THE MOTHS: a starting line
There is a brown moth that invaded my house in the summer of 2006. After several 2 a.m. encounters with the intruder, I rediscovered my childhood interest in entomology, and set out to try and identify the moth. For months I had been plagued by insomnia which I knew was the result of a few unanswerable nagging questions. The mysterious moth at my kitchen light seemed to offer some sort of starting line: answer one question and maybe other answers will follow. The starting line could have been anything- the moth just happened to show up at the right time. The moth functioned as a guide to what has become an adventure in personal epistemology. It served to explore several things:
- How I know what I know, and how it shapes my ideas and actions
- How I learn
- How to gain insight into others’ learning and ideas
The moth has illustrated to me one fundamental bit of information about myself: In a city and world full of ways to connect to information, I had to choose a few filters to help me search for what I wanted to learn. At times I am inclined to deal with structures and objects on a small scale because that’s all I feel like I can handle. The scale of the moth is overwhelming if you begin to understand the width and breadth of the things it is connected to and which are connected to it, i.e. its role in the food chain, environment, history, physics of flight, cultural significance, and perhaps of most interest to me; it’s visual form and variety. The list goes on. Any subject explored fully and with dedication can show you the rest of the world, it seems.
Collecting: why, why why?
The Mobile Museum was born from my interest in collecting and why people collect. I have worked in several museums and galleries, and see these as large-scale representations of approaches to understanding any number of ideas, objects, or histories. I have often walked through a museum and wondered at the mind (or minds) behind the collection. Collecting is of course, not isolated to museums and galleries, and as a child I was very interested in the collections my mother kept: rocks, shells, and a wide variety of plants. These objects functioned as trophies of understanding in an endless study of the natural world.
I see collecting as a means of “individuation”, defined by Jung as the psyche’s instinctive striving for wholeness. In individuation, the undifferentiated develops individual characteristics, and an individual idea (or person) is separated from the rest of the universe. Setting one object or idea aside can help locate that object’s role in the world, and aid in understanding the world as a whole.
The mobile museum is a way for me to engage viewers directly (and indirectly as the museum appears unattended) to understand the changing role museums and collecting play in people’s lives.
The moths seeping into my house at night became a sounding board for analogy. For example, the moths came in at night when I was half asleep, and seemed like some physical representation of my half- awake (subconscious) self. There was a distance here to travel: If one object can serve as a map to a destination (interpreting the world), does that mean the object contains some sort of “knowing”?
There existed in the moth an essence of possibility, hope, and individual significance that stirred some rusty machine in my heart. The gears cranked and turned reluctantly. Can on person contain an inherent understanding that guides them in a direction, and to a life exactly right for them? Can we follow that instinctual knowing, and be oriented as the moth is to the moon? Are we as easily caught and concluded by a kitchen light (or someone else’s ideas or vision for us) as the travelers I found lost on my windowsill?
I hunted up books about moths, and collected them from the windowsills of my house, one at a time. The idea of “knowing” seemed slippery, and I began instead to build a foundation for my ideas in understanding learning. The moths functioned as a point of mediation: something to observe, create a hypothesis about, construct theories about, and come to an understanding of.
As I examined the moths I took notes on how and what motivated me to learn. Scanning through texts about moths, I ended up reading about moth’s use of echolocation, and the physics of how they fly. Echolocation and physics are two subjects I would not necessarily look up and be interested in if left to my own devices. My plan was taking shape.
I understood that I learn by:
- Narrowing my field of interest to something very specific.
- Following a thread of self appointed research.
- Creating my own visual learning tools- which means at times
creating multiple images of an object, and considering how those multiple images should be presented. - Trying to decide how best to present what I have learned to someone else, in this case, in the form of a small written text and exhibit.
MATERIALS AND PROCESS: replicas and away
A month of my summer was spent traveling in the eastern US, and I took the opportunity to gather fallen moths from each location I visited. By the end of the summer I had at least sixty dried moths in a box on my studio desk. I have become very proficient at spotting moths from afar, and though I’m sure it’s a skill I will never use, it has been an interesting experiment in honing one’s eyes to attract to a particular shape. Having examined dozens of moths close up, what fascinates me now is their variety of form- their rough shape when seen from a distance.
When I first started gathering the moths I grouped them by location. When it became obvious that certain species of moth crossed over into various regions, I abandoned what I had intended as a sort of mapping, to grouping the moths based on form- mainly body type and wing type. This is an interesting technique, and understanding of why it might be used, because it mirrors the classification system created Linnaeus, the Swedish naturalist who created the “family, genus, species…” system commonly used by scientists today.
I began making small replicas of moths as a way of forcing myself to examine their every minute detail. I had to notice everything to make a good replica- color, size, shape, wing patterns, etc. After making a few that were similar enough to the real thing to be mistaken for it at close range, I began taking the basic properties of the moths and mixing them at will to create moths with a believable appearance, but fictional origin. I had the strange idea that I could make trouble on a tiny scale and get away with it all day long.
The moth in this case embodied an experiment concerning the idea of information entropy- a theory that can be used to describe how much information is present in a single scenario, and is used in understanding probability.
I contemplated the idea of constructing every possible moth and its variations, and trying to understand what the chances were concerning the likelihood in the creation of each moth constructed of “favorite characteristics”. I realized very quickly: that’s too many moths.
(body forms) x (colors) x (wing shapes) x (leg shapes) = too many moths
I narrowed my purpose to aesthetic and formal concerns and chose materials with two motives:
- to create a realistic moth- this entailed using mostly wood and various types of paper
- to create moths whose appearance was obviously artificial, but generally correct- using mostly plastics and white paper
In order to create realistically shaped and colored moths I worked slowly- often making only four or five moths in a couple of hours. Reproducing the moths in life-like form helped me to notice the subtle difference in each moth.
When I later moved to artificial materials and shifted my motives away from realistic representation, my work speed increased rapidly. I reduced the forms I was working with to mere shapes of moths. These moths unraveled all of Linnaeus’ hard work, save for his rudimentary classifications. They were no moth and every moth- a sort of “moth in general”. These moths served as a symbol of my ulterior motives in studying the moth- using it as a tool for studying a limitless range of topics.
Imagine the moth as a sort of regulating valve for everything in the known world. When the amount of information begins to be overwhelming, my research is just about moths. When the moth cannot be understood without considering another topic the valve is turned open a bit more, and the flow of information is increased.
COLLECTING TO KNOW : a thousand pictures for one word
I will admit my interest in collecting and why people collect has been a number of years in the making. I have worked in several museums and galleries, and see these as large-scale representations of approaches to understanding any number of ideas, objects, or histories. I have often walked through a museum and wondered at the mind (or minds) behind the collection. Collecting is of course, not isolated to museums and galleries, and as a child I was very interested in the collections my mother kept: rocks, shells, and a wide variety of plants. These objects functioned as trophies of understanding in an endless study of the natural world.
I see collecting as a means if “individuation”, defined by Jung as the psyche’s instinctive striving for wholeness. In individuation, the undifferentiated develops individual characteristics, and an individual idea (or person) is separated from the rest of the universe. Setting one object or idea aside can help locate that object’s role in the world, and aid in understanding the world as a whole.
My investigations into the nature of collections leads me understand that often times in collecting anything, we have accidentally collected ourselves. It is this unintended presence-like an unexpected guest in the night- that has captured my interests.
“…even if the collection develops into a discourse with others, it is always primarily a discourse with one’s self.”
-Jean Baudrillard, The Revenge of the Crystal
I am not sure why, but with the moths the idea of chance never left my mind. Perhaps you, the reader will draw the connections I have missed, but every moth I found seemed to of come to me by luck and mystery.
