05 Nocturnal Dance
On balmy summer nights, one can observe the deadly dance of the masses, like a pulsing cloud, moths and mosquitos gather almost like a ritual around the streetlight.
It seems like a mystical procedure that from a scientific perspective cannot be clearly explained. However, the lunar theory offers promising answers that tell the tragic story of the moths.
The work Nocturnal Death Dance is a wearable mask that forges a link to the mysterious deadly flight of the night insects into artificial light. It is an attempt to make the state of paralysis and total exhaustion that moths, mosquitoes and other flyers of the night are subjected to tangible for the human body.
Year: 2020
Collaboration: Evgeniia Kozlova
Ana Mumladze
Danny Nedkova
Franz Ludwig
As an orientation aid to keep on course and always fly straight ahead, night insects keep a specific angle to the moon, an eternal approach to a quasi fixed point in the far distance raised in the night sky.
However, when an artificial light source intervenes, obviously much closer than the moon, the moth switches the angle and now orients itself, as if by magical attraction, to the new terrestrial object in the near distance. The proximity, compared to the seemingly infinitely distant moon, causes a never-ending spiral, the dance of death in which the moths are doomed to fly until their energies are absolutely drained.
The experience that can be found in our work Nocturanl Death Dance is based on the attempt to translate the paralysed, exhaustive state of the insect to the human apparatus. What does it take to disrupt our own mode of movement, to interfere with arriving and resting?
What functions are necessary for a smooth journey from A to B and how can they be so irritated that we end up in a never-ending spiral dance similar to the insects?
After experimenting on our own bodies, the materials mirrors and spectacle lenses have proved effective. Through these, one can manipulate the field of vision and orientation, or more precisely, the sense of depth, size and direction.
The biomass of nocturnal insects is steadily decreasing, not least because of our cities, which at night turn into illuminated bodies of light. Supposedly romantic scenes are part of the problem of light pollution.
The human endeavour to enliven the darkness of the night, despite our orientation apparatus not being designed for it, not only displaces other entities from their habitat, but also kills some of them directly with our pre-programmed dependence on light.