There is a new exhibit at the New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA) centre in South River which gives the public insight into how insects hear sounds.
Secret Reception is a collaboration between Kristine Diekman, Ben Pagac and Tony Allard, all from California.
Diekman calls the exhibit Secret Reception “because it’s not just about sound production but also about sound reception.”
The exhibit features large drawings of eight insects made from conductive paint. People touch any part of the insects and a miniature computer, sound player, battery, and Bluetooth device all packed in a small housing, triggers the insects’ sounds for the listening public.
The exhibit also includes a corresponding cardboard box for each insect with a small speaker inside that vibrates when the insect drawings are touched.
Diekman says when holding the box, the vibration it makes approximates how an insect feels or receives sounds “which is different from how humans hear.”
“There is a lot known about how insects make sounds but less known about how they receive sounds,” Diekman said.
The eight insect drawings include a bumblebee, mosquito, cicada, parasitic wasp and hissing cockroach.
The inspiration for Secret Reception came from a similar artwork Diekman did where the public touched the finished piece to hear sounds.
Among the public at this earlier exhibit was a group of hearing-impaired people and Diekman said when they picked up a speaker to ‘listen’ to the sounds, “although they couldn’t hear it with their ears, they felt the vibrations.” That set the stage for Diekman to work with Pagac, who is an entomologist, and Allard, who specializes in visual arts, to create what would become Secret Reception.
“Insects’ ears are distributed throughout their bodies,” Diekman said. “For example, wasps and mosquitos hear through their antennas while bees hear through their antennas and hairs,” Diekman said.
The trio set about creating the exhibit with Pagac recording most of the sounds.
Diekman adds sometimes they had to get creative on how to get the recordings without adding the normal background sounds in nature.
She said in the case of the mosquitos, Pagac “attracted them into a jar and put a microphone close to the jar” and recorded their sounds.
Diekman herself followed a bumblebee around landing on flowers and held a microphone close enough to it to capture the sounds it made.
Allard put his visual arts skills to work by creating the large-scale drawings and Diekman made the electronic housings and boxes that produced the vibrations.
The entire project took three months to complete and it had its first showing this past March in Florida at the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology. From there it went to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C. The stop in South River is the first time the exhibit is in Canada.
Diekman says the exhibit is a big hit with children but adults also enjoy it. It’s an educational piece of art but Diekman adds people can also have fun with it.
For example, if someone picks up one of the boxes and suddenly it vibrates because unknown to them someone else touched one of the insect drawings, “they say how did I make this happen.”
NAISA’s Artistic Director, Darren Copeland, says Secret Reception will be on display until September 4th. He says the exhibit is ideal for families and children attending summer camp to take in over the next couple of months.
Diekman holds community workshops and has been creating art for 40 years but only ventured into the world of sound art in the last five years.
Rocco Frangione is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter who works out of the North Bay Nugget. The Local Journalism Initiative is funded by the Government of Canada.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
