Platonic Insect Trap
Insect in this year’s essay can be seen as an allegory for idea. They are both often quite elusive. The Platonic Insect Trap helps us capture them. Our formal larva grows from the phenomena that three golden sections can be perfectly inscribed into an icosahedron. The folly is a recursive structure using sacred geometry as the generative engine. Placing three of these platonic solids into a larger icosahedron reinforces this nod to the infinite and spatially symbolizes how divine proportions work on every scale. From here, the shapes are tilted and cut to make the golden planes function as backlit display panels for our squashed friends projected on the floor. While last year’s whorl sought to demonstrate issues of scale on a nearly telescopic level, this year’s trap shows us similar truths relating to the nearly microscopic level. Though bugs are visible to the naked eye, a flatbed scanner was used as our microscope, allowing us to see the rich detail inherent at even that scale. It captures time by recognizing motion as chromatic aberration, as seen in June’s bugs, which were some of the few actually scanned alive. The scans are superimposed onto strongly backlit straight photographs of an asphalt parking lot. They inhabit the scale of our world like stain-glass imaginations. The scale of the erosion on the lot is abstracted by its extreme specular nature. By framing different scales of perception in this way, we can begin to perceive many dimensions simultaneously. This experience becomes the inspiration for trapping even more elusive creatures.
