‘In-Visible Moth Spells’ by Liina Lember
MA Information Experience Design (2019-21)
Royal College of Art, London, United Kingdom
Key supervisors: Dr Claude Dutson
Invisible Moth Spells is an installation which explores the mutual interests, shared concerns and interconnectedness of moths, humans and other species. The installation examines how light pollution, the changing urban space and dwindling natural resources affect a range species including our own. Invisible Moth Spells creates a space for moths and people to meet.
This project's light sculpture is a part of a set of five different sculptures situated in urban space that invite audiences to explore in a playful way the wonderful world of moths and their importance in ecosystems. Each sculpture presents a different aspect of moths. For example, one of the sculptures one can listen to poems about moths while the other shows the ultramagnetic light rays that affect their populations. The work acts as a portal into the more-than-human world of insects and Moths, in which light becomes a material and urban space its playground.
The sculptures are accompanied by an illustrated fictional book that introduces the invisible dimension, contains written moth spells and tells a story of the last moth. The project's visual representation is guided by moths' colour and light perception and human created urban tiled grid patterns. The project's use of grids as a part of the visual language represents the human desire to control and organize the natural world.
The project has been developed as a response to the alarming declining numbers of ecosystems and insect populations as a result of urbanization, habitat loss, pesticide use, light pollution and climate crisis. The project aims to bring attention to and question existing social stigmas while encouraging care and sharing information about moths. The project's main objective is to make the invisible visible.
Liina Lember / MA IED / The RCA, London, 2019-21
I'm a multidisciplinary designer and artist based in London. I explore space, colour, light and other-than-human invisible dimensions. My design process is influenced by experimentation, science and other-than-human entities. I am interested in the limitations, edges and shared embodied experiences. I experiment, research and question the liminal space between plausible futures and alternative realities.
speculative futures, mutlispecies spaces, light pollution, colour studies, reciprocity, red light, moth, urban space
