This post outlines the development of an ongoing collaboration with Claire Shovelton of Chroma Ensemble. It will become two projects - the first is a film/projection with script, part of an installation in a group show to be held at the Lumen crypt gallery, Bethnal green on 5-8 November 2020 (originally 3-5 April).
The second is a development of this idea as part of a programme of contemporary classical music, which we plan to tour to Fair Isle next year. The thematic programme will include a newly commissioned piece, and be linked together by my spoken text and Claire’s visuals. The tour will include schools workshops base don the themes of my research.
Woodberry Wetlands 16 September 2016
The original idea for this collaboration occurred to me while watching a performance by the Chroma ensemble, “Awakenings” at St. Peter’s Church, Berkhamsted, Thursday 25 April 2019, 7.30pm
Image courtesy of Claire Shovelton at Chroma.
Watching Claire’s light projection, I suddenly had a realisation – it resembles the classic ‘moth trap’ – a white sheet hung up and lit, to which moths are attracted after dusk.
PHOTOTAXIS: movement in response to light.
This gave me an idea for a performative aspect of something I have been working on as part of my PhD research, a creative response to the lives of moths.
In the context of the Anthropocene (the era of human alteration of the planet to a measurable, geological degree) this work explores alternative ways of thinking and being in coexistence (Morton) with non-human nature. It also records and reveals patterns of species fluctuation, migration and retreat in response to human activity including light pollution, intensive agriculture (habitat loss and pesticide use) deforestation, urbanisation and global heating.
Claire created a mesmerising flow of moving image, which responded to the ebb and flow of light in the piece. It seemed to breathe. We have talked about collaborating for a while. I would like to work with her as she explores this new creative aspect of her work.
clip from performance visuals for CHROMA ensemble "Awakening" programme Claire Shovelton, April 2019
Video available at https://vimeo.com/chansonnette
What I loved about her projection, apart from the beauty of the image, was how she adapted it in real time, in response to the live energies of the trio. It was sublime. I knew she had done something really special when the technical boffin I was sitting next to leaned over to me, and said “Is that analogue or digital?” I knew something of her process of manipulating light to create it, but he could not tell – and that underlined the sensitivity of what she was thinking and doing, to me.
October 2019
(Images and text sent to Claire to start the collaboration).
Light pollution is key bringer of Insect apocalypse, The Guardian 22 November 2019
So – light, and responsiveness to light, as a theme.
Moths respond to light. But I am not interested in the candle-flame image. This is not about human constructions, or at least not directly. it is about imagining other ways of being and thinking.
Displacing, or inverting the human, to see the story of ‘the other’. How to enter their moon-responsive, air-tidal, pheromone world? How to become invisible? (the Kate Bush song was an early soundtrack to my first ever attempt at a film – “I found a book on how to be invisible”) How to enter that world, without interference, without damage, and – commune with the beings of the night sky? How to become attuned – (Morton again) to these rhythms, and waves and sensitivities?
Martin Warren on Twitter Pictorial loss of moths in Costa Rica over 12 years courtesy of the great Dab Janzen EntSoc19_1
Martin Warren on Twitter Pictorial loss of moths in Costa Rica over 12 years courtesy of the great Dab Janzen EntSoc19_2
Endarkenment
It has the quality of turning the binariness of our relationship to nature on its head. I like the inversion, the flipping. It also relates to FEAR, OTHERNESS. It reminds me of the Inro, the Foxes’ Wedding, the eerie - “uncanny” feeling of ‘other’ animal lives played out in moonlight. Some people dislike moths in the same way as they dislike the dark – what you cannot see, fear of the unknown, the alien, the unfamiliar...
Endarkenment in the sense of post (rather than anti-) Enlightenment. Some definitions of this word suggest a return to ‘spirituality’ and magical thinking in the face of a rejection of religion, or even fundamentalism:
“Endarkenment is the opposite of Enlightenment, which was the philosophical and scientific movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that challenged mysticism, traditional theology, and autocratic government.”
But I think there can be a more positive sense. Not dismissing all the developments of science under the Enlightenment but looking at ideas which decentre the human and – literally – bringing back the necessary healing, protective dark. Reclaiming the good side of dark. Other-than-human needs. Balance. Chiaroscuro.
Or, rather Dark Ecology. But this is not a good word for the title. MoonDark? Dark-sweet?
“What is dark ecology? It is ecological awareness, dark depressing. Yet it is also dark-uncanny. And strangely, it is dark-sweet. Nihilism is number one in the charts these days. We usually don’t get past the first darkness, and that’s if we even care. In this book we are going to try to get to the third darkness, the sweet one, through the second darkness, the uncanny one. Do not be afraid.”
- It’s about co-existing.
(Inro? The flavour of rogin and gingi (silver) Togidashi laquer. Can’t find the one I am looking for, but it may have the flavour of these about it – colour, otherworldliness)
Tatsuke Toshihide 1757-1833
See The Life of Animals in Japanese Art exhibition, Jun 2–Aug 18, 2019, National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Especially one, The Foxes Wedding (which I can’t find a good picture of!) But here is:
Case Inrō with Design of Fox Wedding Procession. Japan. Edo period. 1615–1868. The_Metropolitan Museum of Art.jpg
“The Kitsune no Yomeiri (狐の嫁入り, “the fox’s wedding”)...is a strange event told about in Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu.[1] The “kitsune no yomeiri” can refer to several things: atmospheric ghost lights, a phenomenon during which it appears as if paper lanterns from a wedding procession are floating through the dark; what is commonly referred to as a sunshower; and various strange wedding processions that can be seen in classical Japanese kaidan, essays, and legends. The “kitsune no yomeiri” is always closely related to foxes, or kitsune (who often play tricks on humans in Japanese legend) and various Shinto rituals and festive rights relating to the “kitsune no yomeiri” have been developed in various parts of Japan.”
...there is a Fox moth: perhaps it could provide a starting point for a narrative, night wooing, it’s pheromonal wedding and how this is interrupted by light pollution, dwindling numbers, harder to travel to find a mate, starvation through pesticide use and loss of habitat:
The female is silver grey, and the male is smaller, golden tawny colours.
photo: Ryszard Szczygieł
Bollington, 3 July 2016. The Fox moth that Cole found.
This section is more Autumnal, wintry – about the cold dead dark times: seeing in the dark:
“The lowest part of the year.
In lacquer cradles under the earth, bodies dissolve in molecular dreams, reimagining themselves utterly.
Winter moth, December moth, Early moth, Satellite. Even in the dead of winter, things are moving.
The female of the species is a wingless thing.
She sits, fat bodied in the moonlight, ermine and sable, furry, waiting to make love in the cold.”
The Winter moth, Holeslack Farmhouse, Cumbria, January 2017.
Night Vision:
Take your human goggles off, experience the night through the olfactory, branched antennae of the horny (literally!) male moth.Navigating by the moon, searching out the pheromonal call of potential partners…distracted by the the light.
Within this work there will be stories of failure and loss, dwindling, dying, violence and despair. But there is a life force that persists, surges and adapts, beyond the control of humanity. However, faced with the damage that our ways of living have and do cause, we have choices we can make about what we value, and about what kind of companion species we would like to be.
MOTH EYE RESEARCH - November 2019
Eyes;
The dark-adapting mechanism reacts more slowly than the light...”
The musical scale...
Colour spectrum – how moths do not like yellow and are drawn to UV
“a moth’s eye is coated with tiny, uniform bumps that gradually bend (or refract) incoming light. The light waves interfere with one another and cancel one another out, rendering the eyes dark.”
https://www.herox.com/blog/178-moth-eyes-inspire-new-means-of-boosting-solar-effi
Ommatidium: “The compound eyes of arthropods like insects, crustaceans and millipedes are composed of units called ommatidia. An ommatidium contains a cluster of photoreceptor cells surrounded by support cells and pigment cells. The outer part of the ommatidium is overlaid with a transparent cornea” Wikipedia
Structure of the ommatidium: https://www.britannica.com/science/ommatidium
moth = superposition eye: https://www.britannica.com/animal/insect/Nervous-system#ref68836
Ommatidia
Phototaxis is a kind of taxis, or locomotory movement, that occurs when a whole organism moves towards or away from a stimulus of light.[1]
Transverse orientation, keeping a fixed angle on a distant source of light for orientation, is a proprioceptive response displayed by some insects such as moths.[1][2]
By maintaining a constant angular relationship to a bright celestial light, such as the moon, they can fly in a straight line. Celestial objects are so far away that, even after travelling great distances, the change in angle between the moth and the light source is negligible; further, the moon will always be in the upper part of the visual field, or on the horizon. When a moth encounters a much closer artificial light and uses it for navigation, the angle changes noticeably after only a short distance, in addition to being often below the horizon. The moth instinctively attempts to correct by turning toward the light, thereby causing airborne moths to come plummeting downward, and resulting in a spiral flight path that gets closer and closer to the light source.[3]
A supernormal stimulus or superstimulus is an exaggerated version of a stimulus to which there is an existing response tendency, or any stimulus that elicits a response more strongly than the stimulus for which it evolved.
- “an innate response” photoreceptors respond to a positive stimulus
(these all above from Wikipedia)
Why are moths attracted to light?
1) Navigation by moon (usually up above)
“Some lepidopterists (moth and butterfly scientists) suggest that moths use the moon as a primary reference point and have the ability to calibrate their flight paths as the Earth’s rotation causes the moon to move across the sky.(There is even evidence to support the theory that migrating moths have an internal geomagnetic compass system to guide them in the right direction.) So a moth’s attraction to an artificial light or to a fire could be related to orientation, and lead to disorientation — the moth wasn’t “expecting” to actually get to “the moon” (the light source) or to be able to fly above it, so confusion results.”
“Researchers found that moths used both magnetic signals and visual landmarks to guide them.
2) “escape-route mechanism” – up = usually better than down, moon = up.
3) Another interesting question is: Why do moths stay at lights? A moth’s eyes, like a human’s eyes, contain light sensors and adjust according to the amount of light the sensors detect. In high illumination, light from each of the moth’s thousands of fixed-focus lens facets is channeled to its own sensor (ommatidium). In low illumination, light from multiple lenses is channeled to the same ommatidium to increase light sensitivity. You probably experience a few moments of blindness when you turn on a bright light after your eyes have adjusted to darkness, or when you are suddenly in darkness after being in bright light. A moth’s dark-adapting mechanism responds much more slowly than its light-adapting mechanism. Once the moth comes close to a bright light, it might have a hard time leaving the light since going back into the dark renders it blind for so long. In the case that the moth escapes, it won’t remember the problem with flying too near the light and will probably find itself in the same predicament all over again.
Another possible explanation for why moths stay at lights is that they are mostly night-flying creatures and eventually respond to the light as they would to the sun — by settling in for their daytime “sleep.” ”
Compound eyes:
https://www.britannica.com/animal/insect/Nervous-system#ref68836
“The compound eye, made up of a number of facets, resembles a honeycomb; each facet overlies a group of six or seven retinal cells that surround the rhabdom. Each of the retinal units below a single facet is termed an ommatidium. The number of facets varies.”
But - they shine copper in the dark….
Darkness, vision and time:
“color vision may play an important role in the sensory ecology of nocturnal moths”
“Opsins are ancient proteins”
”All living organisms possess a circadian clock to synchronize their rhythm with the environment, and photoreceptors are clearly necessary for this synchronization”
”Moths feed [58] and navigate [59]–[60] using multiple cues. Visual perception is one of the most familiar forms of stimulus discrimination, and moths require a highly developed visual system. Whether opsin mRNA levels oscillate in a circadian manner has been an interesting question for a long time.”
“Cycling of opsin mRNA levels was disturbed by constant light or constant darkness, and the UV opsin gene was up-regulated after light exposure. Furthermore, the opsin genes tended to be down-regulated upon starvation.”
The Expression of Three Opsin Genes from the Compound Eye of Helicoverpa armigera (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) Is Regulated by a Circadian Clock, Light Conditions and Nutritional Status
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0111683
poor light environment adaptations, circadian rhythms, opsin fluctuation,
- That is good for the film – night becomes day – they sleeeeep.
Claire’s Instagram, 13 November 2019.
And so it begins…
Up until this point, Claire and I were thinking of this loosely as a Chroma project. An ‘enriched’ chamber concert, building on ‘Awakenings’, with a programme devised around these themes and linked by pieces of text, written , possibly spoken, by me. If we raise sufficient funds, we may be able to commission a piece of music, and take it on tour.
My involvement with the PostHuman (‘What has Art to do with Animals?’) reading group at CSM resulted in us deciding to do a group show at around this time. Members of the group include another PhD student, an MA Fine Art alumna (sculpture), and three current or recent MA Art and Science postgrads.
We have in common an interest in relationships with nature, and have been reading a variety of texts around this subject. We settled on a time slot in early April 2020 at the Lumen crypt gallery in Bethnal Green.
Meeting in Euphorium, 31 January 2020
I sent Claire the script for the “Nourishment’ film I made, and she responded to various themes as a kick off.
The inversion theme was key. The overlooked stories, the unintended consequences.
She also picked up on the dates – 46, 49, 53 – these were the dates of gestation. I hadn’t thought of this.
She is thinking of ways to visualise the data ( perhaps for school workshops later too)
RESPONDING TO DATA is a thing....patterns, colours, textures – stimuli from site.
She says: the time cycles, the numbers, this relates to the musical way of thinking.
CS: It is a durational piece - Different concepts of time - The elasticity of life experience in temporal matters - METABOLISM (KP: this relates to the juddering....somehow)
The film script: 9 seconds in human time: Pupation, life cycles, the second brood, adaptation, mutation.
“It is not a relationship of control...”
KP: I am thinking of three overarching sections, themes or layers:
Nourishment, Procreation (Moonlight, Sex), Flight or Freedom of Movement (migration).
Meeting 310120 Claire’s imagery in progress
6 February 2020
Site visit to the gallery and meeting with forest school organiser.
The gallery is in the crypt of St John on Bethnal Green, 200 Cambridge Heath Rd, E2 9PA.
Designed by Sir John Soane, it is narrow and curvaceous and feels like being in a submarine. Actually a little claustrophobic, but when dark and filled with projections, the atmosphere will change. Much discussion about how 5 potential audiovisual pieces will work in here together!
21 February 2020
With the reading group, we have been keen to make some contacts with community groups local to the gallery in Bethan Green, partly to build an audience, but partly so that our work will be responding to the actual locality in terms of specific nature. Phil is very keen to do some activities in park next door and bring the outside into the gallery. Catherine is working on some aural histories of different generations about their memories of nature. I have talked to St. Margaret’s House community centre about doing some workshops with the textiles group using moths as a link to interrogate the idea of ‘inspired by’ nature, and turn it on its head a little. Becky and Phil have arranged something with the local forest school, and that has put us in touch with Phytology, a very interesting arts organisation that looks after and hold events in a nearby nature reserve. They have a very sensitive approach, work closely with the community, and have a herb garden form which they run an apothecary, making balms and salves.
Phytology, Bethnal Green
Phytology, Bethnal Green
Phytology, Bethnal Green
21 February 2020
Since we have decided to make our show about ongoing research I feel much happier, as I think some of us were thinking it was a bit of an artificial deadline, but these links give us time to build up a response to the actual area, which can be ongoing, after the exhibition itself.
Phytology, Bethnal Green
We can do this by hanging out at Phytology, getting involved with the garden and the school, and using our observations to feed into the work. I would like to perhaps do some moth trapping and a talk later in the summer, and join in with the medicine garden. I would love to learn more about dye plants, but really I watn to expand my knowledge of the link between food-plant and host.
Site visit to the gallery to trial the film - 11 March 2020
Towards Light try out, Lumen gallery, 11 March 2020
Floor plan, Lumen gallery, Bethnal Green.
Becky got very excited about the Donella Meadows title ‘Places to Intervene in a System’ which suggested to read at the reading group. So, it has become the title of the show. Really, I mentioned it because of the bit about “strategically, profoundly, madly letting go”, which is what I am attempting to embrace in my practice.
I wrote a blurb for the Press Release and am quite pleased with it:
Press release for Lumen show