISSA EVANS EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS BARRETT KLEIN PAUL CAREY-KENT JOE COELHO JENNIFER WONG KUAI SHEN ROSS PIPER CATARINA CARRAO DAVID TRIGG KATE TIGHE CHRISTOPHER EWING CLAIRE KNOX DESIGN LAYOUT MELISSA EVANS TOBY MATTHEWS PRINTED BY HOLYWELL PRESS

WWW.SEISMAMAG.COM @SEISMAMAG

EDITORIAL

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he World Wildlife Fund (WWF) symbol has been a panda since 1961. This makes sense as pandas are mammals we can readily relate to; they have four limbs, milk-feed their young, and are furry and warm-blooded. They also live at human scale.

By contrast, insects live at tiny scale, or ‘shock scale’ in architectural terms, and in tiny places.

They might seem covert, appearing and disappearing suddenly from burrows, pavement cracks, or from tucked under the bark of trees. Moreover, their physical structures are dissimilar to our own and there is a catalogue of negative cultural associations built up around insect characteristics, around their dissimilitude, their otherness. Films such as The Fly, Starship Troopers, or Them!, stories such as Kafka’s Metamorphosis, or Steven King’s The Mist, and some music albums (pp.158-161) reflect and play into our sense that some insects are uncanny and unpleasant. But empathising with insects is valuable.

There has been recent discussion about declines in insect populations, and the effect this might have on global ecosystems (van der Sluijs 2020). Human effects on insect survival range from the more obvious, insecticides and the destruction of wild habitats, to the more hidden, light pollution or introducing non-indigenous species (Knaden et al 2022; Owens et al 2020; Siviter and Muth 2020). In 2020, Crossley et al discovered that insect decline in the US may be less severe than in Europe. Nevertheless, human manipulation of our environment clearly has consequences for the insect world.

So, how can the layperson really hear and respond to insect needs? In his Maxims and Reflections (1833), Goethe suggested that ‘Everyone hears only what he understands’. With this edition we aim to provide a small window into understanding the culture of insects, including their sound and music, their organisational and social systems, their games, and their design.

Cover artist Claire Morgan’s works reveal and challenge our own biases as we realise that their gorgeous and ordered patterns and forms incorporate blowflies. Kuai Shen explores how ants might play and Lisa Schonberg how they sound and communicate. Alexandra Daisy Ginsburg and Marlène Huissoud develop designs with pollinators in mind, Joseph Yoon discusses the potential gifts of insect agriculture, and Fiona Benson illuminates insects’ relationships to each other, revealing bridges to our own.

Through exploring their world further, we find that they are not only beautiful and fascinating, but that they might also be familiar and relatable. So, let’s take an exploratory and celebratory trip through the intricacies and wonders of the insect realm. Perhaps, on understanding them more deeply, we might be able to really hear them too.

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COVER ARTIST INTERVIEW: CLAIRE MORGAN BLUEBOTTLES AND US

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ENTOMORPHOSIS ISABELLA SALAS

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INTERVIEW: FIONA BENSON BEAUTIFUL IN THEIR STRANGENESS

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CICADIAN RHYTHM SUSAN RICHMAN

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ARTICLE: BUGCASTING ROSS PIPER

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STAG BEETLE PAUL BROOKE

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INTERVIEW: MARLèNE HUISSOUD A WHISPER OF THE BEES

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ENTOMAGICAL ANNA COLLETTE HUNT

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ANDRENA NASONII ALEXANDRA BERGMANN

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ARTICLE: PLAYING WITH ANTS & OTHER INSECTS KUAI SHEN

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ON THE SPOT OF A MOTH KRISTA LEIGH STEINKE

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ENTOMOPHONIE LEON LOUDER

HONEYBEE LEG PAUL BROOKE

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BEES SARAH WESTCOTT

Contents

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INTERVIEW: JOSEPH YOON WHY NOT EAT INSECTS?

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PARADISE LOST ANNETTE TOWNSHEND

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VISITING THE MOTH ENTHUSIAST BETH LETTINGTON

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ENTOMORPHOSIS ISABELLA SALAS

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INTERVIEW: ALEXANDRA DAISY GINSBERG A POLLINATOR’S PERSPECTIVE

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INSECTOR JEFFREY TURBOFF

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THE LOST WINGS OF SUMMER TRACEY BUSH

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BEETLES CYNTHIA YATCHMAN

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BULWARK, BEETLE LUCAS ROSSI

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INTERVIEW: LISA SCHONBERG A DEEP ATTENTION TO PLACE

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TELLING OF THE BEES JAKE ESHELMAN

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40 DAYS AFTER THE STORM KRISTA LEIGH STEINKE

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INTERVIEW: CATHERINE CHALMERS THE NATURE OF ART

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OMMATIDIUM SHAWN SMITH

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ARTICLE: THE DARK SIDE OF THE COCOON JOE COELHO

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ENTOMORPHOS HECTOR GONZALEZ

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PURPLE POPLAR POLYPORE ANNA SZALC

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KATHERINE AND THE EARLY THORN BETH LETTINGTON

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INTERVIEW: STEVEN KUTCHER FLICK INSECTS

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BEEHIVE: SHARED HOME GABRIELA DEISOLBI

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ARTICLE: THE NOBEL FRUIT FLY CATARINA CARRAO

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INTERVIEW: UNA CHAUDHURI EXIT, PURSUED BY A BUG

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MONARCH BUTTERFLIES SARAH WESTCOTT

COVER ARTIST

Claire

Morgan

IN CONVERSATION WITH PAUL CAREY-KENT

bluebottles and us

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or 20 years – after graduating in sculpture from Northumbria University in Newcastle – Gateshead-based Irish artist Claire Morgan has made beautiful yet discomfiting floating installations with such natural materials as taxidermied birds, animal skins, dead flies and dandelion seeds.

Typically, she arranges them with geometric precision to set up a contrast between the ordered and the wild, often contrasting many regulated insects or seeds with birds or animals as a more ‘disruptive’ presence. Insects are just one part of that, but have featured regularly over the years as a – somewhat unusual – art material. Bluebottle flies have been her ‘go-to’ insect, with various other species also making appearances.

Morgan explains that ‘When I started working with insects I was interested in their smallness and multiplicity in relation to us, and in the idea of control. On the face of it, bluebottles felt like the antithesis of that, given the way they behave, and I wanted to get some kind of control of them and see what that would do. At another level, I realise that isn’t true – indeed, there’s a complete absence of chaos in their comings and goings – within minutes of an animal dying, the body calls to them, and they know. What may seem random natural processes are actually choreographed sequences.’

Surprisingly, perhaps. Morgan says it is simple to preserve the flies: ‘They have an exoskeleton, and they’re so small there’s not much to go wrong with them.’ She freezes the dead flies to make sure nothing else is living on them, then uses alcohol as a simple preservative. ‘Things don’t decay unless they get eaten by something. So I just arrest that part of the process that usually happens, and that insects themselves take part in.’

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Heart of Darkness uses thousands of exactingly-threaded bluebottles to form a cube made up of smaller, intersecting, cubes. ‘Labour and repetition have been important tools for me’, says Morgan. ‘I discovered that I could use incredibly fragile materials to create the illusion of precise geometric structures. Any event might destroy these structures. As the potential for destruction seems closer, the senses of frailty and futility become more powerful, and there is a particular beauty in that moment’. Extreme control is imposed on apparent chaos in a way which, paradoxically, emphasises both the insignificance of an individual within a large body and also the critical importance of individuals to the overall effect – if one slips out of position, you notice. The internal cubes are made up of differing densities of flies, so creating an illusory form with a dense, dark core, with spaces between individual flies becoming tighter and tighter towards the core.

Approaching the sculpture hanging at a distance, the overall form is visible before you reach the point of being able to distinguish what the individual elements are which make it up – itself a phenomenon one can see in nature, as in a flock of starlings. Then you realise that the organic underlies the geometric. That transition interests Morgan from two perspectives. First, it stands in for the wider differences in how we perceive things as against the underlying reality. As part of that, she notes, the small objects look connected as they create a massive controlled form, ‘but actually they hang on separate individual threads and are not the unity they appear to be.’ Secondly, that switch to a close-up view is likely to change the viewer’s emotional response: the beauty of modulated regularity from a distance is revealed to be constituted by something that most people find repulsive. We move from wonder to horror. Morgan points out that the process of insect metamorphosis, most paradigmatically from caterpillar to butterfly, follows a comparable path. Moreover, that’s a powerful metaphorical aspect for us – ‘the complete transformation embodies cycles of change’.

Image caption: Heart of Darkness (detail), 2012, Bluebottles, nylon, lead, 250 x 75 x 75 cm. Photo: Claire Morgan Studio

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‘the morphology of each stage

is staggeringly different’ 010

What does an entomologist make of Morgan’s observations?

Dr Ross Piper emphasises that such flies as the bluebottle, Calliphora vomitaria – a type of blowfly – are typically reviled, but woefully misunderstood. ‘To many they are animals of filth, of death and of decay.

However, in an ecological sense they are absolutely crucial to life on land, efficiently and quietly recycling dead animals back into the web of life. In ideal conditions, they turn dead animals into more blowflies in a matter of days, nourishing the soil and a huge variety of other species in the process. Without these animals, the cycling of materials and energy through terrestrial ecosystems cannot happen.’ Moreover the larvae, the stage responsible for this, are works of art in their own right, ‘beautifully adapted feeding machines that have dispensed with extraneous features to complete one task and one alone – to feed and grow as quickly as possible. They have no eyes, no limbs, just the instinct to feed quickly so they can grow and transform into an adult fly. And what a transformation this is. A blowfly larva and the adult fly it will become are the same individual, yet the morphology of each stage is staggeringly different. All of the instructions to build these two wildly different bodies are contained within the ancient code of the fly’s DNA. A cascade of events turns genes off or on, transforming a writhing animal of rotting bodies into an animal of the air.

Image caption: The Beauty and the Beast (detail), 2012, Bluebottles, morpho butterfly, nylon, lead, 102 x 52 x 9 cm. Photo: Claire Morgan Studio

Yet that conventional contrast of wonder and horror, Morgan points out, is subjectively based. It’s a point that’s taken up in The Beauty and the Beast: evenly populated grids of bluebottles surround a morpho butterfly, likely identified as the eponymous ‘beauty’. But our cultural norms, prior experiences and human sensory perception determine what we find ‘beautiful’: trying to prove that an ‘objective’ basis underlies such aesthetic judgments has frustrated many a philosopher. Morgan prefers to see matters as non-binary – apparent opposites are just different points on a continuum. That said, butterflies do gain in our terms from not threatening our food hygiene; being a more visible size for us; having more obvious colour; keeping quiet; and flapping their wings at a speed we can follow. Yet one can readily imagine alternative frameworks in which the flies are the attractive ones. And even from her human viewpoint, Morgan says bluebottles have plenty of ‘beauty’ – for example, if you zoom in on their sheen. Her butterflies are anyway imperfect, but she rather likes that: many were collected at a butterfly house, where butterflies lacking the energy to escape predation by other insects overnight would be found dead and collected in the mornings.

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Many of Morgan’s works combine insects with other natural – and sometimes synthetic – items, setting up more potential for internal narrative. Bearing sets a sphere of greenbottles above a nest, as if a larder is place ready to assist in raising the chicks. Here the apparent contrasts work differently: it might seems that the random movements of flies have been brought under rigorous control and separated out from the irregular build-up of grass and twigs.

Yet, as we have seen, flies’ movements are precisely goal-oriented. And nests also have their own underlying system of form in the service of function: they achieve cohesion and flexibility through the entwining of flexible struts in frictional contact, so that a seemingly disordered bundle of bendy rods is woven into a material that is lightweight and springy, yet unified. The two shapes are very much on a continuum, as well as combining to make an unusual take on the minimalist way of contrasting elemental forms. The title, says Morgan, ‘relates to the formal quality of the sphere relative to the smooth internal curvature of the nest – like a ball and socket joint’.

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‘flies’ movements are precisely goal-oriented’

Moving on from the blowflies that make up the piece, to how they are arranged, there is a nice contrast here between the flies in their natural state and their suspension to form the three dimensional shape. Our understanding of the natural world is extremely superficial, rather like our everyday encounters with flies, but the reality of nature is vastly more complex. Consider for a moment that to date we have described just over 1.5 million animal species, just over a million of which are insects. Think about all the interactions between individuals and between species – the predation, the parasitism, the symbioses, the territorial disputes, the courtship, the reproduction, happening all of the time, everywhere. For me, thinking about this is akin to contemplating infinity. There are still millions of animal species out there to describe too, to say nothing of trying to work how these species live and interact. Answering these questions would take an army of biologists thousands of years.’ Morgan’s neat geometry can also stand in for our desire to order the complexity of the natural world to make sense of it. The concept of a species – and there are some 1,900 known species of blowfly – illustrates that. ‘It is a useful tool’, says Piper, ‘but one that we invented. There are currently 32 different species definitions and there isn’t one that applies to all life. Our minds thrive on order – neatly arranged compartments – but nature is dynamic and fuzzy with poorly defined boundaries. Regardless of the organisms in question, lineages are continually splitting and rejoining over time – rather like the braided flow of a river in a delta – and this is the only commonality we can find.’

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Imageb caption: Bearing (detail), 2018, Greenbottle flies, small twigs and detritus, nylon, in vitrine, 98.5 x 51.8 x 51.9 cm. Photo: Claire Morgan Studio

Image caption: Here is the end of all things, 2011, Barn owl (taxidermy, A10: 473093/01), thistle seeds, bluebottles, nylon, lead, 240 x 900 x 150 cm.

Photo: Tom Gundelwein

Love will tear us apart is another instance of Morgan using a recognisable phrase as a title: here referring to Joy Division’s song rather than de Villeneuve’s fairytale or Conrad’s novel.

Such titles provide a shortcut to potential meanings – might it be, for example, that Ian Curtis’s line ‘something so good, just can’t function no more’ could be applied to the environment? That’s plausible given that Morgan combines bluebottles and chaffinches – it’s not obvious who’s chasing who – with rose petals and pieces of polythene bags.

The bags aren’t there to point narrowly to the issue of plastic waste, so much as more broadly to the whole cycle of consumer consumption. ‘The waste plastic’, says Morgan, ‘is like a contemporary artefact that embodies our lazy, indulgent, throwaway culture, and it provides a very clear and literal example of the impact we have on our surroundings.

But I am not making work about rubbish. More than this, it embodies the social and psychological toll this culture can take on us, as individuals and as animals. There is a jarring between the disruptive, meticulous, and unstoppable cycles of life and death that ultimately govern us, and the superficial, seductive, sedate, safe and easily consumable things that we choose to use to entertain and distract ourselves.’

Image caption: Time of Death, 2017, Swallow (taxidermy), greenbottle flies, nylon, in vitrine, 77.9 x 46.6 x 71.4 cm. Photo: David Lawson

In Here is the end of all things an owl emerges from a cuboid force field of thistle seeds – suggesting the cycles of time – and bluebottles: it’s made it through the first three cubes of seeds, and is about to face the fourth, of bluebottles.

‘Since the owl died due to an injury’, explains Morgan, ‘one of its feet is missing, and some bluebottles appear to have already landed on the damaged foot.’ And while the swallow in Time of Death encounters such a blizzard of greenbottles, they seem as much a threat as a source of food. That complicates the assumption that the flies will be eaten by the owl, reminding us that in due course the flies will feed on it as carrion.

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Image caption: Love Will Tear Us Apart, 2008, Chaffinches (taxidermy), rose petals, polythene, bluebottles, nylon, lead, 200 x 180 x 150 cm. Photo: Claire Morgan Studio.

Image caption L-R: I only dared to touch you once I knew that you were dead, 2023, 32 page concertina fold book, drypoint and collagraph with hand colouring, 32 x 565.6 x 17.7 cm; Dead Weight, 2023, Wax, human hair, fox skin, mixed media, 165 x 50 x 55 cm. Photo: Galerie Karsten Greve

‘Foxes embody something wild, untameable, intuitive, visceral –

maybe even carnal’

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Image caption: Bloom, 2023, Wax, bluebottles, nylon, in vitrine, 13 x 57 x 27 cm. Photo: John McKenzie

In one work a wax figure holds a fox skin in an intimate embrace – made following life drawings sessions of a model posing with the skin. Foxes appeal, she says, because they exist ‘on the periphery of the synthetic, rectangular environments we’ve made for ourselves and the wilder, untamed world. They’re incredibly beautiful and I feel a connection with them somehow: they embody something wild, untameable, intuitive, visceral – maybe even carnal’. She sees the new work as having ‘a weird mixture of tenderness and violence, of awareness and yet denial of our relationship with nature.’ It’s the mode of expression rather than the theme that’s new: Morgan says her practise as a whole ‘has been focussed on how we humans understand and interact with the rest of the natural world, and our unwillingness to acknowledge our absolute lack of autonomy or control. I look at humans as animals, and the complexity of our intellectual dislocation from the landscape that sustains us.’

In Bloom Morgan returns to bluebottles, strung on thread in the new context of a wax model.

It suggests the body decaying and being consumed by insects. We’re part of that in a way we may not wish to be: ‘it’s a dark but fascinating process’, she says, ‘that emphasises how we are just another organism in nature, we’re not entities in isolation – and our bodies know that much more clearly than we do … That’s not really morbid, as the process of life includes death. The way we desperately pursue youth and try to distance ourselves from the natural world has a massive role to play in what we are doing to the earth.’ There needs to be a greater understanding between species, and it would help, she says, ‘if we saw ourselves more as what we are: intrinsically wrapped up in the natural world, not just living on it ...’ We’re wrapped up, by that token, with the bluebottle.

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‘it’s a dark

but fascinating process’

Image caption: Claire Morgan in her studio, May 2023. Photo: John McKenzie

Claire Morgan is represented by Karsten Greve Gallery, Cologne, Paris and St. Moritz. Her solo show ‘I only dared to touch you once I knew that you were dead’ runs at Galerie Karsten Greve, Paris, 4 Nov 2023 – 6 Jan 2024.

For more on the artist and her work, please visit http://claire-morgan.co.uk/ and @clairemorganstudio.

All photos © Claire Morgan, Courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve, Paris, Köln, St. Moritz.

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Entomorphosis

© Isabella Salas. All rights reserved.

BY ISABELLA SALAS

Image caption: Entomorphosis by IsabellaSalas

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© Isabella Salas. All rights reserved.

Image caption: Entomorphosis by IsabellaSalas

Entomorphosis is a curated ensemble of 783 artworks, incorporating a fusion of entomology, digital art, and photography. Here entomology becomes a portal; Salas utilizing generative adversarial networks to reimagine the insect kingdom, transforming the scientific into the surreal.

In this captivating odyssey, boundaries between species blur and mutate, offering viewers a glimpse into a parallel world shaped by both nature and algorithm. Vibrant photography provides an arresting visual narrative, which alludes to and iterates on not only the physical forms of insects, but also their mutations, resilience, and adaptation. The collection as a whole invites us to explore the delicate dance between reality and imagination through the intricate microcosm of the insect realm.

Commissioned by the Montréal Insectarium | Espace pour la vie and MUTEK as part of the Entomophilia Celebrations. This project was made possible through access to 763 original images belonging to the Insectarium’s original archives.

For more on Isabella Salas and her work, please visit https://isabellasalas.com/

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© Isabella Salas. All rights reserved.

Image caption: Entomorphosis by IsabellaSalas

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© Isabella Salas. All rights reserved.

Image caption: Entomorphosis by IsabellaSalas

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iona Benson is a poet whose vivid lyricism strikes at the marrow and gentles the soul in equal measure. This delicate and thrilling equilibrium has garnered her work significant attention and praise from readers and critics alike.

In 2006, she received an Eric Gregory Award and in 2009 became the first in the Faber New Poets series.

Her debut collection, Bright Travellers (Cape 2014) won the Seamus Heaney Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Since then, Benson has authored two further books: the searing Vertigo & Ghost (Cape 2019), which also won the Forward Prize; and the headily gorgeous Ephemeron (Cape 2022). All three of these collections have been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize.

In 2019, Arts and Culture at the University of Exeter commissioned ‘In the Company of Insects’ (Arts and Culture, Univerity of Exeter 2019), a collaborative project between Benson and sound artists Mair Bosworth and Eliza Lomas. The project comprises three parts: ‘Bioluminescent Baby’, a series of poems written by Benson and interwoven with sound art by Bosworth and Lomas; ‘Insect Love Songs’, a public anthology of poems written by workshop participants and published poets; and ‘Insect Chimeras’, a collection of children’s poems and artwork, created in the course of workshops run by Benson and artist Catherine Cartwright. Bioluminescent Baby (2019) went on to be published as a pamphlet by Guillemot Press, with illustrations by Anupa Gardner, and some of these poems also form the first section of Ephemeron.

Here, Benson speaks to Barrett Klein about her collaborative working with entomologists, her own research and writing processes, the urgency and transience of life cycles, and the beauty of the journey.

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Fiona Benson

beautiful in their strangeness

Image caption: Portrait of Fiona Benson by Jessica Farmer

IN CONVERSATION WITH BARRETT KLEIN

EDITED AND WRITTEN

BY JENNIFER WONG

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Barrett Klein: I understand that your interest in insects may stem from your mother, is that right?

Fiona Benson: Yes, I think it probably does. My mother has always been interested in zoology and the natural world. She was a primary school teacher, so when we were little, she would focus in on things on our walks, but my relationship with insects is rather ambiguous.

BK: How has the relationship changed over the course of your life?

FB: I have always been interested in them, but we thought for a long time that my father was allergic to bees and wasps, so there was a certain amount of respect to that relationship. When I was older, I travelled to areas where cockroaches were a problem, and I really don’t like cockroaches, so there was both fear and fascination.

We lived in Cyprus for a while and there were lots of interesting insects there, including these very big, gentle ants. More recently there has been a lot of concern in the UK about declining populations of bees and pollinators, and ever since we’ve had this garden, I’ve been planting for them (lavender, catmint, salvia, bee balm, buddleia etc). It’s been lovely to see insect activity increasing in the garden. I think that probably led on to these poems about insects, and my interest developing further.

BK: Even though you don’t like cockroaches, your respect for them comes across in your poem, ‘I Love You, Mama Cockroach,’ and there seems to be a particular connection you have made with their parental care.

FB: I had to write a cockroach poem because I have a very strong disgust reaction towards them, and I wanted to confront that. It transpires that they are really good mothers.

BK: You have called poetry, ‘music on a word level’, and considered the origins of poetry as a spoken art. Did you find your recent sound recording collaborations a natural way to share your poetry?

FB: That added a really lovely extra awareness to this project. I was working with two radio producers, Mair Bosworth and Eliza Lomas, and they are incredibly attuned to the aural world. They were particularly interested in working with insects that communicate through sound, and it was a lovely genre to use, to record the insects themselves and layer in their sounds. The kind of sound design they created was really interesting. Mair Bosworth imagined these spooky crunchy wet noises for cicada larvae underneath the earth. I think that listening to poems is important, so to have these poems recorded and given space in this way has been a real luxury.

BK: Even with the visually oriented subjects, for example, biomimicry of Morpho butterfly wings, the sounds worked really well.

FB: I do think of poems as music: a scoring of the human voice and trying to make music without instruments. The language of entomology has many gifts, like the word ‘instar’. I hadn’t come across it before and it’s such a lovely word. Many of the words were new to me, and they were very beautiful in their strangeness.

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Image caption: Still from video of I Love You, Mama Cockroach by Fiona Benson and Eliza Lomas, from ‘In the Company of Insects’.

Video by Steven Haywood. Photograph by diliananikolova/iStock ‘In the Company of Insects’ was commissioned by Arts and Culture, University of Exeter You can view this video using FrameAlive or by visiting the Arts and Culture website www.artsandcultureexeter.co.uk.

Still from video of Notes towards an Understanding of Butterfly Wings by Fiona Benson and Eliza Lomas, from ‘In the Company of Insects’.

Video by Steven Haywood. ‘In the Company of Insects’ was commissioned by Arts and Culture, University of Exeter You can view this video using FrameAlive or by visiting the Arts and Culture website www.artsandcultureexeter.co.uk.

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Image caption: Still from video of Firefly Suite by Fiona Benson and Mair Bosworth, from ‘In the Company of Insects’..

Video by Steven Haywood. ‘In the Company of Insects’ was commissioned by Arts and Culture, University of Exeter You can view this video using FrameAlive or by visiting the Arts and Culture website www.artsandcultureexeter.co.uk

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BK: All the words we use all the time in entomology, we can’t take them for granted. I’m also curious to hear about your creative process and how you incorporated the terminology and the research concepts that may not have come so naturally.

FB: The biological science was easier for me to understand than any elements which included physics. I spoke to a specialist in biophotonics at the University of Exeter, Professor Vukusic, about the blue Morpho and he tried to explain the physics of how the colours work on the scales of the butterfly’s wings, but I just couldn’t get it, so I ended up writing about butterfly wings as something that we desire because of their beauty.

BK: Actually, that has only recently been worked out. The stable blue across an iridescent Morpho wing has confused people for over a hundred years and so it has been exciting to read recent research on the Morpho wing about the complicated layering and the spacing of layering – two of the factors which contribute to the hue and the intensity of hue (Giraldo et al 2018; Song et al 2017). It’s also fascinating to consider how these naturally exquisite structures could be replicated through biomimicry; how we might try to imitate what’s happening in the physics of the butterfly wing.

FB: That’s what Professor Vukusic has been researching. One amazing application would be for the thread used in surgery and specifically the tension of the thread. He has been developing a thread which displays as a certain colour at a particular tension.

BK: You have been learning from entomologists about the array of approaches in studying the wealth of insects around us. I counted nine orders of insects included in the fourteen poems for your project and pamphlet Bioluminescent Baby, which is pretty impressive! I wonder if you decided to reflect diversity of insects deliberately, or if this was a fortuitous case of serendipity.

FB: I did want to write about a variety of insects, and not just those that are more obvious. I wanted to be diverse, but sometimes it depended on what we found as well, so there was an element of chance. We did some pond samples with kids which led to a caddisfly poem. Then I went to witness the mayfly emergence at Mottisfont Abbey on the chalk stream there; and the River Keeper Neil Swift pointed out all these amazing caddisfly cases made of tiny bits of white pebbles and chalk. Suddenly, caddisflies were everywhere!

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BK: Let’s return for a moment to your creative process and how you find it might differ when collaborating with scientists or when using scientific data. Were you inspired in the field and then went in your own direction, or was it more a back-andforth process?

FB: It was a bit of both. I am genuinely interested in the natural world, so I knew I would be creatively interested, but it was often more about feeding in lots of information and then waiting for it to filter out a little; what was it that had caught my imagination? I tried not to force it too much and just let it dream a little before I wrote anything.

I did a lot of research into cockroaches, but ‘I Love You, Mama Cockroach’ came out much later with everything I remembered about the mothering techniques all jumbled in together. There’s a dream time between taking in all the information and then hopefully getting a poem, but it’s not always the poem you expect.

Image caption: Marmalade Hoverfly woodcut by Anupa Gardner from Bioluminescent Baby by Fiona Benson Published by Guillemot Press 2019

I do a great deal of free writing and will take notes when I am on field trips and then I will research. Sometimes the research happens after I have started the poem because I want to backtrack myself and find out more about something. For some of the projects I made multiple visits, for example, to the hover flies and the field crickets, and that process made me very aware of the speed at which insect lives run.

BK: It is noticeable in your work, that you have conducted a lot of background research, not only in the terms you use, but also the way they flow together. Did you find any parallels between the process of writing poetry and the processes you were witnessing in the work of your scientific collaborators?

Image caption: Blue Morpho woodcut by Anupa Gardner from Bioluminescent Baby by Fiona Benson Published by Guillemot Press 2019

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FB: I think there is an observational element; writers are always paying close attention to the world and entomologists do the same.

There’s an affinity in their respect for the natural world, in the attentiveness and openness, and in not being closed to different possibilities.

I could imagine myself studying some of these insects. Poetry is my way of studying them, I guess, a kind of creative response, but the scientists are doing the same thing.

For example, I noticed this similarity with the scientists I met who are studying the behaviours of cicadas, mapping brood locations and emergences. It’s just a different way of responding to and recording the world; we both try to learn about the world and to understand it.

Image caption: Blue Ghost Fly woodcut by Anupa Gardner from Bioluminescent Baby by Fiona Benson Published by Guillemot Press 2019

BK: True, and your poems are revelatory in the way they explain natural phenomena so beautifully. They would be a really powerful tool to help teach certain topics in entomology. For example, in your poem ‘Love Poem, Lampyridae’ which focuses on glowworms, we see the idea of the female’s ‘single green seducing star’, and it made me think of human intrusion and evolutionary traps as things that unwittingly seduce other organisms. Some of your work also touches on light pollution and habitat change, which is especially important with bioluminescent fireflies (Lewis et al 2020). One of the compelling features of this work is that you don’t have a single voice or a single message. This speaks to the variety of subjects and topics to explore when you’re looking at such a diverse taxon as insects.

FB: The light pollution issue feels particularly important because it’s not the most obvious problem, and yet it’s so damaging for insects and it’s quite a simple fix – you can just close your curtains.

Image caption: Magicicada woodcut by Anupa Gardner from Bioluminescent Baby by Fiona Benson Published by Guillemot Press 2019

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You travelled across the ocean to join a Tennessee scientist in the Smokies Mountains to explore a natural phenomenon which only exists in a few places in the world: synchronous bioluminescence in fireflies.

FB: Yes, humans are very attracted to light and dark, and in poetry that kind of imagery is all pervasive. Mair and I were excited to see the fireflies and it really was beautiful. It was the darkness that was synchronous (Sarfati et al 2021), which I hadn’t previously understood, so there were these dark spells and then the light would come, but it wasn’t the pulse of synchronous lights I’d been expecting.

And yet, there was also this unexpected beauty; the dark being a form of listening. I’m particularly fond of listening as a form of communication.

I also felt guilt because I was away from my family, and my children were still young at the time, and the fireflies were signalling for each other, not me.

It felt slightly like eavesdropping. We can’t fully understand their communication and they’re not making a show for our entertainment. There is an urgency to what they’re doing, and they have their own motivations.

BK: Yes, these beautiful bioluminescences are happening despite us. I’m really curious to learn about how you selected your collaborators and about some of your experiences working alongside them.

FB: The ‘In the Company of Insects’ project was funded by Arts and Culture at the University of Exeter, so some of the scientists were chosen because they were based at the university; in the case of the hover fly team, at the Penryn Campus.

It’s an amazing experience to have scientists open their laboratories and research to you. All of them were so kind in sharing their expertise. With the cicada experts, we had to chase them because they were on the move, mapping cicadas, in a car with ‘Cicada 1’ on the number plate!

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‘there were these dark spells and then the light would come’

BK: Similarly, introduction of exotic or invasive species is often not the focus in public discourse about what is causing insect destructions or declines.

BK: Fantastic! Let’s look at your poem ‘Magicicadas’ for a moment, because it includes an especially beautiful, evocative description of moulting: after seventeen years, cases splitting down their backs emerging like the wet head of a baby, wrestling out of their tight old skin arching back like an orgasm, like an ecstatic gymnast on the high trapeze; sap-green, bunker-pale their damp wings lemon before they stiffen and straighten, lattice brown.

This is such a major transition, where you have an arthropod in a suit of armour which has to shed in order to grow (Chapman 2012). They’re not only removing their old covering – ripping out their throat and foregut, they’re ripping out their anus with their hind gut, they’re tearing out the tracheae through the spiracles, and all of that is visible inside their exuviae. They are vulnerable for some treacherous period, while they’re sclerotising (hardening), melanising (gaining colour), and how necessary, yet potentially horrifying the experience could be for an insect.

FB: They are strange, aren’t they? I think the bunker came because they’re underground for so many years, away from the sunlight (Kritsky 2021).

BK: And you make mention that they can only make it out as long as their forest environment hasn’t changed.

FB: It’s a really sad story that by the time Brood XI was ready to emerge, their forest had gone because of development in the area (but see Cooley 2021; Cooley et al 2012).

BK: In another of your poems, you refer to the fungus that has evolved in order to exploit these seventeen-year, periodical cicadas. Why do they develop for thirteen or seventeen years underground, depending on the species, and why for those specific lengths of time?

Why is the number of years a prime number? There are thoughts that they may have had to survive through long, cold spells in the past, or to have out-competed parasites, but there is this single fungus, which can take over the abdomens of male cicadas, and rub off onto females, too. Curiously, the fungus actually changes the song of the males, and they end up singing with a higher pitch (Simon et al 2022).

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Image caption: Still from video of Magicicadas by Fiona Benson and Mair Bosworth, from ‘In the Company of Insects’. .

Video by Steven Haywood. Photograph by Fiona Benson.

‘In the Company of Insects’ was commissioned by Arts and Culture, University of Exeter You can view this video using FrameAlive or by visiting the Arts and Culture website www.artsandcultureexeter.co.uk

Image caption: Still from video of Field Crickets by Fiona Benson and Mair Bosworth, from ‘In the Company of Insects’.

Video by Steven Haywood. Photograph by Fiona Benson.

‘In the Company of Insects’ was commissioned by Arts and Culture, University of Exeter You can view this video using FrameAlive or by visiting the Arts and Culture website www.artsandcultureexeter.co.uk

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FB: Yes, and the cicada experts I was working with mentioned that the males will also begin to behave like females, to click their wings in the same manner as the females (Cooley 2018).

BK: When you write about field crickets, you are bringing in precise scientific information, but you also interleave this with personal accounts and impressions and expressions. Does that come naturally, or do you consciously have to think about how to weave the personal into these scientific happenings?

FB: I think my way of understanding insects is quite human throughout. Anthropomorphising hasn’t been very fashionable in poetry recently, but I feel our understanding of the Earth is so limited by our humanness and we only ever understand things through a human lens, so with this project I didn’t want to not consider the human; I actually wanted to lean into a human perspective more strongly.

This poem is more confessional, but I didn’t direct it that way, that was just what happened because my response to these field crickets was quite personal. I identified with them, so I just let it go there. Trying not to censor that kind of material and being honest about human experience has been really important to me, whether I’m writing about insects or other things.

BK: One of your commentaries is that in a sexual sense, maybe we are not so far removed from these little beings, whirling towards the singing males. Do you think humans are too quick to reject such connections?

FB: I think it’s harder to find with insects than with something that is very close to us, like a chimpanzee. For insects, I thought it was especially important to find the common ground because we have these adverse reactions to them. If you want to overcome those reactions, you have to have some empathy with insects and their lives and find the parallels with your own urges. Humans have pushed insects away from our reckoning and become very distant to them. I think I was trying to narrow that gap.

BK: You write that the field cricket is ‘a slave to DNA’, which reminds me of Richard Dawkins’ work The Selfish Gene (1976) – that we’re vehicles for our genetic material. It’s not very enticing for many people to think about, but I felt that was one really compelling way that you drew us and drew yourself together with those crickets and their response to the singing male crickets.

FB: The poem is also about love; both versions of the story are in there. There’s the idea that we’re being used by our biology to reproduce, but there’s also the idea that the child is very loved, and that the journey is worth it in the end – the idea that the journey itself is beautiful and that it might be where we find meaning.

BK: Your poem ‘Notes on the Understanding of Butterfly Wings’ is another interesting chapter involving thermal biomimicry and that’s another world that is invisible to us, rendered visible in ways that can be meaningful from an engineering standpoint as well as in understanding how insects work. I loved the evocative imagery of the line: ‘the grass like an infested pelt’.

FB: For that image, I was thinking about our childhoods when there were a lot more insects. I remember the outside light being on and it being crowded with insects. It’s quite terrifying that there is that absence there now, so I wanted that child-life with that meadow-hopping.

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BK: Let’s now look at your poem ‘Mayfly’ in which you ask the question: ‘who says ecstasy must be prolonged?’ Yours is the only cultural reference I have ever found to the order of mayflies, Ephemeroptera, that doesn’t lament the ephemeral nature of their lives, and by extension, our lives. I think that is fascinating!

‘Ephemeroptera’ means short-lived, winged-one in Greek, and their most extreme brevity of lifespan is expressed by the females of one species in the southeastern United States which lives for months to a couple of years as an immature, but as an adult they can live for less than five minutes! In five minutes, she has to emerge with wings, select a mate, and lay fertilised eggs before dying (Sweeney & Vannote 1982).

FB: I think I found it consoling to see that insects have quite a long larval stage before this very brief adult stage. It’s as if they have a secret life of their own before we see them. There’s something quite magical about that.

BK: There’s a longhorn beetle whose lifespan was found to be twenty-seven years as a larva!

FB: It’s quite nice to know that they have a lengthy previous existence before they emerge. There’s something so mystical about the transformations that they undergo; to come out with equipment they’ve never used before and have to figure out how to use it in a such short space of time. I think their transformations are beyond anything we could invent.

BK: Yes, here they are going through what some would argue is the most meaningful time in their lives, in that it spells out their genetic legacy, and in that moment, as you say, they have got to figure it out. Innate behaviors kick in, but still they sometimes face novel environmental stimuli, stressors, and conditions, and they have to be pretty versatile in the face of such potential trauma (Dukas 2008). It’s amazing to think what that learning curve would be like, be it over hours or minutes.

I am curious if you feel your future holds additional arthropods. Do you have any plans to continue with your insect explorations?

FB: I think they’re always going to be there. I don’t plan to do another project specifically focused on insects, but I still love watching and learning about them, so I think that will always come out naturally in my work.

BK: Thank you for sharing your time and exquisite work with me, Fiona.

‘In the Company of Insects’ can be found at https://www.artsandcultureexeter.co.uk Bioluminscent Baby is available from Guillemot Press at https://www.guillemotpress.co.uk Bright Travellers, Vertigo & Ghost, and Ephemeron are all available from Penguin Books.

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Image caption: Cover of Bioluminescent Baby by Fiona Benson. Published by Guillemot Press 2019. Woodcuts by Anupa Gardner

Image caption: Cicadian Rhythm by Susan Ruchman

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Image caption: Piper using a light trap up a tree to attract insects on BBC Myanmar expedition. Photography by Anwar Mamon.

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y interest in nature has been life-long. From my first tottering steps I was spellbound, which was bad news for the various small beasts in my garden and wider environs. Small, grubby fingers ferreting unfortunate beetles and caterpillars from their hiding places and incarcerating them in used margarine tubs, often together and often in pretty squalid conditions. I was also quite partial to eating the odd ant. Not sure why, but in my defence, it was the early 1980s, I was young and I didn’t know any better. My favourite was a violet ground beetle. At the time, I had no real idea what it was. All I knew was that it was big, metallic purple and that it deserved a stint in a tub. This is probably how it begins for all zoologists. I’d say the vast majority of humans start out with a deeply embedded interest in the natural world.

As long as there have been people we have wanted to understand the living world and the animals that surround us. Initially, this curiosity in our fellow animals probably didn’t extend much past trying to establish what was good to eat, what was useful in other ways and what was best avoided. As changes in the way we lived and sourced food left us with more time on our hands this practical interest eventually blossomed into a curiosity for curiosity’s sake and in the last 300 years in particular a scientific endeavour, passed from one generation of biologists to the next, has tirelessly strived to describe the species we share the planet with.

Bugcasting

BY ROSS PIPER

My own path led me down academic avenues and I steadily defined the elements of my work that gave me the most satisfaction, namely sharing my enthusiasm for the bewildering diversity of other animal species we share this planet with and adventure. Pursuing these two things has led to some interesting places and experiences, one of the most significant of which was being part of an international TV expedition to Myanmar. Organised and funded by the BBC and Smithsonian Institution, this expedition was the first time in almost six decades that a large film-crew had been let into Myanmar. I was a presenter/on-screen expert on this expedition, my first experience of this type of work and it was a real baptism of fire. Being out all day and talking to the camera for most of that time was pretty exhausting.

Nearly everything we did had to be documented and the hundreds of hours of footage that were amassed were eventually distilled down into three hours of TV to support a narrative that was devised

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after we returned. Looking for and finding animals in the wild is what I love, but it can long and arduous with no guarantees of success. For TV, there’s also the complication of having to record sequences and specific shots multiple times, often repeating what you said, again and again and faking surprise. This was probably the hardest part and more the work of an actor. Still, any hardship was vastly outweighed by getting to visit a really interesting part of the world. One place in particular, a place called Htamanthi was easily the most interesting. In the north of the country it was a place where few westerners had been and I doubt that any other entomologists have ever been there. The time I spent there, camping in a clearing, exploring the forest and its species with the help of some phenomenal local guides will always be some of most cherished memories.

Long may there be places like this.

The pressure to get good bits of footage can also you to take risks you might not normally take. On one occasion, eager to find the subterranean brood chamber of a giant dung beetle replete with cricket ball-sized orbs of carefully rolled dung, I eagerly stuck my hand down a likely looking burrow that I found beneath a pile of dry elephant dung. I scraped at the soil, talking to the camera as I my hand inched further down the burrow. Eventually, I was up to my elbow in the burrow and I then had a very rude awakening – the sharp pain of a sting or bite, made all the more troubling as I couldn’t see the assailant. For a fraction of second I thought snake, but as I swore and wrenched my hand from the burrow there on the end of it, still briefly attached was a tarantula. It promptly let go and fled into the leaf-litter. My questing fingers had ruined its retreat and in defence it had plunged its fangs deep into my index finger. Apart from a throbbing finger and the ignominy there was no harm done and I breathed a deep sigh of relief that it was a spider and not a venomous snake.

A few days later, my bitten finger now hotly infected, we were on the trail of elephants in very dense forest. All was going well, but then the small herd we were following – about ten animals, scattered in different directions forming two groups itching to reunite, but separated by a band of sweating film-makers and zoologists. Responding to the trumpeting of their kin, the further group of elephants made straight for us, crashing through the thick forest and forcing us to leap for shelter behind whatever large trees were available. Again, all of this was documented, although leaping behind the trees had to be re-enacted as the cameraman was also diving for cover when the elephants were bearing down on us.

As well as contributing to documentaries in front of the camera, I have also been involved in the development and refining of documentary ideas for various TV production companies. This requires knowledge of not only my specific areas of expertise, but also the practicalities of obtaining footage, e.g. where and how to find the species in question and how easy or difficult they are to film.

My main aim through the TV work I’ve been involved with and also my writing and talks is to try and shine a light on the astounding diversity of other animals we share this planet with and how much there is still to learn. Life is the most remarkable thing about our planet and it abounds here, but we’ve only just scratched the surface in understanding the natural world. It’s a sad fact that we know more about the surface of barren moons in space than we do about our planet. I want people to understand that the Earth is a beautiful and special place – the only home we’ve got, so we need to cherish it.

For more information on Ross Piper and his work, please visit: https://www.rosspiper.net

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© Isabella Salas. All rights reserved.

Image caption: Entomorphosis by IsabellaSalas

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Stag Beetle by Paul Brooke © Paul Brooke

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Marlène

Huissoud

IN CONVERSATION WITH BARRETT KLEIN

a whisper of the bees

Sitting at the intersection of design, art, science, and material innovation, Huissoud’s Cocoon (2017) series is a collection of otherworldly furniture designs that incorporate cocoons vacated by silk moths (as opposed to those used in industrial silk production, which are boiled during the pupal stage for speedier processing and to prevent an eclosing moth from chewing through what could otherwise be unwound as a single strand of silk) (Goldsmith 2013). Surreal and alien like, these slender-legged cabinets, chairs, and even wardrobes are covered with accumulations of the organic forms, which are varnished with black propolis, a mixture of tree resin plus pollen and beeswax made by honeybees to seal cracks in their hives (Seeley 2019). In these widely exhibited works, Huissoud celebrates the life of the Bombyx mori moth and demonstrates an alternative to the destructive and exploitative practices that are common to industries working with insect-made materials.

Collaboration is an important element of Huissoud’s pioneering practice.

In sculptural series such as Of Insects and Men (2017), she worked with traditional glassworkers to combine propolis with waste glass, inviting a consideration of two normally discarded materials that have similar yet distinct properties. For Please Stand By (2019), she joined with scientists from Kings College London to design chairs made from un-fired clay that function as refuges for pollinators such as bees, wasps, and butterflies. In making these habitats for urban wildlife, she sought to raise awareness of the dramatic decrease in flying insect populations across the world and the urgent need to protect these creatures, especially in cities.

Image caption: Portrait of Marlène Huissoud. Photography by Kat Green.

EDITED AND WRITTEN BY DAVID TRIGG

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nsects and nature have been a part of Marlène Huissoud’s life since childhood. Born in 1990, she grew up on a farm in the French Alps where her parents kept honeybees – an experience that has fuelled her experimental design practice. It was while studying Textile Futures at Central Saint Martins’ School of Art and Design in London that she developed the project From Insects: An Exploration of Insect Materials (2014), which explored the viability of utilising waste from the insect world in the creation of furniture, vessels and other products. Using innovative materials such as resin harvested from beehives and the cocoons of Indian silkworms, she investigates the unique properties of these natural byproducts and asks how such materials might be harnessed to build a more sustainable future in which humans better live in harmony with nature.

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More recently, Huissoud has collaborated with Melipona bees in the creation of the site-specific installation Mamá (2022) for SFER IK, an art museum deep in the Mayan jungle outside Tulum, Mexico. Taking the form of a large, sprawling tree stump, the hollow sculpture is made from locally-sourced bejuco wood and finished with ash, clay, dung and a wax extracted from native cacti.

Designed as a home for the native bees, which are considered sacred by the Mayan people, the work is accompanied by six satellite hives installed around the site and maintained by local crafts people. Ideally, the project will serve as a model for rethinking our co-existence with other species.

In this interview, Huissoud discusses the relationship between insects and design and how her work creatively bridges the gaps between humans and nature.

Barrett Klein: Marlène, I’d like to start with a question about your history. Growing up in a family of beekeepers, do you feel it was only a matter of time before you started incorporating insect products into your work?

Marlène Huissoud: Yes, I think it’s something that was inside me since I was a kid. I was in the Alps with my family, surrounded by nature. My grandparents were farmers, my great grandparents too, and my parents were beekeepers, so it was just meant to be. When I was young, my parents and I would travel with a beehive every summer. We were living in a small caravan collecting honey, talking to the bees.

BK: I’d love to hear more about how that might have influenced you in terms of your directions and maybe your entomophilia – your love of insects.

MH: I developed a very profound love for bees at a young age, but then, as a teenager, I got a bit scared, because I thought it wasn’t cool anymore. It was really when I started to look at materiality during my master’s research at Central Saint Martins that everything fused together – a bit of a whisper of the bees, calling me to give them a voice in my practice. It was a very magical time.

BK: Some people categorise your work as ‘design’, but how do you feel comfortable defining your work?

MH: I think the best description is no description. I like to say that some people call me an artist, some a designer, and others a weirdo. I really like to keep it as open as possible because it allows you to collaborate with many people, from craftsmen to farmers, to scientists. I think it’s very important to be multidisciplinary, so maybe no description.

BH: That’s interesting; so you find it more valuable to be, as you say, at the intersection of the two, without pigeonholing yourself as either an artist or a designer.

MH: Yes! What I do is very sensitive and very emotional. There is a connection with other species, so I think it’s super important to just let the work go where it needs to go. And it can go anywhere! It can go to a forest, it can go to a museum and so many other places and I think that’s the magic of it.

I also think it’s important for my work to be accessible to a wide audience, especially with these kinds of projects where ecological questions are raised.

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Image caption: Mamá at the SFER IK Museum (2022). Photography by SFER IK Museum.

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BK: Similarly, I think we scientists are finding it increasingly important to be accessible with our messages. For example, with issues that affect us all – global climate change, habitat destruction, biodiversity loss. If we have pedantic, abstruse, hard to reach and hard to understand products, it doesn’t make our message as viable, accessible, or effective.

MH: Yes, and I think that is where the designer or artist can come in. I remember the first day I went to a laboratory and met a lot of scientists, and they seemed to speak a very different language – sometimes I needed a bit of translation. It can be nice for an artist to come in and facilitate a dialogue – to create a bridge between different languages and to facilitate communication and the discussion of difficult scientific topics.

BK: I’m curious to talk more about your collaborative projects, for example with Kings College London (KCL), and to think in terms of mutually beneficial exchange at the intersection of science and art. Oftentimes, there is an appreciation for the benefits this type of exchange has for the artist, but the benefits of such exchanges for the scientist are downplayed or more difficult to assess. I’d like to talk about how your art contributes to outreach, to accessibility, and to helping people realise how beautiful science can be.

MH: I would say, in my process personally, I always have crazy ideas. Maybe they are unfeasible, but there are no limits in my mind. I think as an artist you can bring an openness to different dialogues; to really open the mind to territories that are more abstract because we are specialists in the abstract, so perhaps an artist can change a scientist’s way of seeing things a little.

BK: I love that because sometimes in science we can tackle the next step in a small way, but paradigm shifts and huge transitions and revolutions in science often require reaching out across disciplines or maybe having the science shaken up a bit.

MH: In response to your question about how my work might speak to large audiences, at first, I was really working more in collectable design and art, and with galleries. I did that for several years and then realised it was not where I belonged or where my work belonged. I really want to give a voice to insects in public spaces – in jungles, but also in museums that are free and open to the public. It was very important to me to take this direction and to choose to let the work be in natural environments.

The last project we did was in the jungle in Mexico. Of course, not a lot of people will go to Mexico to see it, but it’s there and accessible for people and other species to discover.

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openness to different dialogues’

BK: I’m very curious about what these types of collaborations have been like. What is it like to work with Marlène Huissoud?

MH: The collaboration with KCL in 2019 was for the London Design Festival, with Jane Withers Studio, which is a great research studio based in London. The project focused on the ecological crisis, so they put me in touch with two scientists from KCL to develop the first habitats we made for insects in the city. We were in dialogue with Robert Francis and Brandon Mak from KCL, and I was asking them a lot of questions about what pollinators would need to make the work actually habitable for insects. At the time, everyone was asking me to make chairs for humans and my answer was to make a chair for insects. So, I would say, maybe working with me can be provocative, but in a nice way.

The project with the SFER IK Museum in Mexico was a collaboration between a bee-lover, Helio, craftsmen from the museum, and of course the Melipona bees. It was interesting because this project was during Covid lockdown and so it was long-distance. We discussed plans through Zoom, and it was funny to see how it’s also possible to meet other species online.

In general, I think it’s quite smooth to work with me. I put a lot of optimism and energy into what I do, and, in the end, I’m really designing for the insects themselves.

BK: I think that’s a really special, beautiful part of your recent work: this idea that you’re creating for insects and not the humans. It would be fascinating to explore any design tradeoffs; for example, what materials can you use? How does that limit the culmination of the piece?

And where do you draw the line in terms of aesthetic choices?

Thinking about the gorgeous structures in Please Stand By, were your initial thoughts to have certain forms and colours and how were those decisions altered by the constraints or guidelines that scientists offered?

MH: It’s a super interesting question because you can’t go to the crafts store and buy this material; it’s not that easy. The colours and materials are dictated by what the insect needs, and you have to be really in line with doing something bio-made and biodegradable. It’s a lot of restriction and to begin with you feel you will never manage to make something beautiful and in your own creative style, but we always manage and there is always a eureka moment.

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Image caption: The Chair from the Please Stand By Collection (2019). Photography by Valentin Russo.

Image caption: Cocoon Light (2017) Photography by Studio Marlène Huissoud.

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Actually, it’s funny, but I think it really is the materials which guide us in the making process.

For example, we only recently started to make really big scale work and to be safe, we make small models for the work, but we never made any models previously. We would make an abstract drawing and it would turn out exactly like the drawing.

BK: Oh really! So, you could follow through. At what stage did you find clarity on what the end product could be? Was it very early on or after, say, a mock up?

MH: It depends on the project, but for Please Stand By it was about one month into the project.

The material we used is made from natural clay, but it’s not cooked, so you need to find a way to waterproof the clay without firing it. We had about two months to complete the project and after roughly one month of experimenting with materials, we succeeded in finding a way by implanting natural wax inside the clay.

BK: So, it’s not surface-coated with wax, it’s embedded?

MH: Well, you heat the wax to a liquid and then brush it into the clay, and it protects the clay.

BK: Is it beeswax or a different wax?

MH: It’s wax from a cactus, called candelilla wax.

BK: How long do you expect these works to last outdoors?

MH: Between two to five years, I would say. It depends if they’re covered or not because the only concern is when you have very heavy rain, it will break the clay.

BK: How do you feel about your work being ephemeral?

MH: That’s a good question. I don’t see a problem at all; I think it’s the process of the pieces. Even after two to five years though, and unprotected in the wild, the work won’t be completely gone, just a bit damaged. I create these pieces for the insects to live in for a moment, and when it’s time to go, it’s time to go.

BK: Does anyone take a census of the abundance or diversity within your pieces?

MH: Most are inhabited by bees at the moment. For the Mexico project, I hired a team to take care of the Melipona bees inside the Mamá sculpture and they actually seem to be really happy inside the piece; they’re making a lot of babies. Even though we work with scientists, the client is the insect, and we never know if it will work in the end, but so far, every piece has been inhabited by insects.

BK: And some of them are with solitary bees and others with social ones. For example, for your project Mamá, you’re working with a truly social stingless bee species.

MH: Working for solitary bees is a very different process from working for a more human kind of audience. It requires a different typology of work, typology of entrances for them, typology of materials and houses. Everything is completely different.

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MH: I would say that for solitary insects it would be a building with a tiny entrance for every kind of insect, whereas for a colony of European bees, for example, they might require a walled house, like a beehive, but one which is not made to produce honey.

The works also require different scales. For Mamá there are seven colonies of Melipona inside the piece and each colony needs a different branch, with a certain distance between each of them.

It is also very important to consider the orientation of the sun with respect to each entrance to a branch.

BK: Have you explored or been interested in exploring the very unique nest architecture of the Melipona? For example, they use a cerumen, which is a resin wax mix, and it is different from the propolis you find with honeybees (Roubik 2006).

Cerumen has a very particular look, feel, and smell. Do you imagine working with that material?

MH: If someone invites me to do that I would love to – their architecture is amazing!

BK: Another aspect of your work which really interests me is that you have combined different species, different orders of insect, and their products together to create what you have described as a leather. Could you describe that process?

MH: That was the first research project I ever did with insect materials, and it focused on the silkworm and the honeybee. It was mostly the materials themselves that guided the process of making the leather. I worked with the honeybee resin and the silkworm cocoons. The silkworm cocoons are composed of layers of fibres, and you can extract those fibres by hand. The worm also creates a glucose sericin that you can activate into the fibres using spring water (Goldsmith 2013), so I was able to make this kind of paper naturally without any binder or chemicals.

Then the honeybee resin was the perfect match to combine with the silkworm cocoon paper, because it gives a lot of strength to the first material. You can warm it up, reactivate the resin, and then stretch it and mould it.

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‘the honeybee resin was the perfect match’

BK: Could you give an example of how you approach a project that involves say thousands in a social setting versus individuals scattered across a piece?

Image caption: Wooden Leather by Marlène Huissoud. Photography by Studio Marlène Huissoud.

BK: When I work with honeybees, as you mention, you can scrape off the propolis – that resin mix that they use within their nests. It’s really sticky and the idea is honeybees need to fill gaps which might cause too much ventilation if they’re cavity nesting insects. Can you tell us what it is like to work with – the smell, the touch, the taste, and the feel of this product?

MK: I am perpetually smelling it. It’s on my hands at the moment. As you say, it’s a very sticky material and when we collect it, it’s a mix of pollen, resin, and waxes. We spend a lot of time cleaning the resin; first we boil the mixture in hot water to be able to separate all the different materials, then we have this very sticky material, but when we have combined it with the cocoons, it’s not sticky at all anymore.

It’s a very tactile process and the smell is part of that process, but when people visit the exhibition, many of them think its ceramic or glass or something like that. It’s interesting not to give too many clues; it brings a lot of curiosity.

I think the combination of shape and material really brings a lot more identity to the work, because the shape seems very alive. Sometimes a museum curator will say, ‘We feel as though the piece might leave the museum of its own accord, like it’s a little animal’.

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Image caption: Of Insects & Men (2017). Photography by Studio Marlène Huissoud.

BK: Are those pieces as hard and smooth as glass at that point or can you leave thumb impressions in the material?

MH: Actually no. Once the process of cleaning is done it’s very strong and very brittle, like glass. If you throw it on the floor it will break into tons of pieces, but you can repair it. That’s the beauty of it; you can reheat and remelt it as much as you want.

BK: In some pieces you combine discarded black glass with the black propolis. Is that to contribute to the wonder of what the materials are because you’ve got this exquisite sheen and reflection off parts of it?

MH: With Of Insects & Men, visitors to the exhibition sometimes thought that the material was glass, so it was a way to exaggerate the uncertainty and wonder around this strange material which seems completely artificial, even though it is not.

BK: Let’s talk about the role of functionality in design and the aspiration for industrial grade or industrial level design or production. The goal here isn’t to find, discover, or promote the latest industrial material to be used on huge scales, correct?

MH: What I create nowadays is really functional for insects rather than humans. In the past, my work referenced objects which were recognisable to humans, like vases, cabinets, or shelves and presented the object in a provocative way. The pieces were almost artefacts which needed to exist

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to give value, authenticity, and a voice to insects. The message was that the pieces were not for humans to place their watches or clothes on them, they were to provoke thought on the concept of ‘material’ and how things have to be made. Now, however, my clients are the insects and I do habitats for them. I still continue to use their materials and make work that is more human orientated, but in a provocative way.

BK: Do you experience a greater degree of gratification when working for insects than you do working for humans?

MK: When I was working on human-orientated pieces incorporating the waste products of insects, it was nice, but it was not enough. By contrast, when I took the opportunity to really build a dialogue with insects, to design habitats for them, and to give them more spaces in cities, it was super rewarding. I began to feel really aligned in my practice; it just made sense.

We live in a world where there are so many chairs, so many fairs, and so many new things for people to buy, it becomes an important question for a designer: what is the need for this piece? With a chair for insects the answer for me was, ‘Yes! There is a need for this chair,’ and it was a big relief to find that answer. I think I can now continue forever because I have a lot of work to do for insects!

Image caption: Cocoon Bench at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Photography by Studio Marlène Huissoud.

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BK: When I think about these pieces being inhabited by insects, I imagine you as an insect architect or as an architect on insect scales. And at insect scales you’ve got everything from Trichoptera, caddisflies, which produce their own individual cases or sleeves with their cephalic silk glands (Wiggins 2005) all the way to giraffe-tall termite mounds or leafcutter ant nests that extend greatly underground (Frisch 1974). For the social insects in Mamá, we’re looking at a kind of apartment building because you have seven colonies of Melipona stingless bees.

MK: I wanted Mamá to be very massive, to give weight to the Meliponas, and when I first saw Mamá as a human, the scale was very impressive. Now I have an idea of developing and building monuments for insects in the Alps.

BK: That’s an entomologist’s dream!

MH: It’s the start of a project, but I really want to go big for them. At the same time, I’m developing a ‘little village’ on an insect scale – small pieces which together create villages and that you can place on the facade of a building or in a garden, for example. I think the industry is gradually becoming more aware of and interested in how we might integrate insects into our daily life in cities.

BK: Very soon, you’ll be in New York for the ‘Imaginari’ insects exhibition. How has that been?

MH: I think the show will be super interesting because it will be in the heart of New York and Linda Uribe really forecasted a large spectrum of people working with and for insects. I really like the fact that it will be not only art orientated but also gather input from people working in many different disciplines. I’m very curious to see how people will react to that.

BK: I’m curious about your thoughts on dealing with ethics and the ethics of sericulture, working with silk. When you produce your works, you make a point of working with discarded cocoons.

We can think about the millennia-old sericulture practice of heat-treating or killing the pupae within these cocoons to ensure that, when they emerge as adults, they don’t bite their way out and break that very long strand of silk that they’ve spun (Dayalan 2019; Tomasik 2017), but you allow them to eclose.

MH: I only work with cocoons that allow the worm to morph into a butterfly. It’s a very crucial aspect of my practice, because everything I do is in respect of the insect.

BK: How do you grapple with the idea that those domesticated silkworm moths are wholly dependent on humans? If you wanted to liberate them, they would not be able to fly and would not be able to reproduce (Kunpeng et al 2020), so they are tied to us in perpetuity. Does that factor at all into your thinking or production of works with Bombyx mori silk?

MH: It really depends on how you work with the insect – on the dialogue, the way you treat the insect when you collaborate with them, and what you take from them. It’s a question of authenticity and respect; there are a lot of different ways of working with insects and of farming insects.

With time, everything is changing too. There are similarities with beekeeping and over the 45 years my father has been keeping his methods of working with bees and collecting their honey have changed greatly. Everything is evolving and human perspectives on other living organisms and our values are adapting all the time.

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Image caption: The Village (ongoing). Photography by Studio Marlène Huissoud.

BK: Please tell me about your studio. How do you set it up and what inspires you?

MH: I’m based in Paris and soon I will have land in the Alps too, where I will develop little big things. But at my studio there is a garden and it’s very calm and quiet. And very dirty! There are three rooms; the one at the back is for the very dirty work, like the dust and the woodwork and things like that, the one in the middle is the laboratory, where we try a lot of things with the materials and make the piece, and the last room is quite clean, like a workshop. That is where we take the pictures, pack, and have the office. It’s quite nice to be separate from the dirt because it can be very smelly.

BK: What lies in the future for you and your work? Insects produce such an array of products with untapped potential in terms of their properties and their aesthetics. Do you imagine further exploring a diversity of materials through a diversity of arthropods (Klein 2022; Sutherland et al 2010)?

MH: Definitely! So far, I have really investigated the pollinators, mostly the bees and the silkworms and I haven’t completed those investigations yet, but I really want to look at other species now. The new monuments project will involve different species.

BK: I see your work not only as inherently exquisite, but also as profoundly creative in terms of the ways you explore the products and the lives of the diversity of arthropods which are around us.

Thank you so much!

You can find more about Marlène Huissoud on her website https://www.marlene-huissoud.com/ and further excerpts of this interview will be available to view on YouTube from January 2024.

All images shown courtesy of the artist © Studio Marlène Huissoud.

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If I could feel, I would fear a stagnant year when all the seasons seize, But I have no memory to mind and much nectar to sip through my straw.

I carry the progeny of the landscape in the pockets on my knees.

My mother gathered and my mother gave me the golden ball from the trees.

From the dust came us small siblings, but let me not dwell on the world she saw.

If I could feel, I would fear a stagnant year when all the seasons seize.

On my ultraviolet ride, I taste the charge of acetone before she flees With a net slung over shoulder and her gas chamber jar in her paw.

If I could feel, I would fear a stagnant year when all the seasons seize.

Ocelli oriented in the waning light of my life, I sense no breeze.

The puzzler pins me as I bemoan the loss of all my home, green and raw.

I carry the progeny of the landscape in the pockets on my knees.

Had I the language, I would beg the studier for my job, limbs bent in pleas.

She measures my wings on tape and tells my corpse of the coming thaw.

If I could feel, I would fear a stagnant year when all the seasons seize.

I carry the progeny of the landscape in the pockets on my knees.

BY ALEXANDRA BERGMANN

I peek out our cylinder well and facet focus on the giver of decrees.

We four-winged, five-eyed friends of flowers are the scholarly draw.

I carry the progeny of the landscape in the pockets on my knees.

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Playing with Ants and Other Insects ANT MIMICRY AS A PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH IN RELATION TO GAMES AND TECHNOLOGY

Figure 1: Playing with ants & other insects, installation view at the Museum of Science and Technology in Beijing, Kuai Shen, 2012. https://kuaishen.tv/pwaoi.html

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Introduction

his is an upcycle of my transdisciplinary research and exhibition shown between 2012 and 2016, which explored the potential relation of ants and other insects to mimicry in games and culture. Playing with ants and other insects (PWAOI) created an imaginary built upon non-humanist approaches which predominantly arise when reading Man, Play, and Games (1961)

by Roger Caillois. Caillois was a philosopher, sociologist and ludologist, whose ideas proposed that play is an imaginary space of altered realities which must not fit economic obligations; the activity of play creates its own time and space reality outside the routine of life and can be free, uncertain, but also governed by rules and boundaries. Inspired by Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1949), Caillois contested the former’s ideology that play is inherently competitive. He intended to provide a more comprehensive social understanding by dividing the act of playing games into four categories: agon (competition), alea (chance), mimicry (imitation), and ilinx (vertigo). Mimicry after Caillois describes the experience of assuming other roles, playing as other characters, and becoming someone else in a temporary game of make-believe (Caillois 1961). In this regard, Caillois posited: ‘the inexplicable mimetism of insects immediately affords an extraordinary parallel to [hu]man’s penchant for disguising [itself], wearing a mask; or playing a part – except that in the insect’s case the mask or guise becomes part of the body instead of a contrived accessory’ (Caillois 1961).

BY KUAI SHEN

Taken up by this understanding of mimicry, I created a phenomenological discourse about play that interconnects ants’ ecological behaviours and multispecies relations to manifestations in games and computer-generated worlds. In this light, ants have been a successful evolutionary model mimicked by a wide range of insects, which by becoming ants themselves level up their chances for tricking and exploiting the ecological benefits of others. I play with this relationship between model and mimic and develop a critical phenomenology of ants as models for decentralised technology, speculating on the design of non-player characters and role-play simulations. My transversal practice engages with metamorphosis and goes beyond entomological understandings. I think and work across a natural/ cultural continuum to suggest that ants could also play video games if we make the creative efforts to design playgrounds for them.

Ants and other urban insect companions share the same environment with us, whether we like it or not. The social relations ants hold with other species and the models they inspired in science and technology could be seen from an anarchic perspective of friction-riddled co-existence with human cultures. Insects can be considered terrestrial invertebrate rebels living underneath the surfaces of the Anthropocene. Incontestably, they play an important role in the creation of new ecosystems and the transformations of old ones. The future of these ecologies lies in trying to forge better and more sustainable communication channels between artefacts and organisms. This here serves as a manifest to expand the portals of perception in order to inspire in future generations the creation of games not for humans, but for insects (Figure 1).

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Anarchic gameplay It is important to acknowledge that role-playing games provide experiences of make-believe that become temporary escapes from reality. There is a sense of liberation, when the player does not have the responsibility of being herself anymore. This is what mimicry as a play form is about: a chimeric explosion that frees fixed identities making them fluid, metamorphic, and subversive against cisgendered norms of conduct.

With this in mind, I explicitly exploit Caillois’ definition of mimicry to purposely resolve the inequities of anthropocentric play forms.1 Caillois pinpointed a quadrant of categories that open the potential sense of play in living beings other than humans. His four classifications, agon, alea, mimicry and ilinx are governed by two poles or intensities, ludus and paidia.

Caillois defined paidia as anarchic gameplay, the means to play without rules (Caillois 1961).

Conversely, he appointed ludus as a form of play governed by rules. Accordingly, all forms of play can either be ludus (rule-based and controlled) or paidia (free, wild, anarchic and unforeseeable) (Caillois 1961).

These two poles are essential when analysing the human experience of assuming other identities in video game environments, like role-play and multi-player fantasy games. My intention with PWAOI was to repurpose these concepts, focusing on mimicry and paidia as indispensable play forms that allow the perception of insects as players in the game of life. To this extent, mimicry will be treated as a space ruled by metamorphosis and – genetically or algorithmically – encoded transformations, in which one subject or digital process becomes a different entity in a temporary realm of make-believe (Figure 2).

The three portals into the techno-culture of ants Over centuries the social lives of ants have been profoundly affecting human perceptions.

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In this regard, myrmecologists Hölldobler and Wilson (2009) have stated ant networks inspired ‘designs in computers and shed light on how neurons of the brain might interact in the creation of mind’.’ The flair of ants’ efficiency to find the shortest route between food and nest has influenced the creation of algorithms, most prominently the ant colony optimisation or ACO (Dorigo et al 2006).

Hidden in programmes that optimise your shopping search and make suggestions of who to befriend next, one can imagine ants and bugs crawling and swarming within the code.

Bugs that create malfunctions in the code are concealed and become insect avatars, stealthily manifesting non-human forces within technological topologies. The term ‘bug’ denominates faults in the code whilst ‘debugging’ is synonymous of eliminating anomalies. Such is the impact of insects, that they have become disruptors, interrupters of goal-driven creations.

This hidden complexity pulses back and forth along hardware, software, screen, and out into cultural worlds. The translation of ants’ social organisation into mathematical formulas opens creative opportunities for cultural, scientific, and material interpretations, and offers favourable conditions to understand the evolutionary mechanisms of true societies – the term eusocial, meaning truly social, defines the behaviours of all ants and termites, some bees, and a few wasp species. Yet computer-generated experiences inspired by insects followed a path that exploited their appearances and projected fears of invasion. They turned into ‘shoot-em-up’ enemies both in video games and out in the ecosystems they territorialise. The fire ants, electric ants, crazy ants, or argentine ants, for example, acquired the title of invasive species under the gaze of the global economic machine. As enemies in video games, but also as inspirational models for culture and technology, the influential roles of ants and other insects can be discovered along an inverted journey across three symbolic portals: the alien portal, the network portal, and the material portal.

Figure 2: Paidia and ludus. Redrawn by artist from the original diagram on Man, Play and Games by Roger Caillois (1961), 36.

Figure 3: Paraponera clavata, Kuai Shen, 2013. Yasuní research station of Universidad Católica in Ecuador.

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Figure 4: Ant Attack, cover art by David John Rowe of Sandy White’s game for ZX Spectrum computers, published by Quiksilva in 1983.

The alien portal In her cultural analysis of the impact of tropical ants on the imperial campaigns of colonisation, Charlotte Sleigh asserts: ‘There was a trend towards representing ants as increasingly alien in the first half of the twentieth century. Today we remain torn between an admiration for their ways and an anxiety that their lack of individuality parodies our own helplessness in society’ (Sleigh 2001). Sleigh remarked that ants were constructed around colonial themes in awe of the sheer numbers appalling the white man in a tropical indomitable nature, creating in him ‘a sense of being overwhelmed, connecting with his sense of isolation amongst his [indigenous] human neighbours’ (Sleigh 2001).

Humans have fantasised with alien forms and fears of invasion evoked by terrestrial invertebrates because their ecological resilience, numbers, morphology, and chemosocial abilities seem to ridicule humankind. The majority of ants are blind with two stomachs inside exoskeletal bodies, razor-sharp mandibles, six legs, two antennae, and glands that exude a repertoire of volatile chemical messages, while special organs modulate vibratory signals. The overwhelming anxiety mentioned

by Sleigh is a consequence of cultural tropes, loaded with Eurocentric and Anglo-American misrepresentations that follow colonial and military narratives; for example, the bizarre image of giant ants in Them! or the bullet ant Paraponera clavata mutating into monstrous tyrants after a chemical waste spill in Empire of the ants, a slandered ‘b movie’ from the original story by HG Wells2 (Figure 3).

Scientific media keeps polishing this image by employing terms like slave-making, army ants, and supercolony. The greatest ant ‘supercolony’ on planet Earth extends six thousands kilometres along the Mediterranean coast: Linepithema humile, the argentine ant, has been overwhelming southern Europe, multiplying like a rhizome since its arrival around

1960 (Walker 2009). Likewise, the invincible fire ants, Solenopsis invicta, have been wreaking havoc across the United States since they disembarked on Alabama around 1940; millions of dollars invested in extermination methods and pesticides have not stopped their expansion. Fire ants have succeeded in establishing a global network during the last 80 years travelling from North America to Europe, Asia, and Australia (Ascunce et al 2011).

Ants and their invertebrate friends seem to hold the upper hand when it comes to survival of the fittest. No wonder why humans preferred to fantasise about creepy crawlies as killable aliens, and then as battle agents, in these gems of video game history: 1. Centipede, 1981: a classic Atari 8-bit arcade game where a carnivorous arthropod together with the flea, spider and scorpion want to eat the player in a dimension full of mushrooms.

Designer Dona Bailey recalled in an interview: ‘If the multisegmented insect is the bad thing and the player is at the bottom, you kind of have to shoot, but it didn’t seem that bad to shoot a bug’ (Ortutay 2012).

2. Ant Attack, 1983: Sandy White’s game was perhaps the first survival horror game that allowed the player to select either a male or female character. The goal of the game was basically to rescue your beloved one while escaping from giant ants in the city of Antescher (Figure 4). Along with Q*bert and Zaxxon released the year before, Ant Attack became one of the first games to use isometric projection (Edge 2009).

3. SimAnt, 1991: Will Wright’s ant-inspired derivation from his iconic SimCity is a simulation game in which players direct ants with pheromone trails to collect food, burrow, and fight against the red ants enemy. Pheromone communication actually inspired Wright to code the basic engine for The Sims: ‘Every object in the environment is sending out an advertisement of pheromones in a particular

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flavour. The flavours are the eight basic needs of the Sims. So they can advertise food, energy, fun, social, hygiene. Every object is described in those terms, being the collection of pheromones that it broadcasts’ (Nelson 2010).

have been optimising city transit, finding the shortest most energy-efficient travel route, decentralising information, and learning the power of relationships in the formation of intelligent networks.

4. The Zergs in StarCraft, 1998-2012: Zergs are a genetically modified, parasitic alien race with exoskeletal bodies. The player advances them as swarms to spread diseases in strategic battles for conquering other races. In the lore of the game, Zergs attack other species by parasitising their bodies to take control over them; an analogous behaviour is found in real endoparasites of Earth with the fungus Cordyceps unilateralis, whose spores pierce the chitin body of ants to take control over neuromechanical functions, merging with its brain, and turning it into a zombie ant (Kuai Shen 2016) (Figure 5).

Technological networks, as emphasised by Jussi Parikka, can be perceived as a manifestations of non-human forces sharing common properties with the selforganisation in insects (Parikka 2010). Raiding columns of Eciton burchellii, the army ants, also known as rain ants for some indigenous nations (Kuai Shen 2022a), have been studied for developing swarm simulations. By means of simple rules of attraction they generate temporary living architectures called bivouacs, a colonial name which I argue against in my PhD about rain ants (Kuai Shen 2022a). The bonding of kin relations in these Amazonian ants is so intense that they behave as a fluid across any material, weaving themselves as living bridges over obstacles and terrain irregularities, particularly during floods and torrential rain (Kuai Shen 2022b). They improvise malleable, redistributable fabrics made of ant bodies that are tightly interwoven, capable of stretching over and becoming with any forest matter (Figure 6).

5. Empire of the Undergrowth, 2022: a real-time strategy game that allows the player to control a fire ants’ swarm in its domination of new lands; a great feature is assembling water rafts – an ability of fire ants studied thoroughly in robotic engineering (Mlot et al 2011). Like SimAnt, the game is pheromone-based. Empire of the Undergrowth succeeds in creating an aesthetic experience of formic acid as chemical weapons and being overwhelmed by numbers and parallel tasks, while reinforcing the image of ants as multiplying invasive forces.

The network portal (or the portal of interrelationships) Ants’ bottom-up organisation can be compared to a rhizome or to the multiplicity of algorithmic neural models emerging nowadays, and particularly to the almost forgotten peerto-peer connections of the Internet (Johnson 2002). Algorithmic abstractions like the ant colony optimisation emerged from the admiration for ants as models for resilient networks.

ACO-inspired programmes offer solutions to human-made navigation problems (Dorigo et al 2006). Computer models since then

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Dr Ian Couzin and his colleagues approach this rather from the network, mechanistic perspective to propose solutions for traffic congestions (Couzin & Franks 2003). Studying army ant behaviour thoroughly, they came up with a predictive model that shows swarming can be performed by humans, too (Dyer et al 2009). These models suggest there is a simple rule that allows a swarm to move and behave as a fluid entity: reduce distance to stay close to your immediate neighbour while moving in the same direction (Dyer et al 2009). From this I infer that rulebased programmes, mimicking the ant swarm algorithm, prove that intimacy and disobeying (social) distances could be vital for surviving the catastrophes of the Anthropocene.

Scientific interest is invested in designing resilient networks that adjust in time to severe

Figure 5: ZoƠo)mbie An̉ṯ , Kuai Shen, 2013. Yasuní research station of Universidad Católica in Ecuador.

Figure 6: Ant Fabric, Kuai Shen, 2021. Rain ants weave themselves into a hanging bridge to ease transit flow in Sarayaku, Ecuador.

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Figure 7: The fungus gardeners, Kuai Shen, 2013. Photograph of Attini community in artist’s studio showing the peak of the fungus garden with minors of Atta cephalotes tending to it.

Figure 8: Wearing the mask of ants, Kuai Shen, 2013. Ant-mimicking jumping spider (left) at Otonga reserve, Ecuador, and staphylinid beetle of rain ants E burchellii (right) at Yasuní research station of Universidad Católica.

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environmental changes, just like rain ants weaving bridges or fire ants building buoyancy rafts to cross rivers (Mlot et al 2011). With the complexity provided by the ubiquitous operations of human-centred AI-applications, the accurate prediction of planetary events and control of massive crowds is closer to reality. But it is important to keep in mind that algorithmic models of the swarm or ant colony optimisations are just abstractions of the unforeseeable creativity that emerges from the earthly and intimate entanglements between species. As Sebastian Vehlken affirms, swarms are rendered meaningful through agent-based computer simulations that enable a ‘model of control and method for solving problems abstracted from their substantially biological origin’ (Vehlken 2019). Ants and their symbionts are sensorially affected by mutual processes of recognition and identification, and this is what really materialises in-flesh resilient worlds. It has been the retreat from naturalness and the deletion of those complexities that are useless to humans, which have allowed models of swarm intelligence to become useful, operative, and effective technological tools (Vehlken 2019).

The material portal (or the portal of affects) The pioneer myrmecologist William Morton Wheeler claimed ants possess a multiple appealing nature to affect scientists, ‘who cannot afford to ignore their polymorphism or their symbiotic and parasitic relationships … to find in them the most intricate instincts and the closest approach to intelligence among invertebrate animals’ (Wheeler 1910).

To me, ants’ appealing nature resides in the bonding with other species for the co-materialisation of worlds. This is demonstrated by leaf-cutter ants of the Attini tribe, which have nurtured a long-lasting symbiosis with the fungus Leucocoprinus agraricus and dozens of antibiotic-producing microorganisms known as Actinobacteria (Hölldobler & Wilson 2009).

None lives without the other. The fungus metabolises the leaf material ants collect into food for the larvae. This is an invertebrate agricultur-

al system of mutual rewards, as ants cultivate fungal gardens applying antibiotics secreted from Actinobacteria on their bodies to protect the fungus from parasites. The Attini is a holobiont of ecological units which are intimately attracted to each other (Figure 7).

Symbiogenesis, and in particular the holobiont, proposed by Lynn Margulis, is a consistent and valid notion here: life never exists by itself, but by virtue of multiple relations with other species. Ant-plant mutualisms exemplify this. In the Amazon, ants species of Azteca and Pseudomyrmex get housing inside the stems of Cecropia trees, tending to and protecting it from predators and parasites: ants become trees (Passmore et al 2012). In Borneo, the carnivorous pitcher-plant, Nepenthes bicalcarata, hosts Camponotus schmitzi ants without harm, as they are immune to the digestive enzymes and freely hunt for kleptoparasites preventing nitrogen loss for the leaves: ants become plants (Scharmann et al 2013). Ant worlds are co-created in tensile rapport across barriers between species. Probably the finest performance of ants and plants becoming one is found at the devil’s garden, a resilient symbiosis created by Duroia hirsuta shrubs and Myrmelachista schumanni ants. For indigenous people of Ecuador and Peru, Myrmelachista is associated with the myth of a garden spirit, a supay in Kichwa cosmology that protects a forest patch. Myrmelachista are popularly dubbed ‘the lemon ants’ for their citrus flavour, which is actually formic acid the ants spray as herbicide to exterminate plants growing near their host. Like Attini, they also engage in affective and long-lasting agricultural relations. By pruning weeds and spreading chemical deterrents, these ant-plant communities could live up to 800 years (Frederickson et al 2005).

Ants can be seen as affective, sensual beings that are drawn to each other and to the ecological places they inhabit. Their agencies exert a tremendous influence on other species which benefit from securing intimate associations with them. Ants turn into role models. Mimics start wearing ant masks, disguising and

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smelling like them, playing a game of make-believe within myrmecological worlds (Figure 8). Caillois elucidated that mimicry in human games demonstrate ‘the temporary pleasure in passing for another’ (Caillois 1961). Drawing parallels between biological mimicry (the use of camouflage for deceit or predation), and myrmecomorphy (the morphological, behavioural, and chemical resemblance to ants), I propose to imagine ant mimicry as an ecological game between antagonists3 affecting each other as they perform as models, mimics, or victims of deceit. The following formidable ant mimics play this game: • Nymphs of praying mantids run and behave like ants to go under the radar of predators (Project Noah 2012).

• Salticidae spiders, ant-mimicking jumping spiders, pose like ants, moving like them, and waving the front legs as if they were antennae (Uma et al 2013).

• Staphylinidae beetles mimic the morphology, coloration, even acquire the scent of Ecitonini ants by grooming their bodies to blend in with them and disappear from the sight of predators (Kuai Shen 2010).

• Caterpillars of the blue butterfly Phengaris alcon mimic the stridulation of Myrmica ants to get nursed and receive protection (BBC Natural History Unit & Animal Planet 2005).

• Ichneumon wasps produce ‘propaganda’ pheromones, volatile compounds that confuse ants, giving the wasp enough time to sneak in the brood chamber and eat the larvae (BBC Natural History Unit & Animal Planet 2005).

• The assassin bug Acanthaspis petax covers itself with a carcass of dead ants, a chemical cloak which conceals its odour and allows it to evade predators (Jackson & Pollard 2007).

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Controlling space, playing against nature Across the three portals, the world of ants grants a vantage imagination to discover the multiplicity of becoming and being something else. The metaphors and phenomenological relations drawn from mimicry as a play form points to the beauty of the energetic, boundary-less, and transformative activity of game experiences. Games in which insects are antagonists should stimulate the imagination of human players and reshape prevailing misconceptions about insect nature. This should be the creative motivation for game designers. The incommensurable difference that matters is that humans rely on vision to play games, while insects level-up in the game of life by predominantly using an olfactory sensorium interlinked with magnetic fluctuations and vibratory oscillations.

The sensorial worlds of ants and other insects are cross-circuited together when they share ecological contingencies. The leisure and freedom humans have to control a character, while submitting to the rules of a game, contrasts to the sudden burst of chimeric energy in insects’ metamorphosis and world performances.

Embracing a deeper knowledge about sensorial interactions in insect worlds, and their performances of becoming with others, could bring into the light a different form of playing games. Beyond the visual regime, humans need to radicalise sensorial experiences and repurpose electronic assemblages and algorithms outside the craze for VR/AR experiences. By means of techno-ecological entanglements human players could create more tangible experiences outdoors to play with nature. Humans impose rules, destroy and construct spaces. In the world we live today we are the rulers. If rules and spaces are defined by humans, then these are the game worlds insects are forced to playing in. Insects are playing an anarchic game against humans. Let us, this time, play with them (Figure 9).

Figure 9: Ant Playground v. 0.3, Kuai Shen (2014-2017). Concept prototype for a game with integrated sensors inside a hybrid terrarium of leaf-cutter ants.

The sensors provide information about social activity to the human player, who can open gates of the habitat to different food sources and arenas.

Images shown courtesy of Kuai Shen © Kuai Shen. All rights reserved.

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on the spot

BY KRISTA LEIGH STEINKE

of a moth

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n the spot of a moth is a short clip from a larger project in-progress called ‘Footnotes from the Earth and Sky’, an experimental film that explores the relationship between human experience and the physical world. The film invites viewers to refocus their attention inward and observe our planet from a close-up perspective – underneath the rocks, leaves, sand, and soil. Albert Einstein (1951) stated, ‘Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better’. In the same spirit, the film proposes that there are infinite lessons, mysteries, and messages that the natural world has to offer if we take the time to look closely.

The film doesn’t provide answers but rather is a montage of tiny moments that invite viewers to pause, make correlations, and connect dots.

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Image caption: Still image from videowork on the spot of a moth by Krista Leigh Steinke. Video available with FrameALIVE. For more information, please visit https://landing.framealive.com

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In human speech we refer to insects all the time. We talk about ‘buzzing with energy’, or being ‘buzzed’, we describe a person ‘bumbling around’, we refer to someone as a ‘social butterfly’. When someone is acting crazy, they are ‘buggy’ or ‘bugging’. When our machines fail us we blame it on a bug. Insects are with us all the time, even when we can’t see them or hear them. We love some and fear others. Any given insect is beautiful to one person, frightening or disgusting to another. In this symphony of contrasts perhaps we see something of ourselves reflected. Insects were here long before us and will likely outlast us. They are totally familiar and also totally foreign. Like ourselves. Vulnerable, both dominator and dominated. Like ourselves. What can we learn about our deepest selves from insects? How might they embody our desires, dreams, and transformations? And what can their behaviour teach us about survival?

Tension, morphology, and metamorphosis. Tension – between the beautiful and the grotesque, familiar and foreign, dangerous and gentle. Morphology – a branch of biology, but also of linguistics, led me to think about insect ‘speech’ and ‘song’ – this song that is made without a voice. Metamorphosis – what happens when magnify and manipulate these sounds?

This mandate, to create human music using only insect sounds as source material, was an inversion of what humans have been doing since prehistoric times. From the cricket-like percussion of Latin America to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and beyond, we have been trying to make our instruments resemble insect song.

Leon Louder wrote and produced Entomophonie over four months, after winning a commission from the Montréal Insectarium to develop a live electronic music performance for the Mutek festival outdoor stage using strictly insect sounds.

Celebrating Entomophilia is a series of events presented by the Montréal Insectarium | Espace pour la vie to foster the appreciation of insects.

Essential for keeping nature in balance and therefore to our health and well-being, insects become a source of inspiration for creators from various disciplines (gastronomy, visual arts, music, dance, etc.) who then transmit their discoveries, their vision and their enthusiasm to the public.

Entomophonie

MUSIC BY LEON LOUDER

For more on Leon Louder and this project, please visit: https://orcd.co/2a7rrdw https://www.instagram.com/leonlouder/ http://espacepourlavie.ca/

ARTWORK BY ISABELLA SALAS

© Isabella Salas. All rights reserved.

Entomophonie is available to listen to at: https://leonlouder.bandcamp.com/album/entomophonie Or by scanning the image above with FrameAlive technology at https://landing.framealive.com/

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bees

A nest of wild bees In a fallen tree Under ferric nettle Through leaves.

They enter and leave, Earthed And aired, The road a constant noise So constant It becomes A fully stocked Silence.

These bees, these Dreaming Banded clocks — I ride on hooks In words, behind them, (I begin to gather, too) Inside me, tails Inside me, tails of sight.

BY SARAH WESTCOTT

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IN CONVERSATION WITH BARRETT KLEIN

Image caption: Joseph Yoon with the sacred Uchuputu tree in Sarayaku, Amazon, Ecuador. © Brooklyn Bugs.

Joseph Yoon

why not eat insects?

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In 2017, he founded Brooklyn Bugs, an organisation dedicated to showing that insect protein is not only nutritious and comparatively sustainable, but that it can also be delicious. Over the past six years, Brooklyn Bugs’ programming has provided creative presentations, lectures, cooking demonstrations and classes, film screenings, hands-on workshops, culinary contests, keynote speeches, banquet dinners, corporate events, and private dinner parties for tens of thousands of people all over the world.

Yoon has shared his work on five continents and travelled for over one third of this year. He is a Chef Advocate for IFAD (the United Nation’s International Fund for Agricultural Development), a member of the prestigious Explorers Club, and in 2022, was the Culinary Director for the Insects to Feed the World Conference and the Future of Food at SXSW, and the Culinary Advisor to the Methuselah Foundation in support of NASA’s Deep Space Food Challenge.

In this interview, Yoon speaks with Barrett Klein about the heritage of entomophagy, the benefits of insect agriculture, his recipe for insect kimchi, and the future of edible insects.

EDITED AND WRITTEN BY KATE TIGHE

n the burgeoning movement of ‘entomophagy,’ or eating insects, Joseph Yoon might just be a game changer. A renowned chef specialising in edible insects, Yoon is also one of the most inspiring advocates for entomophagy and insect agriculture on the global scene.

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Barrett Klein: Let’s start with probably the most basic question you’re confronted with: why eat insects?

Joseph Yoon: Well, I don’t usually like to answer a question with a question, but, in this case, there’s no better question to answer with than, why not eat insects?

If we look at it from an historical perspective, humans have been eating insects since the beginning of human evolution and there’s well-documented evidence that we have continued to eat insects throughout history (Lesnik 2019; Backwell & d’Errico 2001). Nowadays, 80% of the world’s nations still eat insects, and over 2 billion people regularly consume them around the world (Lange & Nakamura 2021).

A big distinction to make is in transforming the perception of insects as pests, and something that bites you or eats the plants in your garden, to edible insects – something that is sustainably farmed or harvested for human consumption and can be prepared deliciously with the proper culinary acumen.

BK: A recent study conservatively estimated that 1611 insects, proper, are eaten or have traditionally been eaten, but they included the caveat that this is likely a gross underestimate (Van Itterbeeck & Pelozuelo 2022). The true number is more likely to exceed 2000.

JY: Indeed, there are over 2000 species of edible insects that are widely eaten, and each of them have different nutritional values based on what they’re fed, how they’re reared, and how they’re ultimately processed. There are a lot of variables, but in general we found that many edible insects are anywhere from 50-80% protein by dry weight (van Huis 2016).

If we take crickets as one example, they contain all nine essential amino acids (Stone et al 2019), which are building blocks our bodies need to grow but don’t produce naturally. Crickets also contain other micro-nutrients like B12, zinc, and also chitin (Nowakowski et al 2021), which research is showing is beneficial for prebiotic gut health (Lopez-Santamarina et al 2020).

From a cultural perspective, predominantly in American and European cultures, we have so much to learn about edible insects. There remains widespread aversion to eating insects in AngloWestern cultures, and the practice is still much more prevalent in parts of Southeast Asia, Africa, and Central and South America (DeFoliart 1999). Sadly, I learned when travelling through areas of Thailand and South America, and in speaking with colleagues in Africa and Mexico, that there is now a growing resistance to eating insects because of globalisation and a desire to emulate American or European culture and food. I truly believe that we have so much to learn from indigenous groups, and that we can look toward ancient traditions and indigenous practices to find solutions for the future.

BK: Let’s look for a moment at the idea of honouring cultural tradition.

JY: Yes – this is something that’s very important to me. It’s crucial for me to work with a heart of learning and curiosity to be effective at what I do. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have travelled for over one third of this year and to receive so many opportunities to share my work and learn from communities across the world. I could not possibly imagine travelling without making time to learn and spend quality time with local people.

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Image caption: Demonstrating how to pick up a chontacuro (palm weevil larva) with chopsticks in Sarayaku, Amazon, Ecuador, as we prepare three dishes featuring the palm weevil © Brooklyn Bugs

In Ecuador I worked with a lot of different indigenous groups, and in Thailand I had intimate conversations with people on the street, at universities, with students, academics, chefs, scientists, and street vendors – across all layers of the community. It’s incredible to be able to go with big eyes and a desire to learn and have a cultural exchange, but I’m also very serious in my desire to amplify indigenous voices and practices, and to see them proudly reclaim the rich heritage of eating insects.

I would love to see the two billion people around the world who consume insects become global leaders in insect agriculture, instead of being used as a convenient statistic in reports.

BK: Do you have any reservations about entomophagy? Are insects for everyone?

JY: I think the answer to the second question is, quite simply, no. For example, insects contain the same protein (arginine kinase) in their chitin as shellfish do (Srinroch et al 2015), which may cause an allergic reaction if you have a sensitivity to shellfish. On the other hand, I’m sure we all know someone deathly allergic to shrimp, but not to other shellfish or molluscs. The same can be true for insects. For example, a very dear friend of mine is only allergic to mealworms, but he can eat other insects without any problem.

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Image caption: Beet and potato salad with quail egg, agave worm, black ants, bee pollen, agave worm salt, and parsley stems © Brooklyn Bugs

Image caption: Roasted crickets in a bowl with black background © Brooklyn Bugs

But allergies are not the only reason someone might wish to avoid edible insects.

Some people hold beliefs – whether they’re religious, ethical, or otherwise – that may preclude them from eating insects.

BK: Let’s explore the ethics of eating animals and more specifically insects, with more and more evidence suggesting that insects and their relatives experience a version of pain and may be sentient (Crump et al 2023). Discussions of cognition and consciousness (Chittka 2017; Chittka 2023) also come up often and are growing in the entomology literature.

JY: This is a complex issue, and a personal one. Eating insects, or eating any type of food, is deeply personal. When we think about the act of putting something in our mouths that will then be masticated and ingested and be inside us – that gives us the very sustenance to survive – it becomes clear how intimate an individual’s food choices are. So, with regards to the ethics of eating insects, I believe this also comes down to personal choice.

Nowadays, I don’t serve any meat at my events except for insects, so we have vegetarian-focused menus bolstered by insect protein, and I have noticed that many people who choose to become vegetarian or vegan for reasons related to sustainability are very receptive to eating insects. Insect agriculture is far more sustainable than livestock agriculture , with respect to its use of water, land, feed, and its comparatively lower production of greenhouse gas emissions (van Huis 2013; Berggren et al 2019).

I find it really fascinating that vegetarians and vegans are among the most supportive demographics at my events, and that there is a growing number of people who identify as ento-vegans – people who live an entirely vegan lifestyle with the sole exception of

eating insects. And so, I think these are just some small examples of the complexity of each individual’s lifestyle choices. Ultimately, I don’t want to make the decision for anyone – all I try to do is provide ideas, options, and the knowledge of science-based facts for people to ideally come to their own decisions.

The factors that I feel scientists have contributed towards encouraging eating insects are studies on the nutritional benefits, the sustainability, and the potential benefits to agricultural systems. What I have realised, however, is that we will not encourage behavioural change solely by sharing scientific information. The practice of eating insects also needs to be culinarily appealing, and to demonstrate how they can be prepared to look like familiar foods for people from cultures all around the world.

BK: A great segue to what is probably top of the list: what about tastiness and novelty factor?

JY: A substitute for something will never be successful without being equal to or better than that which it substitutes. I had eaten insects before, but when I actually started cooking with them, I immediately realised I had to make them taste delicious. To achieve this it’s vital to have a functional understanding of insect protein, because when you take cricket powder, and you bake it into bread, or you add it to a cake, or make a cricket stock for soup, or add it to a smoothie, the manner in which you cook it is going to really vary the flavour profile, texture, and the entire sensory experience. Say you bake a bread and it’s soft in the middle with a hard crust on the outside – and when you toast it, the taste and texture also change even though it’s still the same piece of bread. The gastronomical applications with which we prepare food can dramatically alter the flavour, the texture, and the whole manner in which we appreciate and experience food.

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So, I knew that I needed to work exhaustively on the culinary applications of insects and have a better functional understanding of what this food is when it’s boiled, or fried, or fermented, or baked, or roasted – through all culinary manners and machinations. I essentially tried to do that with every single insect that I received. I put each one through a methodical process to gain an in-depth understanding of the food, and to then apply the cooking techniques that would be the most appetising for human consumption. What has really been fascinating has been learning how to make insects the main protein component in a dish without having it be an entire bowl of crickets. The only limitations we have cooking with insects lie with our own imagination.

I’ve been cooking with insects for six years now and, to be quite honest with you, I’m a little embarrassed by my preliminary workings when I look back on them. My knowledge has grown and developed a great deal since then, and we all must start somewhere, right?

BK: Now, since we’re in Joseph Yoon’s kitchen, can we please talk about one of your own favourite dishes: kimchi? How does the addition of insect protein affect this dish that you personally love?

JY: Absolutely! What I love so dearly and what I miss so much when I travel is kimchi. It’s a Korean spicy fermented dish, that’s traditionally made with napa cabbage, that goes through the process of lactic fermentation. Kimchi is one of our national dishes and treasures and it is eaten as a side dish at virtually every meal. I remember eating it as a kid and it’s still a very comforting dish to me. Kimchi traditionally has oysters, baby shrimp, or fish sauce to create the umami, the depth of savouriness that we want out of our kimchi, and so my first thought was: how can I replace that with insects? How will I create enough umami? And by utilising cricket powder and soy sauce, which is not traditionally in kimchi, (and some other ingredients), I was able to create a formulation that I’m really happy with. I was able to successfully replicate kimchi with insect powders – primarily cricket or mealworm powders – and also substitute the glutinous rice flour to make a slurry from the kimchi paste with the insect powder as well.

Image caption: October 2023 – Preparing cricket kimchi utilizing cricket powder in the kimchi paste © Brooklyn Bugs

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Image caption: October 2023 – Joseph Yoon preparing Cricket Kimchi at the University of Adelaide Food Innovation Lab © Brooklyn Bugs

Image caption: October 2023 – Cooking with students from the University of Adelaide and with students and an instructor from TAFE SA. © Brooklyn Bugs.

BK: I think this would be a great time for us to lift the curtain on Brooklyn Bugs. So, we’re in your HQ – could you describe to us the evolution of Brooklyn Bugs? How does the organisation operate and what happens behind the scenes?

JY: At Brooklyn Bugs, our main focus is on advocacy, outreach, and education and our work really goes towards sharing the tremendous potential of eating insects and the innovation of insect agriculture’s impact on the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and global food systems.

Prior to Brooklyn Bugs, I was a small business owner – first in the music industry as an artist manager, and then, from 2011, as a private chef and caterer. I started cooking by hosting pop-up events, and what was really interesting in 2011, was that people didn’t know what a pop-up event was. Nowadays, everyone is hosting pop-ups, but in 2011 I would go to bars and suggest that we collaborate on pop-up parties and people were really keen to try something new.

After that, the business grew pretty rapidly working as a private chef and caterer to a lot of one percenters, big corporations, and even some celebrities. In 2017 I was approached by Miru Kim – an artist whose work I had admired for a long time – to work on an art project she had conceived

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We’ve now worked with so many incredible universities and globally recognized institutions that we respect and admire so much, that it’s given me such a great sense of purpose and inspiration to go from working as a private chef, to finding solutions towards food security, food justice, environmentalism, and sustainable global food systems.

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Insect agriculture presents an opportunity for regenerative and circular agriculture that can work alongside existing agricultural systems (Barragán-Fonseca et al 2020; Tomberlin et al 2015; Yen 2015). Insects can be utilized for organic waste management and be fed scraps from restaurants, grocery stores, bakeries, and breweries, and they can then be utilized as animal feed and pet food mitigating the food waste from going into landfills, and the deforestation in the Amazon utilized for animal feed. A byproduct of rearing metric tons of insects is the frass or excrement which is an incredible bio organic fertilizer mitigating the chemicals in our waste streams from traditional fertilizers. And a true gold star of this circular system is that the exuviae or the exoskeletons from the insects going through metamorphosis is also a part of the frass and together, they are tremendously effective at replenishing soil health.

We held a three-day festival which included a conference with brilliant speakers and panellists, an outdoor vendors’ market, followed by an eleven-course tasting banquet and a community brunch on the last day. A lot of the local news channels and newspapers were interested in what we were doing, including The New York Times, and I realised that this was an opportunity to work with something incredibly meaningful. We were invited to speak at the NY Entomological Society’s meeting at the American Museum of Natural History, participate at a couple of food festivals, and this was all just in the first six months of Brooklyn Bugs! And A LOT has happened since then …

‘I realised that this was an opportunity

to conquer her fear of insects by eating them. I said yes immediately.

Although I had eaten insects before – mostly crickets, grasshoppers, ants, and agave worms – I had never really cooked with them. When I went online to research, I discovered a report by the UN’s FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation) called Edible Insects: Future prospects for food and feed security (2013) and was fascinated that eating insects could address food security and sustainability. That motivated me tremendously and I started to email North American insect vendors who sent me free samples to work with and that sparked an idea: what if I held an edible insects festival in New York City? The plan gained a great deal of interest, and I frantically started making calls, put my team together, and Brooklyn Bugs was born over Labor Day in 2017.

Image caption: Chili and Garlic Brood X Cicada, cricket green goddess sauce, soft tofu salad. © Brooklyn Bugs.

to work with something incredibly meaningful’

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Image caption: Clockwise top left: Vespula flaviceps (Japanese wasps), Manchurian Scorpions, Roasted Crickets, Fried Grasshoppers, Roasted Mealworms, and Fried Termites © Brooklyn Bugs

BK: So, there are many facets to being Joseph Yoon of Brooklyn Bugs and you can’t master all of these facets singly. To what extent do you educate yourself about the science of insects, entomology, and to what extent do you marry your interests and passion with professional entomologists, nutritionists, and others when you explore entomo-gastronomy?

JY: I was admittedly not always the greatest student as a kid. Nowadays, I put a lot of time into educating myself, and have immersed myself in learning as much as possible. I never pretend to know something I don’t know, and I rely heavily on my relationships with scientists and academics.

Immediately, from day one, I tried to develop a rapport with scientists, started adding them to my Rolodex, and celebrated them like rock stars. I’m happy to say that many of them are now among my very dear friends, and without these relationships, I wouldn’t be where I am now.

If my approach were simply to suggest people eat bugs, without providing any scientific context, where would I really be? I just try to humbly share what I know and amplify the work of people who are doing such amazing research.

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BK: I’m going to ask you a question that’s often hard for scientists to answer: where do you see yourself being in five to ten years? When you ask a scientist that question, it’s a particularly difficult challenge to address, because oftentimes you want the science to guide you. You make discoveries and from those discoveries you have hypothesis generation, and it can take you in unexpected directions. Do you have a vision beyond five or ten years, or do you just want to see where life takes you?

JY: I feel similarly to scientists on this one, and I have always wanted to write a book …

BK: And there are a lot of really zinger books on the eating of insects, but you would have unique offerings and I could imagine a Joseph Yoon book on entomophagy going in a number of directions. What would be your dream encapsulation in the form of a book?

JY: I would love to write a narrative-driven book that shares a lot of the stories and recipes over the past six years. Another possibility is a memoir, maybe the founder story, or perhaps my team would be able to help me think about what the most pertinent or compelling narrative might be.

Image caption: At The University of Wisconsin Madison, 2019. L-R: Barrett Klein, Joseph Yoon, and Arnold van Huis (the main author of FAO’s 2013 Report, Edible Insects: Future prospects for food and feed security) © Brooklyn Bugs.

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I was a liberal arts major and I love to share the value and skill sets of the critical reasoning and thought processes that liberal arts has given me to explore the expansive potential of leaping off into the great unknown. There are so many opportunities I never would have thought could be in my life prior to Brooklyn Bugs. I never thought I would be speaking at universities or working with museums and institutions that I’ve long respected and loved around the world. It’s been such an incredibly humbling experience.

With regards to what the future holds, I put a great deal of respect and responsibility into having the gift of a global platform, and regularly speaking in front of audiences and college students. I love authentically being myself and emphasizing that it’s ok to be a long haired, colorful, bohemian, Korean-American, jazz chef, and edible insect ambassador, or whatever your calling is. I love to encourage people to dream the impossible, to follow their heart, be fearless, find purpose, and have conviction. I also love to share my strategy for how I like to deal with all my naysayers and detractors – I love to kill them … with kindness. Kindness always wins.

There’s great momentum and growth with edible insects and insect agriculture, and it’s not a question of whether all this will happen, but when. I’m excited to launch a couple of global campaigns next year to increase the availability of edible insects at grocery stores, and to bring respect and pride to the very practice and notion of eating insects around the world. We’ll happily continue working with our partners and colleagues to be inclusive and share our work through the prism of great hope and optimism for the future.

The experiences of the past six years have made me feel like I’m literally going through metamorphosis, and maybe the next time we’ll speak, I’ll have grown a pair of wings or antennae …

Image caption: Fermented honey, crickets, ginger, jujubes, with fried turmeric eddoes and bitter melon © Brooklyn Bugs.

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Image caption: Cricket and veggie frittata with cricket aioli © Brooklyn Bugs.

Image caption: Portrait of Joseph Yoon by Peter Domorak for the Explorers Club © Peter Domorak.

For more information on Joseph Yoon and Brooklyn Bugs, please visit: https://www.brooklynbugs.com/ and further excerpts from this interview will be available to view on YouTube from January 2024.

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Paradise

Lost

BY ANNETTE TOWNSHEND

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his work was created using traditional wax model making techniques, has been made from honey bee wax provided by the Department of Entomology at Cornell University.

The wax, collected from an orchard in New York State and analysed at the Cornell Chemical Ecology Core Facility, was found to contain pesticide residues above the EPA and the EFSA acute contact exposure levels of concern for honey bees. As Paradise Lost contains traces of these agricultural chemicals, they have been listed as artist’s materials.

Materials: Honey bee wax, pesticide residues in the wax (Difenoconazole, Carbaryl, Indoxacarb, Chlorpyrifos, Cyprodinil, Chlorantraniliprole, Trifloxystrobin, Pyraclostrobin, Fluxapyroxad, Metolachlor, Cyantraniliprole, Atrazine, Tebuconazole, Penthiopyrad, Piperonyl butoxide, Thiamethoxam, Methoxyfenozide, Pyrimethanil, Mandipropamid, Picoxystrobin, Azoxystrobin, Tebuthiuron, Propazine, Fluopyram) tinned copper wire, tissue paper, dry ground pigments, acrylic paint and varnish.

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visiting the moth enthusiast

Butterflies are so gaudy and seventies, you say, setting the trap: a bright light, and the twelve dips of an eggbox.

You are thinner than last time, draped in a shirt you found hanging still damp on your grandpa’s washing line – the homemade wine he left undrunk does not taste as whimsical as it sounds, you yell, from down in the cellar where unknown chemicals sit, barrels of varnish, rusting carpentry tools; remnants of when thatching was a livelihood, before your father left to become a salesman.

In the home they built together we are sipping from a specimen glass.

I am reeling from the weight of solvents and dust but you breathe deeply, finding your own air.

BY BETH LETTINGTON

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© Isabella Salas. All rights reserved.

Image caption: Entomorphosis by IsabellaSalas

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Alexandra

Daisy

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg planting Pollinator Pathmaker LAS Edition in spring 2023. Photo: Frank Sperling

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Ginsberg

a pollinator’s perspective

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lexandra Daisy Ginsberg is an artist based at Somerset House Studios, London, who examines our fraught relationships with nature and technology. For example, she was lead author of ‘Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology’s Designs on Nature’ (MIT Press, 2014). Perhaps that suggests a science background, and Ginsberg does say ‘I love science and I love asking scientists questions’. Yet she studied architecture as an undergraduate, then studied for her Masters and PhD in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art. This unusual course leant towards art practice, using design as a critical medium for ‘asking questions about the world, and with a strong focus on examining emerging technologies’. And that is exactly what we get in her notably original living artwork, planting editions of Pollinator Pathmaker at the Eden Project in Cornwall; in Kensington Gardens for the Serpentine; and at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin.

As she explains: ‘bees, hoverflies, butterflies, moths, wasps, beetles, and other pollinators are essential for many plant species to reproduce and for ecosystems to flourish. But human-made habitat loss, pesticides, invasive species, and climate change are causing a terrifying decline in pollinator populations around the world. Without pollinators, many plants can’t reproduce and make seeds. Without seeds, many of the trees, flowers, and crops we rely on simply wouldn’t exist. Plants are vital to the survival of life on Earth, including us. How and what we plant matters, so I asked: what would a garden look like if it were designed from a pollinator’s perspective, rather than ours?’

IN CONVERSATION WITH PAUL CAREY-KENT

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She categorises pollinators into groups like solitary bees, bumblebees, honey bees, moths and butterflies; and their visiting patterns for each plant are held in the database. Some plants suit many insects, but, for example, only some species like bumblebees can get into a foxglove. ‘Pollinators see differently from us, forage in different ways, and emerge in different seasons to each other, so a garden designed for them will look quite different from a garden designed for us’, as Ginsberg explains, ‘all these different coloured and shaped plants are thrown in together because insects see different colours. For example bees can’t see red so they’re not attracted in the same way to red flowers, whereas many butterflies can see red. Flowers have evolved their colours in concert with their pollinators. A great pollinator garden will have all these ‘clashing’ colours mixed up together, but not necessarily in a way that’s conventionally beautiful to the human eye. This makes you extremely aware of your value judgments, and how they’re driven by aesthetics over empathy for other species’.

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Image caption: Digital render of Pollinator Pathmaker LAS Edition in human vision, 2023. © Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg Ltd. Courtesy the artist.

Planting with the purpose to support pollinators isn’t unusual, indeed it’s a trend as people become increasingly aware of the crisis facing pollinating insects – but the key to Pollinator Pathmaker is Ginsberg’s custom computer algorithm, which optimises the selection and arrangement of flowers beyond what can easily be achieved through human planning. The algorithm picks from a curated database of 180 plants to be combined across the whole year, taking account of soil type and the degree of exposure to sunlight to maximise the diversity of insects assisted. ‘It’s an attempt to cram in as much as possible over the year’, says Ginsberg, ‘including plants that wouldn’t necessarily be found together in nature. It’s an unnatural garden that’s designed for nature.’

‘It’s an unnatural garden

that’s designed for nature’

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Image caption: Pollinator Pathmaker in Pollinator Vision, 2023. © Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg Ltd. Courtesy the artist.

However, the algorithm does allow for some modification to influence the appearance to human eyes: users can choose to adjust the number of species, degree of pattern and type of flight paths supported. Anyone can play with her algorithmic tool on the artwork’s website, pollinator.art. Opt for fewer species in a bolder pattern, and you’ll get more drifts and a more conventional garden design look – and the flowers you are instructed to plant will be more generalist, serving various insects. More species will allow more specialist plants to be included. A lot of work lies behind the algorithm – for example, the data for which pollinators visit which plants is hard to obtain and required much research. Despite this, it’s remarkably easy to run it as many times as you like with different preferences just for the experimental fun or until you find a garden which you like. What about Ginsberg’s own garden? She confesses that she should have spent longer generating and comparing options: ‘my one at home looks mad, as I ended up with something that doesn’t look like a ‘normal’ garden: half is 2.5m tall, half is 75cm tall. But it’s full of insects and I love it, as it reminds me that it’s not for me.’ The provocation made, then, is ‘why are you planting, and who are you planting for?’ We might also be drawn into more complex questions as ‘what is at about humans that responds to the aesthetic of flowers in particular’ and ‘is it possible for bees to appreciate what they see, or even to enjoy the pattern of colours as art?’

The algorithm’s outputs are also attractive. That’s partly down to Ginsberg’s own skills – and considerable persistence: she painted all 180 plants in each of their three active seasons to form the underlying visual data. She is making editioned prints and tapestries from the generated visualisations, which read as worthy additions to the traditions of floral art, even though the algorithm and the gardens made from it remain primary. Those prints, together with Ginsberg’s own preparatory sketches, are clearly art, but Ginsberg regards the whole work in that light.

It isn’t a proposed solution, though it would obviously help if enough gardeners planted according to the algorithm. The project is more, she says ‘about agency – shifting our focus to look at nature, spend time with it, and learn to care for it.’

That’s in the light of how she – along with pretty-much everyone, probably – is ‘faced with this complete panic over the climate emergency and a moral panic at my own failings and my own hypocrisy – the way I act every day.’ It’s also about accepting that all technology involves a loss of control to improve the human lot.

Here the technology tells gardeners what to plant where, and ultimately that loss of control enables us to do something where our proclivities are altered. Is it, then, an altruistic use of technology, a genuine prioritising of nature over human interests? ‘Probably not’, Ginsberg replies, ‘because supporting pollinators helps support ecosystems and so supports us indirectly: we benefit from the shared environment not being destroyed.’

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‘supporting pollinators

helps support ecosystems’

Image caption: Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Preparatory sketch of Pollinator Pathmaker Eden Project Edition, 2020. © Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg Ltd. Courtesy the artist

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Image caption: Pollinator Pathmaker Serpentine Edition in August 2023. Photo Royston Hunt. Courtesy the artist.

Image caption: Pollinator Pathmaker LAS Edition in June 2023. Photo: Frank Sperling. Courtesy LAS Art Foundation

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‘The insects are better respondents than the humans’

What are the results so far? A pilot research project with Exeter University looked at the Eden Edition of the artwork, with 7,000 plants of 64 species covering 7000 sq m, comparing the functional biodiversity on the Pollinator Pathmaker site with conventional pollinator planting at Eden, and with a wildflower meadow. Preliminary results show that the algorithm is beneficial to the pollinators, notably through how it enables forage to be provided across all seasons. It’s not that wildflower meadows perform poorly – after all, she points out, nature invented pollination – but they bloom over a shorter period and may have a more limited range of plant species. Yet it is the loss of the UK’s wildflower meadows – 97% have gone since the 1930s – that’s the main cause of the problem. And restoration to get them working is complex: many species must be brought together, and on planting they often fail – it’s often a careful process of experimentation to make them work. Ginsberg also bemoans the trend towards AstroTurf lawns as ‘a disaster for the species in your garden’. Ginsberg is now applying for grants to extend the Eden assessment project into a larger scientific study. The team doesn’t track who downloads instructions to plant their own DIY Edition from pollinator.art, due to data privacy.

‘All we can see’, says Ginsberg, ‘is what people want to share on social media. The insects are better respondents than the humans!’ One might also consider whether it has changed how professionals design gardens. Ginsberg does have some traction there: ‘I haven’t been on Gardener’s World, but I did appear in The Hardy Plant, which is the journal of the Hardy Plant Society, and that’s the ultimate accolade! Experienced gardeners are intrigued, but if they’re actually planting Pollinator Pathmaker DIY Editions, they haven’t told me yet.

I do work with professional gardeners as well as volunteers to plant large public Editions though – watching us plant from a pixelated planting plan where we know where every single plant must go, on such a large scale, is like performance art, a dance of people calling out numbers instead of names and running to get plants.’

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The Pollinator Pathmaker project is highly impressive. Unsurprisingly, it hasn’t emerged from a clear sky, but from a series of her artworks over the past decade. Ginsberg mentions three originating in 2019 that share some of the same approaches and concerns: audience interactivity, biodiversity, species loss and taking a perspective beyond the human one. The Substitute (shown recently at London’s Natural History Museum and currently on show at the Naturhistorisches Museum Bern) is a life-size digital recreation of the extinct northern white rhinoceros. Ginsberg explains, ‘As the artificial rhino habituates to its space, its form and sound toggle from pixilation to lifelike’. We’re drawn into this as it comes to life, but suddenly the gaze shifts as the rhino is fully realised and looks you in the eye – you are the viewed, not the viewer.

Resurrecting the Sublime uses genetic engineering to resurrect the smell of flowers lost due to colonial activity – so that humans may again experience something we have destroyed – ‘an awesome and perhaps terrifying prospect’, says Ginsberg. The cross-disciplinary team included smell researcher and artist Sissel Tolaas and researchers from Ginkgo Bioworks, who ‘used synthetic biology to predict and resynthesize gene sequences that might encode for fragrance-producing enzymes of the extinct plants’.

Image caption: Installation view of The Substitute in ‘Apocalypse – End Without End’ at Natural History Museum, Bern, 2022.

Photo: Nelly Rodriguez

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Image caption: Installation view, ‘Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg – Machine Auguries: Toledo’, Toledo Museum of Art, 2023. © the artist.

Photo: Madhouse. https://vimeo.com/856388110

In Machine Auguries: Toledo (currently on show at the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio) ‘a natural dawn chorus is taken over by artificial birds, their calls generated using machine learning’. The Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology provided Ginsberg with 100,000 field recordings of eleven local and migratory bird species, which she used to train a generative adversarial network, or GAN: two neural networks ‘pitted against each other to learn to sing ... Reflecting on how birds develop their song from each other, a call and response of real and artificial birds mimics the evolution of a new language’. The second half of the sound piece is completely AI-generated birdsong, but ‘you can’t tell the difference’, says Ginsberg. All four projects pivot on the fact that, for all that technology can do, you still can’t recreate what has gone – so we shouldn’t allow more of nature to disappear.

You can read more about Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s projects on her website www.daisyginsberg.com. The Pollinator Pathmaker’s algorithm can be freely accessed at pollinator.art/pathmaker. Current and forthcoming projects include the group exhibition ‘Bending the Curve’ at Frankfurter Kunstverein (to Mar 3, 2024), Microwave Media Arts Festival 2023 (Nov 3, 2023 – Jan 3, 2024) and ‘Mars: The Red Mirror’ at Artscience Museum Singapore, (Nov 25, 2023 – Apr 7, 2024).

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Image caption: The Fly by Cynthia Yatchman

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Insector

BY JEFFREY TURBOFF

Image caption: Insector by Jeffrey Turboff. This video is available to view via FrameALIVE at https://landing.framealive.com/

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The Lost Wings

of Summer

D

uring a recent residency at the Centre for Fine Print Research at the University of the West of England, Tracey Bush is creating an editioned multiple: The Lost Wings of Summer. Utilising the digital laser cutting and printing technologies at the CFPR, laborious hand cutting is reinterpreted to create an editioned, fold out collection of British Butterflies, to be presented in entomology cases.

Reprising her fascination with conventions of Natural History collecting, the interrelated images will create a requiem for thirteen British Butterflies, five of which are extinct: the Black Veined White, Large Tortoiseshell, Large Copper, Mazarine Blue and the Large Blue. The other eight species are on the RED endangered list. The drawings of the Butterfly species were hand-drawn,

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BY TRACEY BUSH

and then made into a letterpress plate. This was printed to create a ‘ghost ‘ image to suggest that these insects will only exist in books in the future. Over the last four decades, 76% of British Butterflies have declined in number (Fox et al 2015). British butterflies are some of the most widely studied worldwide, and Bush has been assisting in the creation of The Lost Wings of Summer by the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery (Department of Natural Science), a project which highlights biodiversity loss and which is a dialogue between paper cut, embossed print, and paper sculpture.

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116 Image caption: Insect Monoprint by Cynthia Yatchman

bulwark, beetle

An artificial wilderness And a sky like lead.

— WH Auden

We all need a shield.

Even a little one.

Even a shield-bug light-weight in flight, heavy as a tickle where it landed, like a walking freckle, more than penta, not quite octa, blocking one photon, one pixel of sun: hexagonal and onyx escutcheon, catching one arcsecond of ultraviolet light.

Dark diamond, zero rupee, scab of a scarab on skin, you can’t unemblazon our corruption— but sometimes one brief absence of pain is enough.

Then it was gone.

BY LUCAS ROSSI

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T

he insect world can seem a beautiful, intricate, and peculiar realm. It is also a world full of intriguing sounds. Some of these sounds we may be aware of, but there are many that are secrets to the human ear.

Lisa Schonberg invites us into those secret spaces through extraordinary multimedia research, sound composition, and writing, with the aims of opening new paths of communication and of transforming human perception of non-human species.

Schonberg began playing drums as a child and went on to study ecology and entomology, earning her Master’s in Environmental Studies with a focus on ant biodiversity in the Neotropics. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In the mid-2000s, she worked with the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation helping to draw attention to the endangered Hawaiian bees in the genus Hylaeus. This became The Hylaeus Project in 2013, during which Schonberg collaborated with Aidan Koch to document Hylaeus bees through visual art, natural history writing, music composition, and photography.

Her first visit to Manaus, Brazil, was as artist-in-residence with Labverde in 2017. Since then, she has spent considerable spans of time in the Brazilian Amazon investigating ant acoustics and developing Amplifying the Tropical Ants (ATTA) in collaboration with entomologists Érica Valle and Fabricio Baccaro at the Federal University of Amazonas (UFAM) and the National Institute of Amazonian Research (INPA). This project comprises a wide range of research and creative outputs, including in bioacoustics, taxonomy, and behavioural and acoustic ecology.

In this interview, Schonberg speaks with Barrett Klein about ant mimicry, techniques and technology in the field, and the origins of human language.

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Lisa Schonberg

a deep attention to place

Image caption: Lisa Schonberg at Wave Farm in Sept 2023. Photograph by Lucy Bohnsack

IN CONVERSATION WITH BARRETT KLEIN

EDITED AND WRITTEN BY MELISSA EVANS

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Image caption: Recording ants at Adolfo Ducke Reserve in Manaus, Brazil during 2017 artist residency with Labverde.

Photography by Gui Gomes

Image caption: Performance/installation, The Insects are Present music composition system at the Lawn (Re)Disturbance Laboratory, August 2023. Linked video: The Insects are Present: LRDL Composition 2, excerpt (2023). This video is available to view through FrameAlive https://landing.framealive.com/home

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Barrett Klein: Could we start by talking about your love of revealing hidden sounds? What can be gained by unveiling hidden or inaudible soundscapes?

Lisa Schonberg: Hearing or realising sounds that are beyond the audible range for humans requires paying deep attention to place, to where you are or where you have been.

Our language tends towards the visual, but there has been a shift towards listening more. The most obvious choice is to listen to what we can hear and that is super important – but to go beyond and consider what we cannot hear pushes us to consider a non-human listening position and perspective.

We gather knowledge through our own fabulous, but limited perspective. I love science. I used to practice science formally, and I now make art that entangles itself with science, but there is much that we don’t know, can’t know, or don’t know yet.

BK: Some of what you’ve recorded and presented visually is ultrasound, or sound frequencies above our perception of hearing, and that reminds me of our very limited electromagnetic range, visually (NASA 2008). We have ROYGBIV, but others – including some insects – see beyond this narrow band of colors. In aural terms, we are limited to between around 20 and 20,000 Hz (Purves at al 2018), and to play with that in a multimedia or multimodal sense is really interesting because you are exploring lost, hidden, and unheard sound and also translating that information visually.

As an entomologist, I have honed my search image for insects, as have you, but I grew up in a temperate zone with cicadas and crickets during the summer and, honestly, I didn’t open my ears as much as I could have at the time. Then I participated in a workshop where Wil Hershberger, co-author of The Songs of Insects (Hershberger 2012; Elliott & Hershberger 2007) was photographing and recording the singers all around us. He had us just listen during the night and during the day, and an audial world was opened up to me.

LS: That reminds me of a project I have been working on at The Sanctuary for Independent Media, with artist Ellie Irons. She has an ongoing project there called the Lawn (Re)Disturbance Laboratory; different plants are coming up that were in the seed bed before the lot was paved over with asphalt. Ellie has opened up the asphalt and brought in new seeds to some plots, and the insect environment there is unreal; when you approach the installation, the soundscape really hits you all of a sudden.

I set up an installation there called The Insects Are Present (2023), which riffs on Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present (2009) at MOMA, where Abramović sat at a table and the public took turns sitting facing her. The idea is to get people to listen to the hidden sounds of insects in real time. They wore headphones linked to mics positioned on and within the soil, and underneath the vegetation.

The idea was to reveal those hidden sounds. I set up a waiting area a distance away from the listening station – only one person was in the focused listening area at a time – but everyone said that even in the waiting area, they were already more aware of the soundscape than they had been when visiting the area previously. So, they suddenly had this auralization.

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BK: Let’s talk about insect sound. Would you say ‘sound’, ‘noise’, or ‘music’, and how and when do you distinguish between these terms?

LS: Sound, noise, music – those things have complicated definitions. Noise is commonly understood to mean undesirable sound, but if you’re a sound artist it means sound that is covering all possible frequencies at once. If you add noise to something you’re fuzzing up the timbre.

BK: So, you don’t ascribe negative connotations to noise?

LS: I do find some noise undesirable, but noise has a socially embedded meaning and then it has a meaning within the sound world. I think of my own work as sound and music – in a music venue it seems like music, on loop in an installation with four speakers it seems like sound art. The term ‘music’ usually denotes a fixed composition, whereas ‘sound art’ typically is more fluid.

When we discuss these terms in relation to the insect world, I feel it prompts the question: are insects sentient? Also, do they experience abstract thought? If I refer to noise in the insect world, I think of sound that would disturb them, or that they might perceive and feel neutral about. Most insects sense sound through vibration, so if a car drives by their nest, you assume that they would sense that vibration.

That could be perceived as ‘noise’ by the insects themselves if it disturbs them or prevents them from communicating effectively, for example.

BK: That’s beautiful. I was thinking from an anthropocentric vantage point, but you flipped it, as you often do in your work, to think from an insect’s vantage point.

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‘Sound, noise, music –

LS: The term was coined by Pauline Oliveros in her paper, ‘Auralizing the Sonosphere: A Vocabulary for Inner Sound and Sounding’ (2011), which focuses on the lack of vocabulary available for discussing sound and how we default to visualbased language. Oliveros took the word auralization from the field of architecture (Kleiner, Dalenbäck & Svensson, 1993), which uses the term in modeling sound behaviour in a specific space. She applied the term to hearing and creating sounds in the mind, so ‘auralization’ provides a sonic parallel to the term ‘imagination’.

those things have complicated definitions’

BK: You have borrowed and written about this term, ‘auralization’. Could you define it?

Image caption: Live performance of the trio Antenna at the Troy Listening Room in Troy, NY, featuring Senem Pirler, Leah Bowden, and Lisa Schonberg (2022). Photography by Jenn Grossman.

Image caption: Schonberg performing a solo set at the Gadsden Museum (Gadsden, AL) for the opening of the group exhibit Naturphilia in May 2023. Photography by David Michael.

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Image caption: Ants in the genus Crematogaster at a bait, with contact microphone under the bait paper. UFAM forest fragment, Manaus, BR. Photography by Lisa Schonberg.

Image caption: Microphones in entrance and surface of leafcutter ant nest, UFAM forest fragment, Manaus, Brazil (2021). Photography by Lisa Schonberg.

Image caption: Ants in the genus Camponotus with a contact mic clipped to the vegetation to pick up their locomotion sounds. Taken in UFAM forest fragment, Manaus, Brazil. Photography by Hunter Lee Daniel, 2019.

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Let’s talk about your music. I imagine most musicians have insect sounds in their work incidentally at some point; they might hear soundscapes that include insects and that might translate into their work. By contrast, you have taken deliberate steps to incorporate those sounds into your music. How do you feel your music differs, given its intentionality?

LS: That’s a really good question. It is similar to when I’m in a band and we want to go in a new direction. Someone will bring an album to rehearsal, and we’ll listen to it intently and talk about it.

Then we play music and rather than mimicking the sound, we see if we can capture the vibe or feeling of the music. I’m trying to replicate that process when I’m listening to insects.

BK: What does it mean to mimic and what does it mean to capture the vibe?

LS: I’m rhythm-based, so to me mimicry is primarily rhythmic and the pitch of the notes often feels more flexible. I think vibe, on the other hand, is the overall musical feeling that someone might perceive. For example, there are instances where an insect might sound out a pattern with a certain density and common rhythm. I was listening to some abundant cosmopolitan ants and there was a sixteenth-note feeling that occurred in different patterns, but the space in between those bursts of sixteenth notes was varied. To get that vibe or feeling it might be sufficient to write anything with sixteenth note phrases and varied spacing – and perhaps a similar tempo and dynamics. With mimicry it would be more of a direct copy.

BK: Could we talk about your collaboration HVAC (2022) and how the difference between mimicry and vibe plays out in that composition?

LS: HVAC originated with a recording I made on the UFAM campus, which is situated in the largest remaining forest fragment of Manaus. It’s a very special place; a big tropical rainforest in a large city. The forest reaches the edge of the campus buildings and there are huge leafcutter ant nests at this edge. This song was recorded entirely inside the ant nests, about six inches down each nest entrance. I threaded my microphones into the nests to capture the ants’ stridulations and the sounds of the air conditioning systems which run continuously in the nearby buildings.

This song considers the effect of the HVAC noise on the ants and their nests, but also reveals the fascinating sound system beyond human auditory range which is happening right next to where the students are learning. You could say this was a collaboration with the ants, the air conditioning system, and musician Jane Paik.

I asked Jane to perform a mix of mimicry and free response with her voice, as though she were trying to communicate with the ants, and I took the same approach on the drumming. We were not only mimicking and free improvising on the ant sound, but also on the sound from the air conditioning. We focused on each in separate takes. In one take I would play the ant sounds on a loop and ask Jane to improvise on those sounds, then we would do the same with the air conditioning sounds. At times we also improvised together, not only responding to each other’s ideas and building on them, but also responding to the ant sounds themselves. When we had enough, I took all the recorded material and built it into a composition.

There are also some synthesized parts in the composition, that I derived from the original field recordings of both ants and the HVAC system. You can generate a MIDI file in Ableton Live based on the rhythm or melody of an audio recording and plug any synthesized sound into this MIDI code. I also took a basic sine wave oscillator and modulated it with the ant sound.

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BK: When you were doing the back and forth during that experiment, was that a way for both of you to try to better understand what the ants are experiencing?

LS: Yes – that was the idea, but of course it’s impossible to truly have their perspective. I am inspired in this approach by David Dunn – a composer and artist who has written and spoken widely on music as a communication and learning tool. He has suggested that music has more potential than human language in beyond-human communication because an ant’s language, for example, has more in common with our music than with our verbal language (Dunn & van Peer 1999).

BK: How about the origins of human music? I’d love to hear your take on a quote from David Rothenberg’s book Bug Music: How Insects Gave Us Rhythm and Noise (2014): ‘Insects may be the very source of our interest in rhythm, the beat, the regular thrum.’ Bold claim!

LS: I would say the claim might have some truth to it. For example, the cooling fan in my studio here has a regular sound pattern, but prior to mechanical technologies, insects possibly provided the most regular repetitive sounds. I wasn’t around at the time to know, but it is possible.

BK: What about birds, as another example?

LS: There is such a wide variety of bird sounds and most definitely have regular rhythms and patterns to them. I’m particularly drawn to insect sound, but I imagine that other organisms’ sounds probably also informed us. I do feel insects were probably a big part of it though.

BK: How do you go about recording your ants and other insects, especially when you’re dealing with subterranean organisms?

LS: Well, one of the most important tools for these recordings is a contact microphone, which has a pressure sensitive Piezo element at its core (Collins 2006). They are specifically designed to pick up sound through vibration as opposed to through the air.

As with music and sound, there is also an unclear boundary between vibratory and airborne sound. If someone yells it will create vibrations within objects in addition to the sound in the air – and if something creates a loud vibratory sound through a substrate there might be some sound that crosses over as airborne. Generally, contact microphones pick up substrate-borne vibration and in my own research these substrates are usually soil or vegetation.

I take different types of contact mics and put them within soil environments or clip them to other vibratory substrates, for example wood in different stages of decomposition. Alternatively, if I see a trail of army ants moving and they’re going over fragments of vegetation, I’ll clip a contact mic to vegetation along their path to pick up the sounds of their locomotion.

A lot of plants in the tropics have domatia (structures that evolved specifically for ant habitation) (Rico-Gray & Oliveira 2007) and Érica has been excited to look for ants in these domatia to record them. So, we often use vision to find places which might have sound. For example, finding fluffy, thick leaf litter and knowing that there will definitely be invertebrates living amongst it.

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to try and capture pristine soundscapes’

‘There is a tendency in sound art

BK: How do you capture something subterranean or hidden to us visually and acoustically? Also, how do you distinguish between far-field sound and near-field sound, and substrate-borne vibrations?

LS: Insects might sense far-field sound as substrate-borne vibrations in the soil they inhabit, and I’ve been using different microphones to pick that up. I use a geophone, which is a field recording microphone modelled after seismology sensors. It picks up more of the low-end sounds and vibrations. I use it mainly to pick up the sounds of cars driving by or lawn care machinery rumbling through the soil near an insect nest, and to determine how or if that sound is reaching the insect habitat.

BK: That is one of several ways your work departs greatly from work by Roger and Katy Payne (Lewis 2020), Bernie Krause (Krause 2016; Krause et al 2019), and others who have recorded natural sounds – you’re not separating human-created sound from natural sound.

LS: I find it interesting that they exist parallel to each other, and I hope showing them that way encourages people to consider this parallel sound world in their day to day lives. If you hear a car sound in my composition juxtaposed with a hidden insect sound and you later hear a car in your living environment, you might consider that there’s a hidden insect sound there as well - and that the car sound might be being sensed by those insects.

There is a tendency in sound art to try and capture pristine soundscapes in pristine locations. I understand the intention, but that is not the planet that we live on. It also positions humans as separate and human sound as disturbance – that pristine equals without human sound. In addition to erasing millenia of indigenous presence in many of these locations, this type of narrative denies the hope that we could be present and part of these places in a positive way.

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BK: I’m going to read a section from your work Night Singers: Text Score for Temperate Regions (Schonberg 2022) which further explores your breaking down of us versus them: Begin this ritual on the 15th day of July.

Once it is dark, walk to the nearest area of vegetation.

Listen. Did the insects start to sing yet?

Check each evening until you hear them.

The first night they call, listen for ten minutes.

Focus on one type of call.

Expand to the full soundscape.

Focus on a single insect caller.

How do they sing with human sounds?

Repeat nightly.

In the fall, notice the decrease in singers.

Continue nightly until they stop singing.

Visit one more night to make sure they’ve stopped.

I see this text as a meditative approach to respecting and potentially celebrating, or at the very least tolerating those omnipresent invertebrates.

LS: Most of that publication stemmed from my moving to New York from the West Coast and then living in an urban space without a car. It really got me to focus on the vegetation and environments around me, so the publication is about getting to know insects through listening in urban places.

BK: Did you also intend to encourage others to reflect on their relationships with domestic insects?

LS: Yes. I of course already appreciated insects, but I began paying even more attention to them inside my own home and I had been reading various text scores by Pauline Oliveros (Oliveros 1971; Oliveros 2013). She has written text scores that are performative – that anyone can perform, even without musical experience. I wrote the Night Singers texts similarly, as an attempt to prompt a slowing down and grounding experience, taking time to consider invertebrates and to reassess our fear-based reactions towards them.

BK: I’d like to run through a few potentially new insect collaborators for you to consider working with. For example, have you worked with stoneflies, which drum during courtship (Sandberg 2011)?

LS: I’ve never worked with them, but now they are on my list!

BK: How about honeybees? I watched a colony of honeybees this summer and used a tiny directional microphone to record their waggle dancing sounds. I had removed the glass of my observation hive and replaced it with tulle to listen in more easily, and it was a different world for me. Might you be interested in exploring the sounds of their piping, waggle dancing, tremble dancing, and other acoustically distinct signals?

LS: I would love to! Having studied the Hylaeus, my attention had been focused mainly on solitary bees, but two years ago artist Miriam Simun asked me to record honeybees for a work she was preparing for the Symbionts exhibit at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. She connected me with

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Image caption: Lisa working in the field as an artist in residence at Wave Farm (Acra, NY, Sept 2023). She was studying ants and possible effects of human communication with cellular frequencies.

Photography by Lucy Bohnsack.

Image caption: Still image from music video for Multispecies (Ants). Video and animation by Blaire Stapp, with footage by Patricia Gouvea. Music composed by Schonberg, and performed by Secret Drum Band. Off the 2020 album Chuva (Moon Glyph Records). This video is available to view with FrameAlive https://landing.framealive.com/home

Image caption: The ensemble UAU performing at Bosque da Ciência in Manaus, Brazil in 2018. Featuring Anthony Brisson, Leonardo Pimentel, and Andrio Dias. Photography by Alberto Araujo

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a beekeeper in Queens, who had six colonies of bees on his roof. I had never listened to them closely before and we stuck contact microphones and very small condenser mics in and around the hives. It was incredible. I didn’t categorize the sounds, but I do want to return to those and work with them more.

BK: It’s interesting that you haven’t spent a lot of time with insects most famous for their singing.

LS: Many katydids have ultrasonic components to their calls (Woodrow & Montealegre‐Z 2023) that I have heard with a specialized ultrasonic mic, but I do focus on hidden sounds rather than more conspicuous insect callers such as cicadas and crickets. However, I have recorded thick cricket soundscapes and included only the ultrasonic component. Then I brought that down into human hearing range.

BK: How about extinct insects with their extinct sounds? I know of one superb example.

Jun-Jie Gu et al. published a paper (Gu et al 2012) in which a male Katydid is fossilised so beautifully that you find not only the stridulatory band but also the pluck on its front wings and they rediscovered an extinct sound as part of a larger soundscape from 165 million years ago.

LS: That’s incredible!

BK: Unusually, they also published a video which gives the ambience and plays the katydid song from this long-lost time. They recreated the sound from what they know of the fossil morphology and extant relatives.

LS: So, they got the timbre, the length, and the meta-pattern of the sound from extant species?

BK: The frequency does, of course, vary based on temperature, but they found the tempo.

LS: That’s an amazing realm I’d love to work in!

BK: Can you give us hints about what else your future may hold?

LS: I’ll be going to the International Ant Symposium in Manaus soon. I’ve been working with entomologists Fabricio Baccaro and Érica Valle, and bioacoustician Tainara Sobroza on ant bioacoustics research in Manaus for several years. I’ll be presenting some work from that project in a live solo performance and giving a lecture at Bosque da Ciệncia.

I will have a chance to go in the field with some myrmecologists before and after the conference.

I have a history of doing biology research and a background in entomology, but it’s really exciting to be in these positions as an artist and musician.

BK: Thank you so much, Lisa. I really appreciate this opportunity to discuss your projects and thoughts concerning insect sound.

For more information on Lisa Schonberg and her work, please visit: http://www.lisaschonberg.com/ and further excerpts from this interview will be available to view on YouTube from January 2024.

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Image caption: Dead Drone by Jake Eshelman

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The Telling of the Bees

BY JAKE ESHELMAN

A

dead drone lies beneath the apparatus used to harvest his semen for a genetic experiment at the Honey Bee Lab at Texas A&M University. In order to extract semen from a drone, researchers ‘pop’ him by crushing his thorax between the thumb and pointer finger to forcefully expel his genitals from his abdomen. His semen is then collected using a pipette. After harvesting semen from multiple drones, the same device is used to anesthetize and artificially inseminate queens. In addition to being a standard practice for genetic research in honey bees – as is the case here – this process is also used to commercially breed queens for beekeepers seeking hives with specific genetic traits and behavioral characteristics. More specifically, this genetic experiment seeks to determine how crossbreeding domesticated and wild honey bees might improve hive characteristics, behaviors, and honey production for commercial beekeepers and their clients, which often includes industrial agricultural operations that rely on honey bee colonies to pollinate their crops.

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Melissodes Bidentis by Jake Eshelman A researcher in the Texas A&M University entomology department positions a specimen (Melissodes bidentis) under the digital microscope to study the species’ behavior, distribution, and ecological interactions.

Image caption: 40 Days after the Storm by Krista Leigh Steinke

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on drowning i. ‘cum fossa et furca’ it doesn’t feel like disaster but you know that you are drowning it is not lichens, no failure of elytra, but the way that your heart snags in your chest, its weight the uneven thud of a door slamming shut before retreating steps, a tumult, a revolt. they are worm-gnawed, and moth-eaten, smoothed between the splits, these uneven stairs that slice with their sharpness, that you climb and climb and climb, while the children open themselves, swiftly bloodied, teeth in shards. ii. o, flower chafer, o pollen-feeder, you, it is not the water sluicing away your breath, but perhaps it is the granite heft and bulk of weight that your spiny tergal folds require, that they require! this ossification, this armor, this dance with gravity, chiton-full, sclerotin-stuffed, and heavy, heavy, thick. heavy and thick because once, like during a dream you unpeeled yourself, slowly, shudderingly, from the very integument that made you, your painful apolysis, sieving, tearing, epidermal growth, ecdysis, epidermal failure. you waited, molting, molting, you were more careful, softer, enduring this necessary danger to grow. but then, tanned-baby, they promised you would be stolid and brave, nearly impermeable, but you your sclerotized shield is hard and firm, and you take up more space than before. this is a very good thing because you are anchored or attempting to anchor yourself more firmly in the looming, wild, world and this is a very bad thing because the world careens around you, tilting and crashing. crashing and tilting, the only anchor you have, is your stony exoskeleton, the bony burden you heft on your very back— your reassurance against mechanical damage spurned by all those modern, wefted moorings. it is not the sack of sand, no basket of dumb stones, no unpredictable wind that swallows you or sends you flying, o precious flower chafer no insidious thrip, you, no backswimmer you, no dumb, sucking aphid, you. no, no. it is the iron noose of disappointment, that pulls you under. no backswimmer, no. it is her touch that feels like poison, her soul sick and unkind. it is the threat of cuticular degradation, her hand around your body, around your world, underwater. cement layer sloughing off, cement lapidary unmooring you, a hindrance, thick and heavy. you know that the space she holds for you, and the disdain in her eyes, will drag you under like another martyrdom. iii. space grants you attention but space is porous too, you have hoarded so much of it that you feel like your insides are seeping out. you are internally wounded in this way. you are internally wounded in this way, just as your softer neighbor’s asymmetrical cerci came at a cost, or that other beetle with his smashed carapace, who knows this feeling too of spreading out, for just a moment. for just a moment, resisting, as the large boot crashes down, a father’s touch. the airways clotted with frothing ribbons of blood, tyrannical sunlight singing the blackening innards on display, glittering.

BY ALANI HICKS-BARTLETT

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EDITED AND WRITTEN BY DAVID TRIGG

IN CONVERSATION WITH BARRETT KLEIN

Catherine

Chalmers

the nature of art

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ew York based artist Catherine Chalmers works at the intersection of art, science, and nature. She does extensive research for each of her long-term, multimedia projects and a direct engagement with the natural world is central to her practice. Chalmers aims to give form to the richness, as well as the brutality and indifference that often characterise our relationship with animals. She uses the narrative possibilities of the visual arts to help bridge the increasing rift between humanity and the ecosystem.

Born and raised in San Mateo, California, Chalmers has a BS in Engineering from Stanford University, and an MFA. in Paintings from the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London. After graduating from the RCA, she moved to New York City and soon shifted her focus from paint on canvas to live animals. Over the years she has raised a cornucopia of insects, rodents, reptiles, amphibians, and countless plants in her studio for her work.

In her Food Chain project, she explored one of the basic engines of the ecosystem, to eat and be eaten. Caterpillars eating a tomato, praying mantis eating a caterpillar, frog eating a praying mantis.

The project resulted in her first publication, Food Chain (2000).

Next, she worked with one of the most reviled of creatures, the urban roach, Periplaneta americana.

The American Cockroach project was an investigation into our adversarial relationship with nature.

For her, the cockroach was a conduit to the negative and often violent relationship we have with the animal world. Chalmers questions the aesthetics of our empathy and enmity toward animals.

Would we like the cockroach better if it looked like a ladybug or bumble bee? Our subjective judgments have real consequences for the ecosystem, as we often seek to eliminate what we find unpleasant. In this context, she staged mock executions of the cockroach.

For her Leafcutters project, every winter for nearly ten years she filmed, photographed, and followed the fates of over a dozen leafcutter ant colonies on the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica. In four chapters, the multimedia project accentuates the ingenuity of these miniature, yet mighty civilizations that inhabit the neotropical rainforest. The work focuses on four supposedly unique human traits: language, ritual, war, and art. The narrative themes aim to blur the boundaries between culture and nature.

Whether in the studio or in the field, Chalmers always works with the animals’ natural behavior.

They are her collaborators. She observes, responds, experiments, and adjusts, and through this back and forth process her work takes shape. Although Chalmers uses a variety of media, from painting to photography, video, sculpture, and drawing, her artistic career is focused on one central issue: how to confront and challenge our anthropocentric point of view. Her work not only connects the disciplines of art and science, but also aims to serve as a link between humanity and the intricate web of life on Earth.

In this interview, Barrett Klein speaks with Chalmers about the evolution of her practice, from manipulating paint and directing cockroaches in New York City to wrangling ants in the Central American jungle.

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Barrett Klein: Let’s start with a quote from your website: ‘I never work alone, my colleagues just don’t happen to be human’.

Please tell us about your colleagues.

Catherine Chalmers: Well, I prefer colleagues with six legs as opposed to two, but I’ve worked with tarantulas, so let’s expand that to eight. I’m interested in the place where the human and nonhuman worlds collide, where there is complexity, chaos, but also where there are parallels or similarities. The intersection of these divergent worlds guides the trajectory of my work.

BK: Some of your projects have required significant travel, for example, travelling to the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica to film and focus for a decade on leafcutter ants.

How did that opportunity arise, and when you were planning this trip, did you already have ideas in mind?

CC: The idea for this project came to me when I trekked through Corcovado National Forest with a scientist and a filmmaker for the Discovery Channel. It was the first time I’d seen leafcutter ants, and I couldn’t believe they existed. The ants cut vegetation from high in the forest canopy and carry the pieces in their mandibles across the forest to their underground colony, traveling up to a hundred yards on trails meticulously cleaned by them.

It was seven years before I had an opportunity to return to Central America and start the project. During that time, while I was still working on the American Cockroach project, I immersed myself in extensive research about the ants. I created a file of ideas seeking to uncover what fascinated me about them, exploring ways to interact with them, and identifying points of convergence between their world and mine. The cultural relevance of leafcutter ants wasn’t immediately apparent.

In contrast, the American cockroach, having coexisted with us for centuries, already had a well-defined identity.

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There were also practical considerations.

How would I work with millions of ants living thousands of miles away from my studio in New York City? Where would I go? Where would I stay? I’d never worked in the field before and didn’t have the equipment to film and photograph without power for my lights.

I got a lucky break when an art collector invited me to Panama to work at his scientific research station.

BK: Your works often involve gorgeous film footage of insects which appears to require some insect manipulation. How did your leafcutter ant projects vary in terms of levels of invasiveness and your ability to pull them off ?

CC: After years of research, I understood that leafcutter ant colonies have eerie parallels to human society, and this became the conceptual basis of my project. As the principal herbivore of the forest, they are a dominant species and, like us, influence the grand structure of all other biological systems in their habitat. Leafcutter ants developed agriculture millions of years before we did. They are farmers, skillfully cultivating fungus from the leaves they collect.

Also like us, they wage brutal wars.

One of the principal characteristics humans and ants share is their socialness, and at the heart of a social species is communication. Leafcutter ants developed an interactive, networked form of communication that rivals the internet and predates it by millions of years. The ants constantly converse with one another, using pheromones, vibration, and touch. They are nature’s ultimate mobile communication devices.

I knew I wanted the ants to carry language, to carry leaves in the shape of letters, and I hoped to be able to persuade them to carry the letters in an order that would mean something to us. Considering this was my first experience working with ants, I’m still amazed I managed to film We Rule within the three weeks I spent in Panama.

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Image caption: Ladybugs, 2004. From the Impostors series. C-print, 45 x 30 inches

Some colonies are flexible

After that trip, I took a year off from Leafcutters and returned to the cockroach project to finish a sculpture for a museum exhibition. During that time, I met someone who owned thousands of acres on the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica, and he invited me down to check it out. To my incredible surprise, I saw more colonies of leafcutter ants in a smaller area than I’d seen anywhere else. It was a Queendom of ants. The density of colonies thrived on the abundance of majestic old mango trees. Leafcutter ants love the leaves of fruit trees.

In Panama I worked in a primary rainforest and had to rely on one large colony, whereas on the Osa I was outside of Corcovado National Park. The prevalence of leafcutter ant colonies is often higher in disturbed habitats.

The project took off in Costa Rica because I had several large colonies to work with, and for the first time, I observed the complex dynamics between colonies. These two things allowed the project to develop and expand.

Leafcutter ant colonies of the same species, in the same habitat exhibit remarkably different behaviors, almost different personalities. Some colonies are flexible, readily collecting the plants and flowers I brought to them, and others were oddly stubborn, refusing to take the very plant they are actively harvesting if I moved it a foot away. Since the leafcutters harvest from a wide variety of plants, it gave me latitude in what I could offer them to form the narratives of the work.

A line of leafcutter ants carrying green leaves looks like an animated drawing flickering across the dark forest floor. For The Chosen video, I wanted to convert this parade into a pageant, into a celebration of color, calling to mind a Balinese festival or pagan rite. Each morning I gathered fresh flowers in the forest and gave them to a colony. Thousands of ants collected the special offerings, and like a ritualistic procession, they paraded across the forest, descended into their subterranean world of tunnels and chambers, and laid the flowers at the feet of a golden idol.

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I experienced a great deal of luck working on Leafcutters. Although patience is a primary color on my artist’s palette, with this project my work was subject at every stage, from concept to production, to the vagaries of climate, and the collective decisions of millions of ants. They may be small, but they are far from simple.

Leafcutter ants are one of the few species to wage organized warfare against their own kind. They even have different strategies depending on the location and severity of the war.

Ant wars are hard to find in the forest; the battles spread out into the leaf litter. In order to film these mini-gladiators, I placed small, white plastic sheets around the area they were fighting in. During the day the ants went about their orderly business cutting leaves, quickly habituating to the new surfaces and ignoring them. But every night the bellicose colony attacked its neighbor.

Though many ants were slaughtered, the colonies did not fight to the death.

Three weeks into the war the aggressor called it quits.

I observed a striking variation amongst ant colonies in their response to the presence of another colony harvesting in the vicinity. Some were tolerant of their neighbors and others were quick to wage war. It seems that even with ants, some groups are peaceful, and others are highly aggressive.

BK: So, you’re learning about individual and colony-level differences.

A hot topic in animal behaviour involves behavioural syndromes, or personalities, and it extends from individuals to colonies at times, so for you to see and document one colony versus another and the way each behaves is really exciting.

CC: Being able to go back to the same location year after year was key to the project’s development. I keep detailed notes of each colony’s location and behavior. For six weeks I’d film and photograph in Costa Rica, then have the rest of the year back in New York to edit and determine what worked and what didn’t. When I returned the next winter invariably some colonies were gone, and I could only speculate what happened to them.

and others are oddly stubborn’

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Image caption: Adoration of the Golden Ant, 2017. Pigment print, 40 x 80 inches

BK: I imagine that happens when studying wild colonies for science as well. Unless you monitor perpetually, you just don’t know. There’s documentation that large leafcutter colonies will get up and go, and the thinking is maybe the parasite load is too high in the old nest, and it pays to move (McGlynn 2012), though relocating is highly risky.

CC: I had varying theories for the disappearance of each colony. One colony, which had often been attacked by its aggressive neighbor, probably lost the war or was forced to move to survive it. I believe it was war, and not parasites, because the next year I discovered a mid-sized colony had moved in. The largest colony in the neighborhood, which was already massive when I first arrived, had disappeared by the end of my project. I think the queen, who can live for fifteen years or longer, probably died of old age.

BK: In the case of War, as in Food Chain, Sex (Before, During, After), and other pieces, you’ve chosen stark white backgrounds. Could you tell us about that choice?

CC: In both Food Chain and the War video, I aimed to create a neutral environment, one that wasn’t natural. It’s easy to dismiss the visceral horror of witnessing one animal eating another, a fundamental aspect of life on Earth when it occurs in a natural setting. It’s as if those things happen in that space, but we humans are separate from that. We’re civilised.

Likewise, with the War video I didn’t want the action to be viewed as just a bunch of ants killing each other. I wanted to abstract the battle and transform it into a more universal war, but there were practical reasons as well. It’s difficult to film brown ants, in brown leaflitter, on brown dirt.

Image caption: Portraits of War, 2021. 16 Pigment prints, 20 x 30 inches each

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Image caption: Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica, 2012

BK: And these were two massive colonies of Atta fungus-growing, leafcutter ants going head-to-head, night after night.

CC: Exactly. They’d usually fight for a couple hours, and the battles varied in intensity. A large, aggressive colony came out precisely at 6pm and attacked a line of ants whose mid-sized colony was located a good distance away. The ants were essentially making a daylight raid of foliage near the aggressive colony and aimed to return home before it emerged. Mostly they succeeded; other times they failed miserably and paid a big price.

BK: Fascinating! I’m curious to know how much of the wrangling you handled yourself.

CC: My ant wrangling techniques got better over the course of the project. There’s no way I could have shot Antworks first, whereas We Rule was pretty straightforward. The timelapse sequence in Antworks was tricky. The art show at the end of the video was tough as well. I needed the ants to hang the leaf pieces, and to parade one by one on stage. Ants don’t like to do anything alone.

There was no wrangling in the War video. The ants were frenzied, and I was lucky to be able to follow them with my little hand-held lipstick camera.

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Image caption: Video still from We Rule, 2017

Image caption: Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica, 2012

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BK: For We Rule, did you have to grab the W, E, R, U, L, E and keep placing them, hoping they would carry the letters in the correct order?

CC: I cut the leaves into letters and left them in a pile. The ants picked them up, but, of course, the order was random. Once the ants securely gripped the leaf-letter with their mandibles, they wouldn’t let go. I could grab the letter, with the ant still attached, and move it into the right place in the phrase. The technique worked well, except that ants don’t move at the same pace; some are quick, while others are slow and meandering. I managed to film several WE’s but only got two RULES. Then I cut them together in post.

BK: Did you get any advice from entomologists or other experts?

CC: I spoke to several entomologists, but aside from gaining a deeper understanding of leafcutter ant behavior and biology, they didn’t offer much advice on how to work with them. The only guidance I received was also the most obvious; find a large, mature colony. Apart from that, I had to figure things out on my own. Additionally, some of the scientific research I encountered was misleading. For example, based on what I read, I assumed the ants would be carrying leaves, given their name is leafcutter ants. However, in Panama, they were harvesting dried bits of vegetation collected from the forest floor, and not cutting leaves. The green letters the ants carry in We Rule are citrus leaves that I provided for them.

BK: That could have been an asset for you—what you placed, they moved, or potentially preferred?

CC: In Panama, I worked on an island off the Pacific Coast. When I discovered that the only colony large enough to film wasn’t cutting leaves, I remembered reading that leafcutter ants have a preference for the leaves of fruit trees, especially citrus. There were no citrus trees on the island, and the large colony had never been exposed to them before. I contacted a farmer on the mainland, who provided me with a branch from his orchard. I placed the branch directly in the ants’ pathway. Initially, they didn’t touch it, and I began to doubt whether the entire project would work. When I returned the next morning, however, the branch was completely stripped. It was then that I realized it was a timing issue, and I needed to persuade them to change their behavior more quickly. I offered them the cut-up citrus leaves right at the colony exit so that as they passed my set, they’d be more likely to recognise the scent and collect the leaves immediately. This approach proved successful.

BK: Before your fine arts training, you did a BS in Engineering and I’m wondering if engineering has been useful for this type of problem-solving?

CC: Definitely. I studied design engineering, and the program’s focus was to instill in us the mindset of an inventor, in a broad classical sense. It was a highly imaginative and artistic degree.

My engineering background continues to play a crucial role in the production of my artwork, addressing technical difficulties, and handling logistical details. It also proves valuable when things aren’t going well. I learned how to approach problems analytically, view them from different angles, and devise effective work processes. For example, when I’m filming, I can only assume the role of the artist, but when I review the footage, I must switch gears and become the critic. I cannot be both simultaneously.

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Image caption: Praying Mantis Eating a Caterpillar, 2000. C-print, 40 x 60 inches

BK: When did you decide you wanted to be an artist, and specifically an insect artist?

CC: To be clear, I’m an artist, not an insect artist. I followed my interests and fascinations, wherever they take me. Mediums and subjects come and go. It’s exploring ideas that interests me.

At Stanford, I almost had enough credits to major in studio art. I took the courses because I was interested yet had no desire to be an artist. After Stanford, I moved to Los Angeles to design toys for Mattel.

BK: Oh, what did you design?

CC: It was a series of small dolls, similar to ‘Hello Kitty’. While I was in LA, I took evening courses in painting and drawing at UCLA, yet I still had no plans to leave engineering. Even when I attended the Royal College of Art, I studied Industrial Design for the first year. It was only when I was thousands of miles away from home that I decided to make the switch from engineering to art.

However, since the RCA is a graduate school, I had to apply all over again, this time to the painting school. Miraculously, I was accepted, and I believe I was the only one without an undergraduate degree in art. I had a lot of catching up to do.

BK: I’d like to read a quote from your book American Cockroach: … insects are a window into the unimaginable, their biology and behaviors are routinely bizarre and enigmatic to us. They’re refreshingly outside the human perspective. I think that our experience can be enhanced by an attempt to understand and give meaning to other life forms. Yet is it possible that a human-centric viewpoint is setting the stage for an impoverished environment?

This seems a common thread through your work; the idea of looking at insects and others through a human lens. When you say, ‘give meaning’, I’m curious whether you’re thinking about functions – like ecosystem functions, including pollination, or about how they factor into our lives aesthetically and otherwise?

CC: It’s not a human lens, but more a biological and ecological one. When you look at our cultural forms today, they’re often narrowly focused on the human, on the human separate from the larger ecological landscape. I believe new ways of thinking about and connecting with nature are urgently needed. So not only do I embrace a cross disciplinary approach to my art practice, but more importantly I strive for a cross species approach. It is important to look beyond the individual moral narrative. We are a collective social species living on a planet full of other creatures all facing a rising rate of change, but our feedback loop is pretty exclusively set to human. I contend that culture has the power to revitalise society’s relationship to nature, and to create more inclusive narratives that help broaden the scope of our vision of the nonhuman world. The arts have the ability to make the environment matter, and what matters to a society is what it works to preserve.

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‘The bark beetle project is deeply personal’

BK: You’ve talked about needing time with Periplaneta americana, the American cockroach, and in time you saw an elegance, a subtlety, and a beauty. You even describe the antennae as making ballerina-style movements.

CC: I learned to read a cockroach’s mind through the movements of its long, elegant antennae; it’s how these insects sense the world. They don’t have facial expressions, and their eyes are compound and unmoving, but the antennae communicate everything about where their attention is focused, and whether they are calm or agitated. I was filming and photographing on open sets and needed to anticipate their actions.

BK: I’m always intrigued by human/non-human collaborations by artists like Kazuo Kadanaga or Hubert Duprat, and your collaborations. It must require ceding control to some extent. How do you find that aspect of collaborating with insects?

CC: It’s one of the reasons I found painting limiting. I could control it, and as a former engineer, I had already spent too much time in that control-oriented mindset. Nothing happened on the canvas unless I initiated it, and I was wary of such top-down human control. I wanted my art practice to facilitate a connection with things beyond myself. I’ve long been intrigued by the lives of animals and felt that paint on canvas, instead of helping me engage with the nonhuman world, was a thick medium that stood between me and my interests. While I still do a lot of drawing, the work comes out of my explorations with photography and video.

I find a camera to be a more direct and transparent means to interact with the subjects of my projects.

BK: You recently created works based on scolytine bark beetles. Were you drawn to them for their engravings, and do you plan to continue in that direction, keeping with video and still photography, or do you have other directions in mind?

CC: I continue to explore and investigate with a camera, but the output, the final works, will not necessarily be photographic. I use the camera to conduct research and have a visual record of what’s happening in the forest.

The bark beetle project is deeply personal. I’ve spent a significant portion of my life in the Sierra and Rocky Mountains, and over the years, I’ve witnessed the massive die-off of conifer trees due to bark beetle infestations and highintensity mega-fires. Observing these changes is what led me to delve into the ecology of the high alpine conifer forest. Additionally, I’ve long been intrigued by the distinctive yet destructive patterns the beetles carve into the phloem. Each species of beetle, of which there are hundreds, creates a signature design. To me, the beetle is like an artist.

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It’s taken several years of research and experimentation to figure out how to translate this threatened ecological system into art. For the first time, it wasn’t obvious what mediums to use. In addition, my focus in not on the insect itself but the dynamics between the beetle, tree, resin, and fire.

Bark beetles and fire have become entangled in a destructive dance. Yet, both are indigenous and essential for forest health and renewal. Bark beetles and fire can be likened to an autoimmune disease, where a portion of the forest ecology has turned against itself. Climate change and human mismanagement have transformed these once-beneficial elements into destructive forces.

A tree under stress from heat and drought is not able to produce enough sap and resin to fight off an infestation. Since sap and resin are the lifeblood of a tree, I wanted to incorporate this material in my artwork, and I’ve been gathering both on my hikes. Similarly, I wanted the remains of highintensity mega-fires to be part of the project. I’ve hiked through the remains of two local fires, the 2013 Beaver Creek fire and the 2022 Ross Fork fire, several times to photograph and collect chunks of the charred, burned trees for use in my work.

BK: There’s sap – the phloem flowing with sugars – and then resin from the resin ducts used for defence (Miller 2018). You could even bring in the beauty of amber – the ancient resins that entrapped bark beetles (Kirejtshuk 2009), along with so many other fossilized victims.

CC: It took a lot of research and experimentation to transform the sap and resin I’ve gathered into a medium I can paint with. My goal is to depict the Mountain Pine Beetle’s lifecycle using this material and to paint every species of bark beetle that plagues the American west. Initially, I used rubbing alcohol to control the viscosity of the resin. The artworks look great for a while, but then the alcohol bubbled out of the painting leaving a cratered surface. Next, I tried heat, which proved unsuccessful. It occurred to me that if I used a solvent from the tree itself, I might have better luck.

I tried turpentine, and it worked brilliantly.

BK: These are experimental, novel techniques. I’m curious if you distance yourself from or seek out relevant methodologies or themes used by other artists?

CC: When I’m in New York, I make a point to see as much art as I can. My art viewing is broad and inclusive, spanning ancient works to hot-off-the-press contemporary.

Each project I work on presents different technical challenges to solve, and my inspiration draws from a wide range of sources. I can never predict what will truly resonate with me. I immerse myself in diverse cultural experiences and allow ideas to naturally emerge. I feed my creative process, and in return, it fuels my work.

BK: I love it. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me, Catherine.

For more on Catherine Chalmers and her work, please visit: https://www.catherinechalmers.com and this full interview will be available to view on YouTube from January 2024.

All images shown courtesy the artist © Catherine Chalmers. All rights reserved.

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Image caption: Mountain Pine Beetle, 2023. Pencil and tree resin on paper, 9 x 12 inches

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Image caption: Invisible Cities: Weaver Ants’ Nest. Collage on paper, 49 x 49 inches.

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Ommatidium

Ommatidium explores our complicated relationship with the insect world. The exhibition investigates the darkly humorous marketing of chemical agents to safely annihilate, the extreme championing of aesthetically pleasing and useful insects over all others, the strangely macabre methods of measuring insect population density, and the overlooked beauty of their complex architecture. Ommatidium refers to the compound eye structure that insects use to view the world. With this exhibition, artist Shawn Smith uses this idea of complex vision to encourage viewers to overcome their innate fear and disgust of insects and see them through a different lens. For Ommatidium, Smith diverges from his usual pixelated wooden sculptures to create two and three-dimensional works in a variety of mediums from drawings and collages, to stained glass and 3D prints.

The fragile weaver ant nest is often overlooked or seen as something to destroy. This collage was created from thousands of tiny strips of paper, cut out of a book about golf courses, to inject the nest with something humans value.

BY SHAWN SMITH

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The Dark Side of the Cocoon

© Isabella Salas. All rights reserved.

Image caption: Entomorphosis by IsabellaSalas

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WRITTEN BY JOE COELHO

he relationship between humans and insects takes many forms.

For example, cockroaches in the home are frequently met with the ‘see a bug, spray a bug’ philosophy. On the other hand, honeybees are admired for their products, ants for their work ethic, and butterflies for their beauty. These are negative and positive extremes of values observed in the realm of biophilia (Kellert 1993). We can examine this relationship by exploring how insects are represented in popular media, such as music. While intrinsically interesting to some, these efforts might also provide some insight into possible outcomes of the current insect apocalypse (Goulson 2021). If people in general have negative attitudes toward insects, they are unlikely to make attempts to save them. One way to assess these attitudes with some objectivity is to determine which types of insects are being represented. Over the past twenty years, I have attempted this analysis on rock and roll music, its cover art, and music videos.

I searched music databases available at the time for insect terms (Coelho 2000). For track and album titles, the most commonly used species were Hymenoptera (ants, bees and wasps), Lepidoptera (butterflies, moths and caterpillars), and Diptera (flies, mosquitoes and maggots). For the names of artists, the order differed only slightly, with Hymenoptera followed by Diptera and Lepidoptera. Why are these orders of insects the most popular? First, these are all groups that are well known to lay people. Lesser-known species (e.g. earwigs, stoneflies, mayflies) were mentioned in some songs, but comprised only a tiny percentage of the total. The evidence suggests that Hymenoptera are used most commonly because of their ability to inspire both positive and negative feelings (Schmidt 2020). For example, some artists had names clearly designed to inspire fear, such as Killer Bees and Venom P Stinger, while others had names that adopted their beneficial characteristics, such as Bees Make Honey and Sugarbees.

Some artists, such as Sting, have a hymenopteran name without capitalizing on it much. However, other artists embrace an insect aesthetic and use it to great effect. In 1975, Stuart Leslie Goddard changed his name to Adam Ant and soon founded the new wave group Adam and the Ants (Wikipedia). He chose the name in part for the toughness of ants, and even expressed this sentiment in the song entitled ‘Antmusic,’ which suggests, ‘Don’t tread on an ant you’ll end up black and blue. You cut off his head/Legs come looking for you’ (Ant and Pirroni 1980). His successful career is in part attributed to the Burundi drumming featured in many of the songs, a sound dubbed Antmusic (Jones 2016; Trowel 2021). He released at least five songs with the ant theme: ‘Ant’s Invasion,’ ‘Ant Rap,’ ‘Antmusic,’ ‘The Ant,’ and ‘A.N.T.S.’

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It is not clear why dipterans were so common among artists’ names. In most cases they were designed to inspire revulsion and fear. As rock and roll is a genre spawned from rebellion, some groups choose these names for their shock value, such as Halo of Flies, Maggots from Mars, and The Mosquitoes. Some certainly conjure a striking image, such as Flies on Fire and Maggotron. These themes were utilized to a great extent by certain sub-genres, such as death metal, which appears to celebrate the flies and maggots associated with dead bodies. The critical ecological role of these animals in decomposition and nutrient cycling is completely ignored.

To examine this phenomenon in a similar, but more visual art, I searched for rock albums with insects in the cover art (Coelho 2004). In this case, Lepidoptera moved up to first place, featured on more than twice the number of album covers as the second place Order, Hymenoptera.

Diptera fell to fourth place, while Coleoptera, the beetles, appeared in third place. The Lepidopteran albums were dominated by images of large butterflies, which provided great visual appeal. At that time, a good album cover could help significantly in selling an LP. Hymenoptera still played both sides of the good/evil coin, while Diptera were almost only employed where negative attitudes were implied. Swarms and infestations of insects carry greater impact than single individuals. At least three albums used dipterans to maximal effect by displaying masses of maggots. Two of these, Wendy O Williams/Plasmatics’ greatest hits compilation Maggots: the Record and Cannibal Corpse’s Vile used painted artwork to illustrate the animals, which are quite repulsive to most people. However, astute observers will note that the cover of Esham’s 1994 EP Maggot Brain Theory is not, in fact, a photograph of maggots. The numerous larvae are almost certainly caterpillars of the greater wax moth, Galleria mellonella, which bear a superficial resemblance to maggots.

They are readily available as fish bait and pet food, and certainly less smelly and unsavory to handle than actual maggots, making them ideal for staging such a photo.

The appearance of Coleoptera in the top three in album covers was a bit of a surprise, but reminds us that there are many large, colorful, attractive beetles in the world. The same effect may explain the overestimation of beetles as the most speciose insect order on Earth, when Hymenoptera may, in fact, be more diverse (Kimsey et al 2017). It also helped that the popular and prolific rock band Journey featured a scarab beetle on 11 albums.

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‘a mischievous boy releases a jar of flies at the circus’

Butterflies and moths enjoy a favorable reputation because of their beauty and bright colors. It is almost certainly this positive response that earned the Lepidoptera second place among insects in popular music.

Artists included Butterfly Child and Butterfly Tree, names which inspire warm feelings.

In a music video, moving images and music are combined for a rich perceptual experience. When I searched YouTube for music videos with insect content, I found almost the same order of taxa that I had in cover art: Lepidoptera>Hymenoptera>Coleoptera (Coelho 2021). However, Diptera, Orthoptera (grasshoppers and crickets) and Araneae (spiders and scorpions) were essentially tied with Coleoptera for third most common, at 12-14% of the total. Butterflies are, again, highly attractive, but also easily animated and obtainable as live specimens, making them ideal subjects for video production.

Hymenopteran videos were dominated by bees, particularly humans in bee costumes (e.g. Blind Melon’s ‘No Rain’) and live honeybees, also easily obtainable. Beetles serve a variety of functions in music videos, such as lightning bugs for mood and scarabs to represent death. Grasshoppers and crickets generally represent positive values, except in cases where massive swarms of locusts induce fear, as in Machine Head’s ‘Locust’. Spiders and tarantulas were also common in rock designed to shock, as they are feared by many, including human babies (Hoehl et al 2017).

Flies and mosquitoes are used to inspire disgust, such as The Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ ‘Mosquito,’ which features a close-up of a very realistic CGI mosquito feeding on a human hand. Its abdomen swells considerably with visible blood, but it is swatted flat in the end by the other hand. Mosquitoes should gain our attention, not merely because they are annoying bloodsuckers, but because they are vectors for many serious disease-causing viruses and parasites. In Alice in Chains’ ‘I stay away’ video, a mischievous boy releases a jar of flies at the circus, whereupon they raise havoc with the animals and performers.

The ability of flies to annoy and distract is thus uniquely harnessed as an evil superpower.

While insects in popular music might seem to be a very small niche, sample sizes for the studies summarized above were 1,338 artists, albums & tracks, 392 album covers and 234 videos. This surprising infestation is attributable in part to the enormous size of the databases from which they were obtained.

Nonetheless, in each case the numbers were always much more than anticipated, suggesting that insects form a reasonably large part of the public consciousness.

Neither do insects occupy an obscure niche in the rock and roll realm. Some of the most famous groups, such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, have created insect-related music. The first album ever to go platinum was by Iron Butterfly, and many videos prominently featuring insects have won awards.

The Cars’ ‘You Might Think,’ in which singer Ric Ocasek’s head appears as the head of a fly, won the first MTV video music award.

For the most part, artists used insects in favorable ways in popular music. Pretty butterflies are an obvious means to use insects’ positive attributes. However, artists have co-opted even the seemingly negative attributes of some insects, such as their toughness and ability to sting, as totemic qualities they wish to project. Hence, we may tentatively conclude that musicians and their fans hold favorable attitudes toward insects. This pattern bodes well for the future of insect species. People who perceive particular animals to be charismatic are likely to aid in their preservation.

Presumably, this effect is the reason that the World Wildlife Fund uses a Panda bear as its mascot. Perhaps we can all play a part in ensuring that insect diversity is preserved.

In the words of Adam and the Ants, ‘Unplug the jukebox, and do us all a favour. That music’s lost its taste, so try another flavour: Antmusic!’ (Ant and Pirroni 1980).

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Entomorphos: The Chrysalis Unveiled by Héctor González. This video is available to view via FrameALIVE at https://landing.framealive.com/

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Entomorphos

BY HèCTOR GONZáLEZ

Entomorphos: The Chrysalis Unveiled, embodies an imaginative concept that delves into the intricate relationship between insects and technology.

Insects, with their captivating structures, unique behaviors, and awe-inspiring diversity, have long been a source of fascination for humans. Meanwhile, digital technology has irrevocably transformed the way we communicate, create, and interact with the world and the natural. Inspired by biologist Edward O Wilson’s observation that ‘Insects are the most complex organisms to have ever existed on Earth,’ Entomorphos aims to represent their intricate structures, unique behaviors, and incredible diversity through digital means.

Entomophos project’s digital forms and insect anatomy inspire the creation of surreal and enigmatic forms. The project employs intricate patterns, textures, and shapes that mimic the complexity of insect exoskeletons, antennae, wings, and eyes, evoking the mesmerizing fluidity of swarming or fluttering insects during their process of growth and mutation. Through the digital medium, the project conjures a surreal world that merges the figurative with the abstract, unleashing the essence of each stage of metamorphosis.

The project’s images capture the different stages of insect development, such as the egg, larval or nymph, pupa, and adult stages. The egg stage bursts into existence with intricate patterns and textures that resonate with the natural beauty of the eggshell. The larval or nymph stage emerges into being with fluid and dynamic forms that evoke the raw energy of transformation. The pupa stage engulfs the senses with dream-like colors and textures, hinting at the mysteries that unfold within the chrysalis. Finally, the adult stage unfurls with symbolic representations of the insect’s anatomy and behavior, breathing life into a world of wonder.

The conceptual video art piece included in the artistic concept also explores the intricate metamorphosis of the insect, capturing the essence of their life cycle through its mutating forms.

Entomorphos invites us to reflect on the relationship between humans, insects, and technology, and challenges us to reexamine our perceptions of the natural world. As Wilson reminds us, ‘To the human ear, the difference between natural and artificial sounds is still clear. But the sounds made by most animals are also complex and musical, in ways that science is only beginning to appreciate’.

Entomorphos encourages us to open our ears, and our minds, to the complexity and beauty of insect life, and to embrace the digital realm as a tool for artistic expression and scientific discovery.

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katherine and the early thorn

The moths saunter slow, doze in their plastic specimen pots as we drink our morning tea.

One spreads proud to reveal a yellow underside, their feathered head narrowed to the nose – another, tiny, dusted soft lies still as a sliver of fingernail.

He is not dead you say, kneeling by Katherine’s chair.

She is touching the cylinder gently, irrationally,

You pick up another, and another again –

Image caption: Purple Poplar Polypore by Anna Szalc

Brimstone, Early Thorn, Garden Tiger, Campion.

Like Adam naming his descendants they become numerous as stars glinting on your kitchen table.

BY BETH LETTINGTON

as though to grasp too firm might injure.

Shall we let him sleep?

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N

eed to film a spider walking four feet and into a slipper? Want an actor to spray dusty moths from his mouth or a fly to leave inky footprints on your book? If you’re in Hollywood and you need insects or arachnids in your show, Steven Kutcher is the person to ask. He is a font of information about invertebrate behaviour and wrangling creepy crawlies.

Over six decades, Kutcher has got the best out of insects for some of the most prominent directors around on films like Exorcist II, Jurassic Park, Dracula, and James and the Giant Peach. Thanks to his encyclopaedic knowledge of arthropod behaviour and his natural curiosity, Kutcher is the man who can pull off the seemingly impossible; in most cases, you may only see a fleeting glimpse of his multi-legged friends on screen, but a lifetime’s expertise has informed their blockbuster moment.

But Kutcher doesn’t just coach insects and arachnids on how to make it in Hollywood; he also makes fine art which puts the most populous members of the animal kingdom in the spotlight. A discipline he calls ‘bug art’, this practice lets the insects shape Kutcher paintings without hurting them in the slightest. Carving out his place in this niche field, the 79-year-old has created hundreds of works of art, exhibiting in various galleries around the United States.

Here, Barrett Klein catches up with Kutcher to discuss locusts liking the heat, how to deal with a classroom full of fleas, and tips for coaxing bugs to paint.

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Steven Kutcher

flick insects

Image caption: Steven Kutcher and Orange Knee tarantula. Photography by Pieter de Koninck

IN CONVERSATION WITH BARRETT KLEIN

EDITED AND WRITTEN BY CLAIRE KNOX

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‘It’s one of the best, yukiest scenes’

Barrett Klein: Steven Kutcher – I’m thrilled to have you for a discussion about insects, entomophilia, and filmmaking. Your work appears in a variety of Hollywood productions, but before we discuss some of these, how would you introduce yourself and what motivates you and what you do?

Steven Kutcher: I’m a very curious person and I like to know how things work. One of the easiest ways to explore nature is to explore something that is found in nature, like insects. I was born in New York City, but my parents would take me to the Catskill Mountains every summer and we would see fireflies and all kinds of wonderful things. I became really intrigued, so decided to follow that track.

I used to make bug reports all the way through school, then I eventually went to Davis to study insect behaviour, followed by an MA in Biology at Long Beach State. One day, my professor told me they were making a movie called Exorcist II and they needed somebody to take care of 10,000 African locusts.

I worked on that movie for over six months and had to figure things out as I went along. This was back in the day, and I learned a lot about how movies were made. When you shot something then, you had to wait 24 hours for the film to be developed, to see if you got something good. Nowadays, it’s all digital – you know instantly and they’re editing right away.

Anyway, it ended up being 3,000 African locusts instead of 10,000 and I grew flats of rye grass to feed them. They wanted the locusts to be on one side of a cage so when James Earl Jones taps the cage, they flutter. I had them put studio lights on one side of the cage – because I knew the locusts were attracted to the heat – and then they pulled the lights away. James Earl Jones comes over, taps it, and the locusts fly around in the cage.

BK: And how did that segue into other projects?

SK : Well, the assistant prop master on Exorcist II worked on Wonder Woman and they needed some Camponotus carpenter ants. I did that job and then discovered that one out of every three movies had a bug in it, so I saw the work potential there and I started receiving an increasing number of requests.

BK: What about some of your favourite experiences on set?

SK : I really enjoyed working with John Carpenter on Prince of Darkness.

There’s a scene where a chest opens up and thousands of darkling beetles run out and down on the ground, crawling around. They made plastic beetles on the ground and then we’d put live ones on top, so it made it look as though there were more.

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Copycat with Sigourney Weaver and hundreds of carpenter ants was fun too. In the scene, she is in bed and feels something, so she pulls back the blanket and there are ants crawling all over.

For this one, I set Sigourney up underneath the sheet, with the ants on top of the sheet, and the blanket was covering the ants. When she pulls it back you see all the ants, then she gets out, lifts the blanket off the side of the bed and there’s a book there with a cutoff finger and ants running around. It was great and Sigourney is a nice lady.

For Dracula, I had to get some edible bugs because Tom Waits plays a character in the film who eats insects. He really wanted to put them in his mouth and Francis Coppola wanted it to look really yucky. So, I had a mix of some flies and other insects on the plate that he wasn’t going to eat, but on one edge of the plate, I put waxworms and some mealworms and beetles that he could pop in his mouth and not have any problem with. The problem was that his character had to wear really thick glasses and he couldn’t see anything out of them, so I had to be sure that when I handed him the plate, he knew exactly where the edible bugs were. He did a great job, and he was also really great to work with.

BK: Do you have a particularly vivid memory from one of your projects?

SK : Fright Night Part Two, where the Dracula assistant is eating bugs and then bugs pour out of his stomach. They had four people working a mannequin, and they switched the actor playing the assistant with the mannequin. He flopped down and his stomach is slit open. I had a five-gallon bucket of bugs and I told them they only had three or five minutes because the heat from the bugs will start killing them. I got this huge mass of bugs, put them in a plunger and they come pouring out of the stomach. It’s one of the best, yuckiest scenes. They just come pouring out. I had mealworms and beetles and probably cockroaches just oozing out and crawling all over.

BK: Any international ventures? Have you ever been in a Bollywood production?

SK : Not Bollywood, but I did work on Race the Sun in Australia where I had to have a cockroach come out of a tennis shoe, climb onto a bag of Cheetos, turn left, walk onto a surfing magazine, and stop on a surfboard.

BK: Okay, that’s complicated. How did you pull that off?

SK : First, I devised a tube with a pusher because I couldn’t be in there to get the cockroach to come out on cue. So, I had a Tygon tube that went up through the tennis shoe; I put the cockroach in the front end and then I had a little pusher to push it out. So, when they were ready, I pushed it out. It started to go forward and because it was at the edge of the tennis shoe, I rigged things up so I knew where the cockroach would most likely go. When it came to the bag of Cheetos, I had creased it, so that, being thigmotropic, the cockroach would run along the crease. And from there, I had the magazine in a way that it would head towards the magazine. For the last part, I attached a little tether to the bottom of the cockroach, let the cockroach go – it could only go four inches – and it stopped right on the surfboard. So they put those two pieces together. Two times out of fourteen it worked.

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BK: What do you enjoy most about your job?

SK : One of the great things about wrangling is the problem solving! There was a Volkswagen commercial where I had to figure out how to make a fly clean itself. So, I took a fly and first, I made it a walking fly by removing the halteres so it wouldn’t fly away, then I put a little bit of honey on its head and flies don’t like having honey on their eyes, so they’ll clean it off.

For the movie Jack, I got to do a bunch of things working with monarch butterflies – making a butterfly land on a windowsill from around 30 feet away. I put the butterfly on a monofilament and the trick was to have them put baffles up outside of the camera view, otherwise the butterfly would fly all over the place. That way it couldn’t fly out of view of the camera.

Then there was Rising Sun, which starts out with a western scene. There are cowboys riding along and a horse’s hoof hits an ant nest and knocks the ants out of the way. For this one, I had to make a fake ant nest. So, I made a hole, put a little container in it and poured the ants on so they were crawling all over it. So, the horse kicks the ants, there’s more Western stuff and then the camera pulls back and you find out you’re in a bar in Japan with a Western movie showing on the TV. Another problem I enjoyed solving: how do you make a spider crawl into a slipper from four feet away? That was for Arachnophobia, and it took me two weeks to figure out. What I did was use invisible, vibrating wires on either side of the spider. So, the camera couldn’t see it because it’s moving too fast and it’s too thin, and it’s like a fan. The cam goes up and down. And that makes the wire go up and down, which created a wave motion. It was four feet long, and vibrated so fast you couldn’t see it, but the spider could sense it.

BK: Speaking of spiders, you painted Tobey Maguire’s spider for Spider-Man in 2002.

SK : Yes! When I was approached for that, I wanted to put a prosthesis on the spider. It was a tiny spider though, and its abdomen could have been punctured easily, so I had to go to plan B – painting it Spider-Man-coloured. I met this fabulous guy who could paint really tiny things. I had to develop a technique. We’d take each spider, put it on some foam and restrict its movements without hurting the spider, then he used an airbrush to put on the base colour. It would take him 20 minutes. We tested which ones webbed down the best and used those.

BK: Have you used a prosthesis in other projects?

SK : For Tim Burton’s James and the Giant Peach, we did develop a prosthesis. They wanted a live spider to be on a plant at the beginning of the film and the young boy to come and collect the spider. I knew somebody at UC-Riverside who had just discovered a new dwarf tarantula and thought that would be perfect.

So, they made a little plastic prosthesis that fit over the abdomen and had a velcro strap, so it looked like the regular spider, but it had a black and white striped abdomen. I had to be careful to put the prosthesis on so the spider would act normally. And I’ve done this a number of other times with insects. For a Bud Lite commercial, they wanted an elephant cricket, which doesn’t exist, so I put an elephant head with tusks on a Jerusalem cricket and had it crawl.

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‘There was a Volkswagen commercial where I had to figure out how to make a fly clean itself’

Image caption: Steven Kutcher working on the set of a honey-coated Macadamia nut commercial. Kutcher put a beehive in the white box and piped it so the bees would use the skep on top as the entrance/exit. To protect the actor he used his own hand as the stunt hand, with the actor’s shirt draped over his own shoulder and arm.

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BK: So, when you place the prosthesis on, you’re careful not to encumber the insect’s motion and normal behaviour. It’s still surprising that the spider wouldn’t incessantly groom.

SK: It is important to consider an arthropod’s sensory inputs. If you cover the eye, the antennae, or the sensory hairs, it’s going to be a problem (Souto et al 2021; Chapman 2012), but I could take your colony of cockroaches and make them look green, or make yellow jackets safe to handle.

BK: And what did I do this summer? Painted dots on the backs of honey bees to identify individuals. As they busily imbibed sugar water, they barely even turned as I applied the marks (Klein & Seeley 2011; Seeley 1996).

SK : And you know that you could paint the entire dorsal surface of the thorax and it wouldn’t make any difference to the bee, but if you painted the leg that might create an issue.

BK: Good point.

SK : We also used a prosthesis in Hocus Pocus. A zombie comes out of the graveyard with his mouth stitched closed. He takes a knife, cuts it open, coughs, dust comes out and moths fly out.

For this one, I caught a bunch of cabbage whites. Then they made a prosthesis that fit in the zombie’s mouth and the lower part was Fuller’s earth, which is dust. So, he had something in his mouth that was split level: dust at the bottom part and I stacked up the cabbage whites. I asked the

Image caption: Dancing Beetle #72-75. Photography by Steven Kutcher

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director to balance all the lights, so that all lights were the same. So, he cuts, coughs, dust comes out and the moths, which are cabbage whites, came out and fluttered around it. It looked great.

BK: What would have happened had you tried actual moths?

SK : One, they fly fast. This wasn’t flying around a light; this was going from A to B. I knew I would get more film time with the cabbage whites, which kind of float, fluttering around.

BK: I’m guessing some of the productions you’ve participated in have departed from pure scientific accuracy in their representation of either insects or arachnids.

SK : It really depends on the type of film. For example, with a fantasy film the main goal is to be entertaining. In Arachnophobia, Frank Marshall, the director, wanted the spiders to have three poison glands to look at through a microscope. I told him most things in nature are bilateral (Stewart 2013), but he decided on three glands. My job was to offer the scientific information, but there are other important considerations in that type of genre of filmmaking.

In Teen Wolf Too, the actors are in a high school classroom and they want to play a trick on one classmate. They somehow end up with a container of fleas and now they’re going to release it in the classroom. I knew that they needed to do a close-up of a large petri dish with fleas in it – something that would hop around – so I went out with my net on the lawn, swept it and got a bunch of phorid flies. They were great. They were hopping around in the petri dish, just like fleas!

So, you can see these bugs hopping around in the dish and then you see them open it up and pour. That’s using entomological knowledge to solve a problem that a cat or dog trainer wouldn’t know. I did investigate fleas, but this was so much better and it worked.

Similarly, in Jurassic Park, they wanted a giant mosquito in amber. Well, I was just out of giant mosquitoes and the mosquito store was closed, so I put together a crane fly. I used an insect pin for its mouth part, made some wings out of plastic, and attached some legs from another crane fly because the one that I was working with was missing some legs. The crane fly was then placed in amber-coloured plastic, and that’s the one you see on screen.

BK: How many entomologists gave you flack for that?

SK : You know, people still don’t point out that it’s a crane fly. I think one of the reasons is because the scene before that I placed a live chilled Toxorhynchites (Donald 2020) – the largest mosquito that feeds on other mosquitos – on the bark of a tree and dripped honey down that surrounds the mosquito and then you see it tumbling down in the honey as it goes down the bark of the tree. It was beautiful and it probably made the next scene more believable.

BK: What is the shelf life of your job as an arthropod wrangler for popular media, given AI and computer graphics?

SK : Well, if an actor holds out his hand and he’s supposed to react to an imaginary butterfly, it’s not the same as having a real butterfly there. When you’re watching a film, if you’re distracted by something and can tell the flies aren’t real, you’re out of the film – the suspension of disbelief – and the film is no longer fulfilling its purpose. When they CG insects, it can look pretty good, but it doesn’t replicate their behaviour perfectly.

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BK: At some point, you shifted into also creating artwork with insects. Please tell us about how that career began?

SK: In the early 1980s they were making a commercial for the series Amazing Stories and they asked me if I could make a fly walk through ink and leave fly footprints. I did it by having a big drop of ink and then I put black acrylic on the fly’s feet. When it walked through the watery ink, it trapped the acrylic paint. And in 2003, I told that to somebody who was doing an art exhibit and she said, ‘Why don’t you make some artwork?’ So, it started in 2003 and that launched my bug art career.

BK: Could you briefly describe the methodology behind your bug art?

SK : Most watercolourists paint on a dry piece of paper. But when I have the paper wet, I can put concentrated pigment on the tiny insect tarsi and they will expand and you can see their footprints from across the room. The other part is using my knowledge of insect behaviour. If the light were stationary, the insect would move towards that light. By putting it on a lazy Susan, being able to turn it, I could make circles and other lines by moving the painting around.

BK: Do you keep notebooks or photo-document the process?

SK : Actually, I do have a list of what I call bug tricks.

BK: That’s great! So, in an ideal world where you’re able to select your dream arthropod and a scenario of your making, what would you choose?

SK: Well, to me the challenge is solving the problem that the director wants. I like those challenges.

Because sometimes you don’t know the answer and you figure it out. As regards a particular arthropod, I really love them all, but sometimes a butterfly is better for the scene than a beetle.

BK: Let’s put this in context. What you have shared across all these stories paints a picture of movie-making history that will probably never be replicated at least in the same way, given changing constraints, changing technologies, changing desires, both by producers and consumers. What are your thoughts in terms of your legacy in the film industry?

SK : In general, figuring out something in life – and movie work is not the only thing I do by any means – but figuring out something I like and being able to make a living out of something I created is something that not everybody gets to do.

Part of my job is to make something look the way people know it is or imagine it is. So, if you want to see ants on an ant nest, people won’t realise it was a fake ant nest. You have to know what you’re doing to do it well. It isn’t like you have to do fifty takes to make this work. And I do very few takes.

BK: Steven, it’s been a huge honor.

SK : It’s just been a joy.

Epilogue: In my career, one must understand science as well as art. They work together. In movie making, just understanding art is not enough and the reverse is also true, therefore I feel lucky to live in both worlds.

For more on Steven Kutcher and his work, please visit: http://bugartbysteven.com/ and this interview will be available to view in full on YouTube from January 2024.

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Image caption: Flowers in the Garden, 14 × 18 Photography by Steven Kutcher

Image caption: Colmena: hogar compartido (Hive: shared home) at the Contemporary Art Museum Queretaro (Queretaro, Mexico, 2023)

My work comes from transdisciplinarity at the intersection of visual arts and beekeeping. This shows how collaborative work between humans and insects is possible, in this case with bees.

My father, a beekeeper, not only taught me the technique to be able to work with these animals, but also to understand their behavior and their needs. Through these new explorations in my creative work, I have moved away from traditional techniques and methodologies for making art; at the same time, I have included the collaboration of bees since they have been a pillar in my life and my family; and through this relationship that I have established with them I have found the qualities of the material with which I work, beeswax.

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Beehive:

Shared Home

BY GABRIELA DEISOLBI

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The Nobel

Fruit Fly I

BY CATARINA CARRAO

n 1909, Thomas Hunt Morgan, Professor of Experimental Zoology at Columbia University in New York, was displeased by Mendelian hereditary conceptions; and challenged the assumption that species arise by natural selection asserting that ‘Nature makes new species outright’ (Morgan 1965). But to be able to prove his idea, TH Morgan needed a cheap material that could be bred in very limited space, big quantities and to his wishes (Morgan 1965), since his research budget at Columbia University was quite tight (Nobel Prize 2020).

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Around the same time, CW Woodworth – Professor of Entomology at Harvard University, had just started breeding in captivity the model organism Drosophila melanogaster, and suggested to his colleague William Castle – a Harvard geneticist studying inbreeding, that Drosophila might be useful to do genetics research. Castle spread the word about the usefulness of fruit flies, which ended up reaching the ears of FE Lutz, an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History (Morgan 1965). Lutz in turn, introduced it to TH Morgan, which needed the cheap and ‘fruitful’ model to challenge the Mendelian assumption that germ cells are pure and uncrossed.

In the end, TH Morgan breakthrough came when out of a million of fruit flies with brilliant red eyes, came a male with white eyes (Morgan 1910). Further cross breeding of this white male to red females, together with other studies of different wing features that were also found during the ‘million’ breeding, led to the conclusion that chromosomes are the bearers of the hereditary factors, which we now know as genes (Nobel Prize 2020). In 1933, Morgan won the Nobel Prize in Physiology for his discoveries.

Throughout this period, World War I had broken, and a massive number of young students and assistants were drafted to the United States army. Short-handed of personnel to breed the millions of fruit flies in his lab, Morgan persuaded Hermann Joseph Muller to teach and expand his Drosophila experimental program (Carlson 1981). Muller was interested in how organisms change through mutations, a term coined in the late 1880’s by Hugo de Vries (de Vries 1909); and began experimenting with radiation-induced changes (Carlson 1981). In 1927, Muller discovered that the number of genetic mutations observed in fruit flies increased when they were exposed to X-rays, and the higher the dose they were exposed to, the greater the number of mutations occurred (Muller 1964).

In 1946, with this research work, Muller was also awarded a Nobel Prize.

But no account of early Drosophila genetics can be complete without recognizing the contribution of Lilian Vaughn Morgan – Mrs TH Morgan.

Besides raising a son and three daughters and two households in New York and Woods Hole, California – where the family would spend their summers (Keenan 2015), Lilian Morgan without any official university position and segregated to a small room in her husband’s research lab – named the ‘Fly Room’, discovered and characterized the first attached-X female, whose genotype was later employed to maintain without selection sex-linked female sterile mutations (Keenan 2015). Attached-X females were also used to understand that ‘meiotic crossing over’ occurs only between chromatids, i.e. the half of the duplicated chromosome during sex germ cell division (meiosis), and not through the full chromosome. She also found the first ring-X chromosome, which was used to produce genetic mosaics for further studying embryologic development in other types of research (Green 2010).

Lilian ended up publishing 16 scientific papers related to Drosophila genetics; and together

with her husband and Muller paved the way for later breakthroughs, growing the scientific power of the fruit fly, as more and more mutations were discovered.

Fast-forward to the 1980s, Ed Lewis, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and Eric Wieschaus also using Drosophila has a model showed that individual genes could be mutated to cause characteristic embryonic patterning defects (Lewis 1978; Nüsslein-Volhard & Wieschaus 1980). Their genetic studies allowed them to order genes within functional pathways from flies to humans, identifying counterparts across species that are now known to have key roles in human development and disease (Verheyen 2022). In fact, we currently know that about 75% of all human genes implicated in human disease have a functional corollary, or homolog, in Drosophila melanogaster (Rubin et al 2000). Many of the cell behaviors observed in human normal and diseased cells can be easily modeled in the fly; and numerous disease categories, from developmental disorders, rare diseases, neurodegeneration, and cancer could effectively be modelled in Drosophila melanogaster (Bier 2005; Verheyen 2022).

In the time of rise of Artificial Intelligence, acknowledging our human similarity to a fruit fly humbly obliges a question: are we humans that special? It’s in fact the study of genes common to other organisms that help us better understand what makes us unique.

The many steps that intervene between the expression of a gene and the display of a behavior or a disease, together with the inescapable fact that each individual is the unique product of a series of historical incidents (i.e., environment) (Greenspan & Dierick 2004), and the knowledge that no particular combination of genes and experiences is ever replicated nor in the lab nor in nature, highlights the relevance our human uniqueness and the importance of the Drosophila melanogaster research for us humans.

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Image caption: Stuck in the Brambles by Susan Ruchman

U

na Chaudhuri is Professor of English, Drama, and Environmental Studies at New York University and a leading light in the fields of eco-theatre and eco-criticism. She has written and lectured widely on these topics and on two concepts she has innovated and theorised: ‘zooësis’, the discourse and representation of species in contemporary culture and performance (Chaudhuri 2017), and ‘AnthropoScenes’, dramaturgies beyond the human (Chaudhuri 2015).

An active member of the theatre community in New York, Professor Chaudhuri has served as a judge for the Obie Awards and as a voter for the Tony Awards. She participates in numerous collaborative art, performance, and research projects, including Dear Climate (www.dearclimate.net), which seeks to foster a better-informed and more affectionate relationship to the more-than-human world, including geophysical forces and other species.

In this conversation, Chaudhuri speaks to Barrett Klein about her essay, ‘Bug Bytes: Insects, Information, and Interspecies Theatricality’ (Chaudhuri 2013), which situates Tracy Letts’s play Bug (1996) in an animal studies context, and about the wider representations of insects in live performance.

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Una Chaudhuri

exit, pursued by a bug

IN CONVERSATION WITH BARRETT KLEIN

EDITED AND WRITTEN

BY MELISSA EVANS

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Barrett Klein: Thank you for joining me in this discussion about connections between entomology and different branches of the humanities, including drama and theatre.

Could we begin with your own connection with the study of entomology?

Una Chaudhuri: Yes – my main venture into the field of entomology was with an article I wrote on Tracy Letts’s play Bug. The article was just one of many contributions that have been emerging in the field of drama and theatre studies to form a genre I call ‘ theatre of species’ (Chaudhuri & Hughes 2014) which denotes the intersection of animal studies with theatre and performance, and which is itself part of the larger field of environmental humanities.

I’m also very interested in the broader question of how the cultural sphere and the sphere of imagination, ideology, and values can be in productive conversation with the sciences.

What can we learn from each other ?

BK: And that’s perfect because we can think in an inclusive way about species and an expansive way conceptually for this conversation, and you will have both an experienced eye as well as a fresh one on some of these ideas. What I love about your body of work is that the biodiversity you engage with extends broadly. For example, your study, from an artistic standpoint, of a whale fall (Chaudhuri & Zurkow nd). You have some of the largest species of animals that have ever existed on planet earth, descending, decomposing, and becoming food for billions of other, smaller species.

UC: I’m glad that you mention that study in this context because of the scale contrast it provides with the tiny bugs in Tracy Letts’s play. In the play, one cannot see the bugs and it is their invisibility that is the most threatening thing.

BK: If we think about scale in the context of a theatre piece, the ‘size challenge’, as you

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have described it, can play a role on either end of that spectrum. For example, how do you play out a whale? Do you necessarily have to scale it down? And how do you play out the existence of an insect? In the case of the play Bug, that size challenge was dealt with, as you put it, through gesture by the actors. There was interaction, but it was all fictional.

UC: Probably, although there are always insects (or other tiny or invisible creatures) on stage!

BK: That’s a good point.

UC: To some extent it is not completely fictional. It is that border between our capacities to make up worlds and the world in which we’re making up that world: the real world is always there. The wonderful thing about theatre and about art is that you can make up anything and you can do anything within it. It is a world of infinite potential and that’s why we humans need it so much and love it so much. From the time we are young we get drawn into story and into imagination and that is because of its extraordinary potentiality; because you can imagine things, you feel reassured that you can also create new things. That very generative space is difficult, however, precisely because you can do anything.

BK: I wonder to what extent it is important or necessary to maintain accuracy, be it scientific or otherwise, as a foundation when it comes to theatre, drama, and beyond? Is it even important? Does an audience need some stability in terms of the known to explore the unknown?

UC: Well, there are many kinds of knowns.

There are the familiar knowns: the sociological surround we call realism in theatre, which comprises those recognisable quotidian details which ground you within the story. There are also unfamiliar knowns, for

‘There are always insects on stage!’

example, those things that a scientific expert knows about their field of expertise. These knowns are unfamiliar to the layperson, and they are wondrous!

It is these unfamiliar knowns to which I am most committed, because I believe that the more we understand the scientific realities, to the extent that science has discovered them, the more we will understand how extraordinary the natural world is, and the importance of saving it. Unfortunately, however, scientific knowledge is often presented in a manner and tone which are inaccessible for the general public, but it is possible for these realities to be framed in imaginative ways; in ways which draw people in, so they become invested and want to learn more.

BK: Do you find that theatre is significantly different and unique relative to other media in translating scientific messages, for example, those pertaining to entomology?

UC: Absolutely! Every art form is unique and there are certain things you can think through, and understand, through theatre that cannot be understood in any other way. It is a space not only of experience and sensation, but also of knowledge production, just like the laboratory.

Not all theatre achieves the production of knowledge, but that is the potential of great theatre. Theatre is a place which has time and space and gesture and sound; it provides a facsimile of the real world, but a world that is largely controlled. Within certain limits, you can play, just as you do in a laboratory with the contents of a Petri dish, except that in theatre you are manipulating elements like voice, language, movement, and costume.

BK: And what about the role of spontaneity? You have an ephemeral, typically contained area with an audience and anything can happen.

UC: Yes – that is an important part of it. As an audience, we bring our livingness to it, and the fact that we know that anything can happen.

We also know that a tremendous amount of thought and artistry is being invested in creating a structure that is intended to unfold in a certain way, but we also know that it could fail; an actor might become ill or be stung by a bee on stage. Anything can happen, which gives us that sharpness. It doesn’t always, but it should.

When we talk about theatre, we’re talking about a huge range of phenomena, from Broadway, where the show is set and the production very controlled to a small play in the woods or a performance by an experimental theatre group. With any performance though, liveness is always a feature – the infinite potential of a moment. Anything can erupt into this art-form, in a way that is not possible in a painting or a novel.

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© Isabella Salas. All rights reserved.

Image caption: Entomorphosis by IsabellaSalas

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BK: If we think about the unique qualities and offerings of theatre and drama specifically as it intersects with entomology, there is a long history. We find numerous examples of traditional dance, ceremony, and one could argue theatre, but let’s look at more modernday examples for a moment.

An easy place to start is Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915), which has been adaptated for the stage many times. For example, Mikhail Baryshnikov has played the role of Gregor Samsa, that despondent salesman turned into …

UC: A cockroach.

BK: Well, was it a cockroach? Was it a dung beetle? Curiously, Franz Kafka wanted to be vague about that; he even demanded his publisher not include an image of an insect on the cover!

Another example is Federico Garcia Lorca’s The Butterfly’s Evil Spell (1920), in which a cockroach falls for a butterfly and while the final pages of the play were lost to time, we know that it didn’t end well for the cockroach. There is also Joseph and Karel Capek’s expressionist work The Insect Play (1921), which is a fascinating satire. More recently, we find Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno (Rossellini et al 2008) which was both a TV series and a series of theatrical performances, which Rossellini delivered with great entomological accuracy. The series includes around half a dozen arthropods, most of them insects, in an engaging and dramatic way, because the lives of insects are so dramatic.

Even more recently, Melita Rowston wrote and directed a show called Cockroach (2018), which is a direct play on Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, but with a twist. In this piece, Rowston pulls from Ovid’s Greek myths to speak about gendered violence.

UC: It makes sense for there to be numerous explorations of Kafka’s story, which has such a striking opening – that phenomenal act of transformation. There is actually a wonderful novel by Tyler Knox called Kockroach (2008) in which a cockroach wakes up in Times Square, realizes he’s a human, and is disgusted by what he has to deal with.

BK: Just imagine it – the sensory apparatus! As you have discussed in your writing, nonhuman animals are not that far removed from humans, even in such distant relatives as the hexapods, the insects. There are profound similarities, and yet we often think of them as alien organisms on earth, not only because they are particularly small, but perhaps also because insects can move in odd ways, their eyes don’t close or move, and because the apparatus that allows them to perceive the world is very different than our own.

Philosopher Thomas Nagel’s paper ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ (Nagel 1974), posits that it is impossible to place our feet in a bat’s shoes. Bats are fellow mammals, so if we extend this exercise to other vertebrates, and then outside the vertebrates – we are talking about half a billion-year-old shared ancestry with highly derived insects – how much can we relate? I would argue that we can relate in really profound ways, but that it might just take more effort.

UC: I completely agree. For many of the reasons you have enumerated, humans have tended to frame insects as if they were from another planet. In terms of imaginative production, they often

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inhabit the spaces of science fiction. That does seem to be changing, however, because of climate change and our growing awareness of ecological interdependence. Increasingly, there is a real curiosity and a growing realisation that insects are vitally important to a viable future for humans. I think we’re in a moment of great transformation. This growing appreciation for interdependence might also extend into interdisciplinary thought and practice, which is becoming increasingly common again.

BK: It is, but we still have a long way to go in terms of interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary studies or interactions. The majority of grants available for multidisciplinary studies still focus on building connections between sub-disciplines within the same field of scientific research. Very rarely does one find opportunities for science and the humanities to be connected in fundable ways. This is troubling because people making great discoveries, for example those awarded Nobel Prizes, oftentimes explicitly cite interaction between disparate fields as having been instrumental to their discoveries.

UC: In some respects, this is an old problem that is taking a long time to solve: the famous ‘two cultures’ theory identified by CP Snow, which describes modernity’s division of knowledge into ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, with the sciences allocated nature and the humanities and social sciences allocated culture, as if they were two separate realms (Snow & Collini 1959). For a long time, these boundaries were strictly policed, and Bruno Latour wrote about the consequences of that division in his book We Have Never Been Modern (1991). One of the consequences he discussed was our cultures moving away from an understanding that we are affected by the geophysical systems of the planet. That has been, I think, the most ruinous distortion of modernity.

BK: In his book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998), entomologist EO Wilson

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argued in favour of the interbreeding of different disciplines for productive gain and hearkened back to the Renaissance and before, when disciplines were much more intertwined. For example, we can think about Wunderkammer, the cabinets of curiosity, which included art as well as natural science artifacts.

I would like to think for a moment about the term ‘eco-theatre’. Is the primary mission of the field of eco-theatre to entertain, to educate, or to explore a relationship with natural ecosystems? You have also used the terms ‘ecospheric consciousness’ and ‘eco-criticism’ and I am interested in how one might study the humanities from an ecological perspective.

UC: Eco-criticism is a huge field which encompasses all the academic literary studies which focus on understanding the relationship between art, literature, and the environment. It often begins with people like Thoreau and Emerson and the other great nature writers, and includes writing about novels, poetry, and theatre.

Eco-theatre is the practice of actually making theatre that is interested in and sensitive to issues of environment and issues of species and landscapes. The mission of eco-theatre is all three of the aims you mention: to entertain, to educate, and to explore our relationship with natural ecosystems. Eco-theatre is not one single thing, however – there are many kinds of eco-theatre and many different people doing eco-theatre and none of us agrees with each other, so everyone is having a lovely argument, which is so important!

All theatre wants to engage its audience.

The first rule of theatre is you don’t want to bore the audience. The second goal is that you want to create an experience from within which you want to produce opportunities for new thinking and feeling. In some eco-theatre work there can also be an aim to create

sustainable theatre, to make theatre that utilises responsible environmental behaviors and practices.

The third term you mention, eco-spheric, is a word that I’m particularly fond of and committed to. It was introduced by the field ecologist Stan Rowe (2001). I prefer it to the word ‘environment,’ which, I feel is bit misleading: it can help sustain the illusion that there is a distinction between the human self and everything else around us, where of course there is no real difference: we are an integral part of the natural world (however much we have forgotten that or want to forget that). The other commonly used word, ecology, is also a bit problematic for me in that it has a specifically scientific feel to it and that it could reinforce the dangerous idea that the natural world is the business of scientists and no one else. The word ‘ecospheric,’ I feel and hope it is a more capacious, more inclusive, and more inspiring term.

symbols and metaphors. The whole thrust of animal studies and environmental humanities is against that. These fields focus on a return to the wondrous realities and actualities as worthy of interest in and of themselves, and as a rich source for new artistic challenges and directions. For example, how might the insects just be themselves on stage? The play Bug is one of the few instances where this truly does happen, and (within the fiction) the character is being bitten by actual insects. The piece plays with the idea that the insects could be a symbol of his fears, but it also challenges us to experience insects as insects.

The play also cleverly mobilized another fact about insects: that they cause itching, which is a behavior that causes a contagious somatic response, as yawning does, for example.

People in the audience started wanting to scratch themselves, and so, for a moment, we were liberated from symbolisation and thrust into physical, physiological experience. We were able to just be with the insects as insects.

BK: Tangentially, I’ve been thinking about the use of the term cultural entomology versus ethnoentomology. In the 1980s, Charles Hogue introduced and formalized the idea of studying insects in terms of their impact on human cultures (Hogue 1987).

BK: Do you see, perhaps, the power of theatre working in another way and potentially contagiously eliciting biophilia, and specifically, emotionally positive responses to insects?

I have noticed that when insects play a role in theatre and drama, the insects are often symbolic, and I was wondering if there is a place for insects just to be insects. An example from cinema is Microcosmos (Nuridsany et al 1996), where the insects are purely insects, and the dramas were apparent without any narration.

UC: Very much so, and it is my goal and hope to teach environmental humanities in order to foster biophilia. We need the arts to infuse our culture with a greater appreciation and love of more than just the human world. To me, the wonders of the biosphere constitute the most important aesthetic value during this moment of climate crisis.

UC: Absolutely! You can read into animals and insects, and humans cannot resist reading into them – and into just about everything else. That is what we humans do; we interpret, we symbolise, we make things into metaphors, and for a very long time we have, especially in the humanities and the arts, treated the natural world as a source of

BK: That is a really beautiful place to wrap up our discussion. Thank you, Una. For more on Una Chaudhuri and her work, please visit: https://as.nyu.edu/faculty/unachaudhuri.html and further excerpts from this interview will be available to view on YouTube from January 2024.

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monarch butterflies

We writhe & dangle In holey light –

Organs boil & settle —

O frass – O tails of flight – O beaks!

We fool in air

Flickered & inconclusive, The weather a hand around us

BY SARAH WESTCOTT

© Isabella Salas. All rights reserved.

Image caption: Entomorphosis by IsabellaSalas

BIOGRAPHIES Alexandra Bergmann is a first-year poetry MFA candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is a previously unpublished poet, having formerly worked in landscape ecology, apiology, science education, and laboratory operations.

Paul Brooke is a multidisciplinary artist who combines science, photography, poetry and book design.

His work has appeared in The North American Review, The Antioch Review, and Scientific American (this summer). He is the author of six books including Jaguars of the Northern Pantanal, Panthera onca at the Meeting of the Waters, and Sirens and Seriemas: Photographs and Poems of the Amazon and Pantanal. Currently, he is finishing a poetic narrative based on pumas in Chile called Pantagruelian.

Gaby Deisolbi is a transdisciplinary artist who studied Graphic Design in Vancouver, Canada, a bachelor’s degree in art history and a master’s degree in Artistic Creation in Mexico. In the past few years, she has focused on exploring, experimenting, and documenting the intersection between art and beekeeping through the work in collaboration among humans and bees.

Bush attained her MA in Fine Art Printmaking from Camberwell College of Arts and Crafts in London. Her work has been acquired by many National and International collections including the Yale Centre for British Art, Tate Britain, and the Marvin Sackner Collection of Concrete Poetry. One recent publication to feature Bush’s entomology collections is Of Green Leaf, Bird and Flower: artists’ books and the natural world’ (2014) edited

by Elisabeth Fairman of the Yale Centre for British Art.

Her most recent exhibitions are: Individually ‘Colmena: hogar compartido (Hive: shared home)’ in the Contemporary Art Museum Queretaro (Queretaro, Mex. 2023) ‘Reinvención (Reinvention)’ in the Contemporary Indigenous Art Museum (Cuernavaca, Mex. 2020), ‘Fragmentos de mi reinvención (Fragments of my Reinvention)’ (Cuernavaca, Mex. 2020) and ‘La Lucha (The Fight)’ (Cuernavaca, Mex. 2019) in Cuernavaca’s City Museum. Collectively: ‘Compartiendo Mundos (Sharing Worlds)’ in the Morelense Center for the Arts (Cuernavaca, Mex. 2023), Queretaro’s Museum of Fine Arts, MAQRO Museo de Arte de Querétaro (Querétaro, Mex. 2022), Museum of the Border Revolution (Ciudad Juárez, Mex. 2022), Palacio Aramburu (Tolosa,Spain.

2022), Cultural Center and Contemporary Art Museum (Mexico City, Mex. 2022), José Luis Cuevas Museum (Mexico City, Mex. 2021), Mieres Centru Cultural (Asturias, Spain. 2021), Durango Arts and History Museum (Durango, Spain. 2020) and Okendo Culture Center (San Sebastián, Spain. 2020). Her works have been selected for the Caelum Gallery, New York, and for the ‘Bienal de Pintura Joven (Youth Painting Biennale)’ for the Cum Laude Foundation, Spain.

Bush’s work is inspired by cultures of collecting the natural world, and our interactions with it. For many years Tracey made scrapbooks, collections of ephemera that could not be thrown away. The use of scraps is a way of recycling both materials and images in a process of reconstruction. These books emerged as Lepidoptera; butterflies and moths, ancient symbols of transformation. Each moth or butterfly is hand-cut from layers of recycled papers and then sewn together using a bookbinders pamphlet stitch. They are then pinned out in entomological boxes made by the suppliers of the Natural History Museum London and the Paris Museum.

Jake Eshelman (b. 1989, USA) is a photo-based artist and visual researcher exploring the complex relationships between people and other-than-human beings. Working to transcend the notion that humanity is somehow separate from – or superior to – the natural world, his work creates opportunities in which to (re) consider our ecological kinships. Through an intimate and intuitive documentary practice, his recent projects investigate how interspecies interactions in agriculture, conservation, and spirituality can illuminate new ways to address anthropocentrism, human chauvinism, and the unfolding implications behind the Enlightenment rationalisation of nature.

Collections of British butterflies are cut from vintage maps of the British Isles. There are quirky links between the butterfly name and the material used.

Hence the Common Blue is cut from the blue green colours of the Dungeness coast. The poetic names such as The Wanderer and Marbled White are hand-written in brown ink on tiny scientific labels.

Butterflies are amongst the first indicators of environmental change; these collections hope to highlight their frailty and diversity, as an alternative to a

Eshelman has exhibited work internationally, most notably at Vantaa Art Museum Artsi in Helsinki, Finland; Contemporary Calgary in Alberta, Canada; Houston Center for Photography in Houston, TX; The Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at Cambridge University, UK ; Rhode Island School of Design, RI; The Morgan Conservatory in Cleveland, OH; The Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in Washington D.C.; Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool, UK. His work is in the permanent collection of the Chicago Design

Tracey Bush is a British artist who works with paper.

Her work is informed by the histories of Natural History collecting, which are often the province of amateur women enthusiasts. Through making artist’s books, she has developed a dextrous approach to creating art, involving a high level of craft skill, through which to explore humanity’s impact on the environment.

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collection of actual specimens. Large collections have been created from paper ephemera for the Natural History Museum, London, the cruise ship ‘Britannia’, and numerous private collections.

Museum and has also been included in independently published photo books, collaborative artist books, and even a children’s book by Simon & Schuster encouraging aspiring creatives to pursue artistic careers. He has also been featured in numerous publications including National Geographic, Texas Monthly, The World Sensorium/Conservancy, Trouvé Magazine, and Then There Was Us, among others. He is a recent recipient of the City’s Initiative Grant administered by Houston Arts Alliance, as well as the Idea Fund individual artist grant funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and administered by DiverseWorks, Aurora Picture Show, and Project Row Houses.

Castle. She has since exhibited her ceramic swarms and insects worldwide. Anna has also collaborated with creative companies, designing exclusive collections for both ANTHROPOLOGIE and Liberty, London.

Anna advocates and champions excellence in craft.

She has worked as a mentor for the Crafts Council and works as a lecturer of contemporary fine craft at Nottingham Trent University.

Complementing his creative practice, Jake is also a writer and emerging scholar. In addition to his forthcoming publications through the Sophia Centre Press and the University of Reading, Jake also serves as the Contributing Editor of Ecological Thinking with Plantings Journal. Beyond the written word, he thoroughly enjoys conversing and lecturing about the issues he explores in his work, as well as the value and validity of artistic research practices.

Most of her poems, particularly those related to her epic poem ‘colpo d’amor’, and her poetry collection “‘he long way down to find you’, which takes an intertextual Ovidian-inspired approach to phenomenological orientation, deal with death, loss, and orientation, and the difficult management of the time and distance that separate loving subjects (humans, insects, animals, objects) from the lost things that they yearn to recuperate. They feature the difficult (impossible?) attempt to find stable moorings in an ever-changing, unstable landscape.

Jake is currently pursuing his MA in Ecology & Spirituality from The University of Wales, Trinity Saint David. He holds a BA in Classical Literature, with a concentration in mythology, hermeneutics, and reception theory from Trinity University in San Antonio, TX, as well a minor in Studio Art and Art History. Jake is also a member of The Fairy Investigation Society.

The mystery and wonder of the natural world and the curious order and beauty of insects are the focus of Nottingham-based ceramic artist Anna Collette Hunt.

Hunt has a strong connection to nature and its preservation, and this has taken root in her creative practice. She is fascinated by the mysteries presented within cosmology and entomology and translates her awe and wonder into ceramic pieces; each individually hand crafted and unique.

Entomology and natural history collections are the starting inspiration for Anna’s work. She is drawn to the curation and order within these timeless collections: each piece frozen in a vacuum of time. Anna’s work seeks to tell stories and to bring specimens to life. She sketches and models the insects, abstracting and reimagining them into a more mythical and magical form. Her ever-evolving swarms of otherworldly ceramic insects, framed collections and standalone pieces feature majestic antlers, kaleidoscopic arrangements of wings and unfurling limbs and antennae. These insects shimmer alluringly with precious metal and lustrous layered glazes.

In swirling clouds and shimmering with their beguiling glazes, Anna’s work reflects the colours of the cosmos and whispers of the subtle movements and patterns of constellation arrangements and celestial events.

Anna Collette Hunt’s first immersive exhibition in 2011 saw her unleash 10,000 ceramic insects upon Nottingham

Alani Rosa Hicks-Bartlett is a writer and translator who lived in the SF Bay Area but now enjoys the Autumn foliage of the East Coast, where she finds herself increasingly in a nudiustertian mode.

Her recent work has appeared in The Stillwater Review, IthacaLit, Gathering Storm, Broad River Review, The Fourth River, and Mantis: A Journal of Poetry, Criticism, and Translation, among others. In addition to ‘the long way down to find you’, she is currently working a collection of villanelles, along with translations of Medieval French and Portuguese love poetry.

Beth Lettington is a British poet based in Hull, England, where she is undertaking a interdisciplinary PhD in English at the Leverhulme Trust’s Centre for Water Cultures.

She received an MLitt in Creative Writing: Poetry from the University of St Andrews in 2020. Previous publications include Poetry Wales and Clementine Unbound.

Leon Louder is a Canadian composer and music producer active since 2003. He makes unconventional electronic music, incorporating unorthodox sounds and irregular rhythms. Using customized machines, and more recently, handmade acoustic instruments, Louder’s work is populated with percussive oddities, interlocking micro-melodies, and eccentric rhythmic programming, as well as spontaneous manipulation of recorded acoustic sound in real time. After his early output, with its nods to disco and house, he became increasingly attracted to the experimental, improvised electronic music cultures and the close knit DIY communities that connect them, performing at the Mutek festival on four occasions, as well as many small venues. Notable recent projects include Scattered Ensemble: Habitat, an impressionistic depiction of a constantly changing ecosystem (the St Lawrence River Estuary) created in collaboration with four Montreal improvisers, and You’re Killing Me, Bro, a schizoid radiophonic collage that attempts to convey the experience of (dis) information overload and political turmoil.

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Staunchly independent, Louder has often relied on his own labels to release music without compromise.

He founded the imprint Unfulfillment in 2014 to release his left field house experiments under the moniker Vertigo Inc, which has grown to become a notable local label for artists operating at the crossroads of underground dance and experimental music. His collaborators over the years have included rapper and beat-maker Socalled, sound artist Martin Rodriguez, and visual artist Chris Dorland. He also works as a sound designer, and A/V composer for television, video games, and installations.

Susan Richman is a NY artist whose work has been exhibited internationally. Recent US exhibits include ‘2023 Botanical’ Photo Place Gallery, Middlebury, VT, ‘The Still Life’ Praxis Gallery, Minneapolis, MN. ‘Art Of NY’ Arkell Museum Canajoharie, NY. Publications include International Color Photographer of the Year, Winners Book and Creative Quarterly; 100 Best Photos Annual, 2022 (to be published in 2023). Prior to Covid, she was an educator at The International Center for Photographers in NYC. Isabella Salas is originally from Mexico City (MX), and she moved to Montreal in 2001 to pursue a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a specialization in film production at Concordia University. In 2020, her official selection at the Mutek AI Lab will mark a turning point in her interdisciplinary career. She then adopted artificial intelligence as her main creative medium to create digital art and immersive experiences.

Recognized for questioning the use and bias of technology, identity, perception, and environmental practices through the use of ancient and new technologies, Isabella was nominated for the first CIFO-Ars Electronica Award, cycle 2022.

She was also appointed to the Composite MTL selection committee and recently founded the International Digital Arts Alliance, a non-profit organization that advocates for equal, open, and horizontal representation of digital artists worldwide.

Krista Leigh Steinke is an interdisciplinary lensbased artist working in moving image, experimental photography, and collage. Her work fluctuates between the photographic and the abstract to present poetic reflections on time, place, perception, and the interconnection between human experience and the natural world. Informed by various sources (from art and photographic history, science and star maps, memory and the female perspective, to current events and the weather), her creative research often takes a diaristic form as a way to illustrate how the personal, social, and universal intertwine. The plight of insects, the pathway of the sun, a hurricane, a global pandemic – she is interested in both the obvious and more mysterious ways that nature impacts our lives while calling attention to broader issues surrounding the environment and our shared community.

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Steinke regularly exhibits and screens her work in museums, galleries, and film festivals across the country, as well as internationally. Her work has received support from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Puffin Foundation, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Glasscock Center for Arts and Humanities, and a Fellowship from the Howard Foundation. She has been invited to be a visiting artist at numerous colleges and universities and has participated in several art and media festivals as an exhibiting artist, speaker, or curator. Steinke holds a MFA in Photography and Digital imaging from The Maryland Institute, College of Art, a BFA in Studio Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BA in the Humanities from Valparaiso University. She currently teaches at Texas A&M and divides her time between Houston, TX and rural New York State.

Shawn Smith was born in 1972 in Dallas, TX where he attended Arts Magnet High School and Brookhaven College before graduating from Washington University in St. Louis, MO, with a BFA in Printmaking in 1995.

Smith received his MFA in Sculpture from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2005. He has received artist-in-residencies from the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA and the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris, France. In 1996, Smith was a recipient of the Clare Hart DeGolyer grant from the Dallas Museum of Art. Smith’s work has been exhibited at Hå Gamle Prestegard, National Art and Culture Center of Norway, Gallery Mark Hachem (Paris, France), Kuntsi Museum of Modern Art, (Vaasa, Finland), and throughout the United States including the Austin Museum of Art, Arthouse at the Jones Center (Austin), Galveston Art Center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Southern Exposure (San Francisco), Grand Rapids Art Museum, Oakland Arts Museum, Berkeley Art Center, Richmond Art Center, di Rosa Art and Nature Preserve (Napa), Dean Lesher Center for the Arts (California), Holter Museum of Art (Montana), Northwest Art Center (North Dakota), Lawndale Art Center (Houston), Wichita Falls Museum of Art (Texas), the Armory Art Center (Florida), Scion Installation Center (Los Angeles), the Grace Museum (Abilene, TX), Artisphere (Arlington, VA), and the McKinney Avenue Contemporary (Dallas), among others.

In 2006, Smith was commissioned to create Doppel Fountain, a monumental public sculpture in San Francisco, CA. In 2017, he was commissioned to create Convergence, consisting of 100 sculptures for the new NYPL Westchester Square Library in the Bronx, for which he received a 2018 NYC Excellence in Design Award from the New York Public Design Commission.

In July 2019, he installed Burning Bright, a 71 foot long powder-coated steel panther at Fire Station 42 in Fort Worth, Texas. Also in 2019, he created Tower, an 18 foot tall pixelated giraffe commissioned by the US Department of State for their Art in Embassies Program to be installed in Niamey, Niger.

In addition to his public art works, Smith has received commissions to create works for many private and cor-

porate clients including Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Adobe, Fidelity Investments, Boston Consulting Group, W Hotels, Frost Bank, and Wired Magazine-UK, among others. His work is in the permanent collection at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery in Washington DC, the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the Explora Science Museum in Albuquerque, NM, and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.

Upcoming projects include exterior public art projects to be installed at EMS1 and AFD23/EMS13 stations as part of Austin’s Art in Public Places Program, a 93 foot long suspended indoor installation in the lobby of the new downtown Google building in Austin, TX and, solo shows in Dallas, TX , Wright Gallery in Texas A&M University, and Paris, France in 2024.

Anna Szalc is a student in USCB’s studio art program.

She has an intense interest in the repetition and little details found in nature. Her dream job would be to stare a birds, bugs, and plants all day, but she would also settle for work as a portraitist and illustrator.

appeared on beermats, billboards and buses, baked into sourdough bread, and installed in a nature reserve, triggered by footsteps.

Cynthia Yatchman is a Seattle based artist and art instructor. With an MA in child development and a BA in education, she has a strong interest in art education and teaches art to adults, children and families in Seattle. As a former ceramicist, she studied with JT Abernathy in Ann Arbor, MI, however, after receiving her BFA in painting from the University of Washington she switched from 3D art to 2D and has remained there ever since. She works primarily on paintings, prints and collages. Her art is housed in numerous public and private collections and she has been shown nationally in California, Connecticut, New York, Indiana, Michigan, Oregon and Wyoming. She has exhibited extensively in the Northwest, including shows at Seattle University, Seattle PaciNic University, Shoreline Community College, the Tacoma and Seattle Convention Centers and the Pacific Science Center. She is a member of the Seattle Print Art Association and COCA (Center of Contemporary Art).

Annette Marie Townsend is an interdisciplinary artist specialising Natural History. After graduating, she was employed by National Museum Wales as a Scientific Artist for over 20 years, producing illustrations for academic publications and models for gallery display. She now works from her garden studio in Cardiff, creating artwork inspired by the natural world which references her experience in preserving, documenting and storing scientific specimens in a museum context.

Jeffrey Turboff is a multiple award-winning video editor and filmmaker. His work in non-fiction has been honored with news and documentary Emmy awards, Cronkite, Murrow, and Peabody awards, and more. His work on the indie film side has also been awarded at several film festivals. An early adopter of iPhoneography, Jeffrey produced and directed the groundbreaking music video Fools Parade for the band Trumpeter Swan in 2012, using an iPhone 4s to shoot and animate, resulting in a very trippy, highly visual, psychedelic experience, eye-catching enough to grab the attention of both Wired Magazine online as well as MobileMovieMaking. com. More recently, when Jeffrey was made aware of the AI image-processing app, Uranus, in early 2023, he tried his hand at making videos with that, and the award-winning short film The Secret History Of Tardigrades In Early Soviet Cinema was one of the amusing results. Often changing the media in which he works as well the genres of work, Jeffrey loves to explore and experiment.

Sarah Westcott’s first pamphlet, Inklings, was a Poetry Book Society pamphlet choice and Slant Light (Pavilion Poetry), was highly commended in the Forward Prize. Her second collection, Bloom, also with Pavilion Poetry, was longlisted in the 2022 Laurel Prize for ecopoetry. Sarah was a journalist for twenty years and now works as a freelance writer, editor and tutor. Work has

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ENDNOTES PLAYING WITH ANTS AND OTHER INSECTS 064-075 1. It is relevant to note that Caillois has endorsed French colonialism in other works he has written, claiming western culture as ethically superior than colonised cultures. I decidedly took advantage of his play studies as a tactic for radicalising perspectives on games that have colonial biases.

2. Them! (1954) is a ludicrous ‘b movie’ about nuclear disasters and ants as evil mutants; H. G. Wells’ plot was close to historical events, depicting an English colony that desperately tries to control ant plagues in Brazilian rainforests [14].

3. Bear in mind, ants play both as models and victims of deceit.

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