Image Courtesy of Freya Addison BioDar
“A thing has in the first place its size and its shape throughout variations of perspective which are merely apparent” (Maurice Merleau Ponty).
Our focal specimen, a male Xestia xanthographa,
is a moth belonging to the family Noctuidae.
A moth at the cross section alive in radar
the seen power in the density of electrical
field, all relative to the plume of the volants.
What are the modelled values, as such of the era?
Here are twenty three bees and wasps lost
to extinction in the last one hundred years,
those with specialist habitats worst hit.
The next slide is blank
The ‘merely apparent’ lost in the noise of data
that cannot be seen and for seen read read.
At the arrival of the end there is no time for
further long term study, only reinterpretation.
to establish the facts and apportion blame.
Or something else?
“You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
How faithful can this be to a prolate ellipsoid,
the indifference at large, all the time noting the rise
in pesticide use, the knock on effects to the insect
eating flycatcher, even as the Black Friday deals
measure out whole lives in a caffeinated plastic
of discarded spoons, “their sucking mouthparts,
composed of a long proboscis that coils
underneath the head when at rest”
By way of answer, she consumes:
eight weeks in preparation of
an anatomically correct specimen
model, gathering surface topologies
of a noctuid moth by micro-CT scan.
“We shall call him Bernard…”
Outside a doubling of pesticide
applications ensues and 20nm
of gold-palladium rains down
in pursuit of a Midas-like accuracy.
In preparation for the micro-CT scan, the specimen was pinned through the thorax and the wings spread.
What aspects of morphology make the
difference as we flicker in and out on each
other’s screens? If the size and the shape
are seen as accidental or as being of it,
there is a difference, a relationality
To improve the contrast of the wings, the dorsal surface of the specimen was coated with 20nm of gold-palladium using a Cressington Sputter Coater 208HR.
between parts. If the seeing is given over
to a process devised with military intent
then how can we take up the question of
the size of the scatterer, the incident of
scattering, the angle of radiation at large?
At voxal an array of doubt. Discrete
elements into which a representation of
a three-dimensional object is divided
and represented by way of digital mesh
where reality is not a crucial appearance
underlying the rest… the tightly knit system
formed by phenomena and my body together.
Only not my body or even a human one,
the thresholding and pin holes smoothed
the image, posed in positions of flight.
