Title: Insect Songs
Artist(s): Ursula Damm, Christina Meissner, Teresa Carasco
Source: Neural Magazine
Sense(s): sound
Issue(s): biodiversity loss
Insect Songs is a work for Cello by artists Ursula Damm, Christina Meissner and Teresa Carrasco.
This work interrogates species decline by engaging in a performative work that interacted with, and caused a species of midge, the chironomous riparius to swarm. As Damm describes of the inspiration behind the piece:
When I left the county side and moved to a city I begun to miss the sound of the fields and the forrest. And when I later returned to the small village in the middle of vineyards, called Diedesfeld, something was gone. I took me a while to figure out that I missed the sounds of insects. And that this sound was like a confirmation of a strong, ecological balance. Science proofed only years later that insecticides diminished insects up to 80 % of their former presence.1
The key affordances of this work are in how it sonifies and, to an extent through the swarming of the insects, visibilises biodiversity loss.