Using a microscope camera and audio/visualization techniques, we are tracking a population of springtails inside a custom-made terrarium. Springtails (collembola) are abundant arthropods, found in soils throughout the world. They are important to soil health, as they graze on bacteria and fungi, disperse spores, and keep the nutrients cycling throughout soil.
To help humans notice their individual interactions, we projected them large and programmed colored dots to share their varying speeds; with blue dots showing their slower movements and red dots showing the fastest.
The sounds are also changing live, based on their movements. We don’t know what the sounds of this soil, or these springtails, are actually like, so we have developed a kind of speculative sonification based on the sounds of a forest. Like forest sounds and like ambient music, soil is present but fades from our notice most of the time. When we do pay attention to the complex life in soil ecosystems, we can be rewarded with a sense of wonder.
Viewers can interact with this system by moving the computer mouse to experience an altered soundscape – and perhaps imagine themselves as a tiny cursor in the world of the springtails.
This project is a collaboration with artists Alena Sun, Brian Trelegan, and David King. We were fortunate to be able to work with David’s amazing glass art crew: Gayle Van Martel, David Foster, Su Fan and Max Kleinmann, in the glass art facility at the Ohio State University.
The work was exhibited in, Those Who Feed Us, an art show celebrating Ohio Soil Health Week, which included Marcia Armstrong, Ken Rinaldo, Mandy Darrington, Adelaine Muth, Eve Warnock, Pelham Johnston, Kim Landsbergen, Janette Knowles, Raman Ebrahimi, Thomas Ellsworth, Daniel Gingerich, Parinaz Naghizadeh, Kyoung Swearingen, Scott Swearingen, and Robyn Wilson.
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INSPIRATIONS:
- Springtails
- Shadrick Addy and Jian Chen, my co-principal investigators of the Nonhuman Storytellers Generating Impressionistic Story Ecologies project, an interdisciplinary grant project funded by the College of Arts and Humanities and Computer Science Engineering, which gave rise to this offshoot artwork.
- The student researchers who worked on the Nonhuman Storytellers Generating Impressionistic Story Ecologies project: Nate Garthwaite, Alena Sun, Ashim Dhakal, Shuning Jiang, Isabel Nixon, and Chenzhuo Tong.
- Artists: Julie Freeman, Ken Rinaldo, and Laura Beloff
- A Chaos of Delight, informative website featuring soil mesofauna, by macro photographer and writer Andy Murray.