The Art of Being an Insect

Insect Workers

Pestival insect workers come from all walks of life and corners of the earth, no stones are left unturned. Some are experts in their field, some are enthusiasts or hobbyists, others are cutting edge practitioners BUT one thing unites them all: a common cause – to represent the multifaceted world of insects in a collaborative and engaging way.

Insect bloggers

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  Bridget Nicholls

  Bridget Nicholls is the Director and Founder of Pestival. Known as a naturalist with a sense of humour, Bridget has combined her passion for ecology, love for animals and her mission for as many people as possible to engage with the natural world. She has worked for BBC2, The Discovery Channel, The Ecologist and BBC Radio 3 and 4. She and Pestival will be Artist-in-Residence at London Zoo, from 2010-2013. Awarded the first Art Fellowship of the Zoological Society of London, her mission is to develop an international zoo network whose aim will be to create new cross arts and science collaborations which engage with animals, the environment, insects and communities, as well as continuing to develop Pestival.

  http://pestival.org

  More details »

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  David Rothenberg

  David Rothenberg is Professor of Humanities at New Jersey Institute of Technology. A philosopher and musician, he is the author of Why Birds Sing, which has been published in seven countries. His articles have appeared in Parabola, Orion, The Nation, Wired, Dwell, Kyoto Journal, The Globe and Mail and Sierra. Rothenberg is also a composer and jazz clarinetist, and he has seven CDs out under his own name. His latest book is Thousand Mile Song, about making music with whales. He lives in Cold Spring, New York.

  http://www.davidrothenberg.net

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  Dr Matthew Cobb

  Dr Matthew Cobb is a Senior Lecturer in Animal Behaviour at the University of Manchester. He has studied insect behaviour for 30 years, and is particularly interested in the evolution of communication and perception and the way in which they are shaped by genes and the environment. He explored these themes in his book The Egg and Sperm Race: The Seventeenth-century Scientists Who Unravelled the Secrets of Sex, Life and Growth. His animal of choice is a fly maggot.

  http://z-letter.com

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  Ed Baker

  Ed Baker has had an interest in invertebrates, particularly stick insects and cockroaches, for as long as he can remember. Despite spending a few years in the wilderness studying physics he now works at the Natural History Museum, London on projects related to insects and biodiversity informatics. He also works for the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature.

  http://ebaker.me.uk

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  Ollie Palmer

  Ollie Palmer is a multi disciplinary designer. He runs Hoog Design and a collaborator with Open_Sailing. Besides design, he has travelled around the world, hitchhiked across Iceland, taught I.T. in the depths of the Amazon and plays with ants. He is a member of Unit 14 at the Bartlett School of Architecture and a Getty Images contributing photographer.

  http://www.olliepalmer.com

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Other collaborators

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  Amenity Space

  Amenity Space is a young creative architectural practice based in Hackney, East London. Qualified architects, Anthony Broomhead and Nicholas Kirk, established the practice at the start of 2007. Both partners have worked with some of the best architects in the UK and have experience of delivering important projects in this country and abroad.

  http://www.amenityspace.co.uk

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  Amoret Whitaker

  Amoret Whitaker, MSc DIC, is an Entomologist based at the Natural History Museum in London. In the past decade she has worked on various groups of insects including hoverflies, parasitic wasps and fleas, and her Handbook of British Fleas is soon to be published by the Royal Entomological Society.

  Whitaker has now swapped parasites of live animals for those living on dead and decaying ones, and is undertaking a PhD in Forensic Entomology. This mainly involves insect succession studies on stillborn piglets and laboratory studies breeding fly larvae, but has also involved field work in Knoxville, Tennessee in the USA to study the decomposition of human donor bodies and the associated insect fauna. She also works as a consultant to UK police forces, attending crime scenes and analysing insect evidence.

  http://www.nhm.ac.uk//research-curation/staff-directory/entomology/cv-3536.html

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  Andrew Hinton

  Andrew Hinton is a creative producer who has worked closely with director Paul Kelly and Saint Etienne on their film projects for the past 5 years. He was an artist in residence with them at Southbank Centre and continues to maintain a beehive on the roof of the Royal Festival Hall which featured in
  the most recent London Festival of Architecture. His recent projects include a series of short collaborations between composers and filmmakers for Channel 4, and four short films for the Tate in which spoken word artists respond to upcoming exhibitions.

  http://royalfestivalhive.typepad.com/

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  Ariane Koek

  Ariane Koek is passionate about the power of the imagination and creativity across disciplines. She's worked extensively throughout the BBC as an award winning producer in radio, and as director in television, going on to become CEO/Director of the Arvon Foundation for Creative Writing. Ariane was awarded a Clore Fellowship in 2009 supported by the Cultural Leadership Programme, and she is currently working on International Arts Development at CERN - the world's largest particle physics laboratory, in Geneva.####Ariane Koek is passionate about the power of the imagination and creativity across disciplines. She's worked extensively throughout the BBC as an award winning producer in radio, and as director in television, going on to become CEO/Director of the Arvon Foundation for Creative Writing. Ariane was awarded a Clore Fellowship in 2009 supported by the Cultural Leadership Programme, and she is currently working on International Arts Development at CERN - the world's largest particle physics laboratory, in Geneva.

  You can follow her work in arts and science at CERN on her blog, as well as on Twitter: BeautyQuark.

  http://wwwbeautyquark-beautyquark.blogspot.com

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  Beau Lotto

  Beau Lotto is neuroscientist at University College London. He has pioneered new ways of comparing, contrasting and uniting arts and science. Beau has written and lectured widely on the nature of perception; public works include an outdoor six-metre tower of glass, light and solar panels on one of east London’s most prominent streets, installation of light, glass and bees for the Science Gallery’s Lightwave in Dublin in 2008 and an exhibition of visual illusion for the Bristol Science Museum. By bridging the gap between the biological sciences, psychology, architecture and visual art, Beau’s work provides a platform for us to discover and question everyday notions of the natural world and our place within it.

  http://www.lottolab.org

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  Bob and Roberta Smith

  Bob & Roberta Smith, born in 1963 in London, invite us to question high art, and the role that aesthetic elitism has to play in society today. At the core of its practice Bob & Roberta Smith assert that art can and should be an essential tool in the democratic process. The means by which the artist explores this is through humour.

  Key to Bob & Roberta Smith’s practice is sign painting. These works take the form of absurd, faux-political or revolutionary-in-spirit slogans. They are painted on reclaimed timber, old bits of board, paper or rather more traditional canvas. The sentiments expounded are often hard hitting, sometimes stating the obvious, sometimes highly opinionated, and mostly very funny. Bob & Roberta Smith have had a number of solo shows including The Beautiful Poetry of Bob & Roberta Smith at the Hales Gallery, London (2005/6) and Help Build the Ruins of Democracy, Baltic (2005).

  http://bobandrobertasmith.zxq.net/

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  Chris Watson

  Chris Watson is one of the world's leading recorders of wildlife and natural phenomena, having invented ground breaking techniques for David Attenborough’s documentaries.

  http://www.chriswatson.net/

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  Christopher Bagot

  Christopher Bagot is a director of Softroom, an architecture and design practice based in central London. They have won numerous awards including their innovative Virgin Clubhouse at Heathrow.

  http://www.softroom.com/

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  Deborah M. Gordon

  Ant biologist Deborah M. Gordon has spent decades digging in the Arizona desert to decipher the chemical, genetic and behavioral codes of ant colonies. Contrary to the popular notion that colonies have evolved into efficient, organized systems, she has instead discovered that the long evolution of the ant colony has resulted in a system driven by accident, adaptation and the chaos and 'noise' of unconscious communication. Gordon, a Stanford professor, wrote the acclaimed book Ants at Work, outlining her discoveries in generous, nontechnical detail.

  http://www.stanford.edu/~dmgordon/

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  Dr James Logan and Dr Sarah Dewhirst

  Dr James Logan and Dr Sarah Dewhirst, scientists from Rothamsted Research, are dedicated to sorting out those pesky insect pests. They both have PhDs in entomology and they currently run a small group of scientists whose research involves finding new ways to control insects ranging from aphids on crop plants to malarial mosquitoes and bedbugs! As well as being dedicated scientists, they have an incredible passion for science communication.

  http://www.rothamsted.ac.uk/bch/PersonalWebpage/JamesLogan.html

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  Dr Olga Bogatyreva

  The focus of Olga Bogatyreva's current research is applying ideas of TRIZ (Theory of Inventive problem solving) to theoretical biology and biological ideas to engineering. Currently her team is working on a biological effects database – "patents" of Nature. They enrich TRIZ with biology and have developed their own natural problem solving tool for engineers. They conduct workshops for industry facilitating them for inventions and generating creative solutions for problems. ?Another area of research is on management in ant societies: the focus here is on self-organisation in complex living systems with abilities for decision-making. The book Social Synergetics is dedicated to this subject.

  http://people.bath.ac.uk/ensob/

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  Dr Rufus Cartwright

  Dr Rufus Cartwright is an Academic Clinical Fellow currently based at Imperial College London, having trained in medicine at Trinity College Cambridge, University College London Medical School, and King's College Hospital, London. He has kept bees for 5 years, both in and out of London.

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  Dr Rupert Soar

  Rupert Soar heads the highly publicised TERMES project, featured in Sir David Attenborough’s ‘Life in the Undergrowth’ series in November 2005. Rupert’s team of international experts, within the field of entomology, simulation, construction, physiology, as well as commercial sponsors and government organisations, are performing the world’s first full 3D digital scans of these massive termite mounds located in Namibia, South Africa. These structures hold the key to adaptive capabilities within our own homes through highly complex geometries and channels which impart homeostatic capabilities and regulation of internal mound environment to remarkably high tolerances. Having built and shipped the world’s largest slice and scanning machine to Namibia in summer 2005, the team now has a remarkable dataset from which simulation and modelling of homeostatic function is taking place. The geometric rules, which emerge, will then be reproduced, by the freeform construction machines, within the walls of our homes.

  http://www.sandkings.co.uk

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  Ed Baxter

  Programming director, Resonance104.4fm, community radio station. Having co-foounded and co-produced (with Phil England) the Resonance FM RSL in 1998 at John Peel’s Meltdown Festival, Ed was the main mover behind the establishment of this community radio station. It has broadcast 30,000 hours of original radio since its inception, involving thousands of contributors, mostly living musicians. He also founded the Resonance Radio Orchestra, a large radio-art ensemble which uses music, text, sound effects and acting to create works especially for radio. Baxtor's role in the Orchestra is to provide texts and direct this large ensemble of musicians, actors, sound-effects engineers etc and to commission music from a wide range of composers and improvisers.

  http://resonancefm.com/

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  Elaine Hughes

  Elaine Hughes is London Wildlife Trust's expert gardener, working across a range of projects and campaigns. She oversees the management and design of the wildlife gardens at the Centre for Wildlife Gardening (CWG) in Peckham (a Green Pennant Award winner 2008), and has had input into London Wildlife Trust's recently launched Wildlife Gardening campaign: Garden for a Living London. This campaign promotes the design and management of gardening for wildlife to mitigate against the potential impact of future climate change. Hughes also recently built a wildlife garden for the Trust at RHS Hampton Court 2008 which demonstrated that wildlife gardens can be beneficial to wildlife, sustainable and ornamental at the same time. She runs workshops and seminars at CWG on wildlife garden design and maintenance, is a judge for Westminster in Bloom and contributes regular gardening advice to London's Time Out magazine.

  http://www.wildlondon.org.uk/gardening

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  Gavin Crouch

  Gavin spent 10 years as a public and private sector consultant, at PA Consulting, before going walkabout in search of answers to business, consumers and the environment. Finding a few answers and a lot of questions, Gavin co-founded Just So Mobile, a mobile internet, messaging and marketing hub to connect people and information at the moment they decide. 

  http://www.justsomobile.com

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  Giovanni Aloi

  Giovanni Aloi is the Editor in Chief of Antennae, the Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. This innovative magazine combines a heightened level of academic scrutiny of animals in visual culture with a less formal and more experimental format designed to cross the boundaries of academic knowledge in order to appeal to divers audiences including academics as well as artists and general public alike.

  A point of reference of international relevance, Antennae will dedicate a whole issue to Pestival, including relevant essays and interviews with a selection of artists involved in the project.

  http://www.antennae.org.uk

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  Jane Wafer

  Jane Wafer first studied biology before turning to art as an alternative way to engage with the world. Her early interest in the natural world is still evident in her artwork which takes a wide variety of different forms. The large organic sculptures shown here are a reflection on change and transformation and were inspired directly by the lives of insects. They are made from paper mâché and other recycled materials. Their huge scale introduces an element of the uncanny, leading us to wonder what monsters might be about to hatch.

  http://www.janewafer.com

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  John Grant

  John Grant came up with Tweehive, Pestival's online outreach and campaign whereby thousands of people will role play being a bee colony for the day on Twitter. John was a co-founder of St Luke's (a socially aware ad agency) and is author of five books - his first was named by Amazon.com as 'one of the ten best business books of 1999' and The Green Marketing Manifesto won the Environmental category of the 2008 British Book awards. His new book is all about Co-operative Networks and Sustainability and he is totally fascinated by (rather than any kind of expert on) social insects.

  http://greenormal.blogspot.com/

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  John Gray

  John Gray is a prominent British philosopher and controversial author. Among his recent books are: Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals; Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions; Al Qaeda and What It Means To Be Modern; and Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. He writes and reviews regularly for The Guardian, The Independent, The Literary Review and The New York Review of Books.

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  Le Suisse Marocain

  An artist who, in keeping with the tradition of the unknown in the 'Old Masters' category calls himself 'Le Suisse Marocain'. His drawings, colleges, assemblages, installations and books are an organised interplay of reverence and exposure, persiflage and appropriation in the pursuit of art as the most unique of all human games. He is seldom to be seen without his umbrella, which serves as an art gallery. Deeply rooted in the Musee Igor Balut in Paris but constantly on the road, Le Suisse Marocain furnishes proof that even in the early 21st century playful masquerades and artistic authenticity are not mutually exclusive. The role he has chosen for this is that of the artist as clown.

  http://www.myspace.com/suissemarocain

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  Mark Cockram

  Elected Fellow of Designer Bookbinders in 2001 and Member of The Society of Designer Craftsmen in 2008.?Mark studied art and design at Lincolnshire College of Art, bookbinding at Guildford College of Technology (Diploma in Fine Bookbinding & Conservation), Japanese bookbinding and related subjects at 'Studio Livre' Tokyo and London College of Printing (B A (Hons) Book Arts and Crafts).
  He opened his first studio in Lincoln in 1992 and Studio Five, London in 2003. He works in fine contemporary bookbinding, book arts, printing and box art, teaching various aspects of bookbinding / book arts in Studio Five, the UK, France, USA, India and Japan.
  Mark's work is represented in public and private collections around the world.

  http://www.studio5bookbindingandarts.blogspot.com

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  Michael Pawlyn

  Michael Pawlyn was one of the lead architects behind the Eden Project in Cornwall. Treating nature as a blueprint, he believes there are huge gains to be made by learning from how the natural world works - especially in the effort to slow down the effects of climate change. Michael's work includes a carbon neutral method for regenerating waste, and a revolutionary power plant which mimics the Namibian fog-basking beetle's ability to create its own fresh water. Michael Pawlyn continues to represent Grimshaw as a Founder Member of the UK Green Building Council and is a member of The Edge, the environmental think tank.

  http://www.exploration-architecture.com

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  Natalie Jeremijenko

  Natalie Jeremijenko is an artist whose background includes studies in biochemistry, physics, neuroscience and precision engineering. Jeremijenko’s projects—which explore socio-technical change—have been exhibited by several museums and galleries, including the MASSMoCA, the Whitney, Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt.

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  Noboru Tsubaki

  Born in Tokyo, Tsubaki has worked in a number of media, including large-scale outdoor installation, interactive networked media, robotic sculpture, and community cultural projects. Originally a practitioner of minimal art, he faced the fall of modernism in the 1980s and began to work on huge objects, which have included a 110 foot long locust hanging off the side of the Yokohama Grand Intercontinental Hotel entitled Insect World. Tsubaki is the head of the Space Design Section at Kyoto University of Art and Design, Associate Professor of the Tezukayama Gakuin University, Faculty of Human and Cultural Studies,Osaka and Director at the Inter Medium Institute Osaka.

  http://unboy.org/

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  Robin Ince

  Robin Ince describes himself as "a comedian and writer and that sort of thing". Ince was also lead singer in alternative rock combo The Reg from 1992-1994, until he was dismissed for lack of musical talent.

  http://www.myspace.com/robinince

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  Robyn Hitchcock

  Robyn Hitchcock is an English singer-songwriter and guitarist. Coming to prominence in the late 1970s with The Soft Boys, Hitchcock afterward launched a prolific solo career. His lyrics are an essential component of his work and tend to include surrealism, comedic songs, characterisations of English eccentrics and melancholy depictions of everyday life. His themes include what many psychologists view as the roots of modern neurosis - namely, death, sex and eating. (Recognising this theme, he released an EP in 2007 called "Sex, Food, Death and Tarantulas".)

  http://www.robynhitchcock.com

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  Roger Highfield

  Roger Highfield was born in Wales, raised in north London and became the first person to bounce a neutron off a soap bubble. He has written half a dozen books, sat on a few committees and was the science editor of The Daily Telegraph for two decades. Today, he is the Editor of New Scientist.

  http://www.rogerhighfield.com/

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  Steve Conner

  Steven Connor is Professor of English at Birkbeck College London. He is also a writer and broadcaster, and the author of many books on literature and cultural history, including Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism, The Book of Skin and Fly.

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  Steve J Benbow

  Steve J. Benbow is a commercial bee-farmer managing over 750 hives throughout the UK producing a range of amazing mono-floral honeys.
  He started as an urban beekeeper, with bees on the roof of his ex Council flat in Bermondsey, London. He began by selling his honey at Borough Market and now looks after beehives in Piccadilly on the roof of Fortnum and Mason. His Company The London Honey Company also supplies London Restaurants with honey and services hives for several chefs. Steve Benbow does educational visits and bespoke seminars incorporating his work as a documentary film-maker.

  http://www.thelondonhoneycompany.co.uk

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  Susana Soares

  Susana Soares is Senior Lecturer at London South Bank University within the Department of Architecture and Design. She is also researcher fellow on the 'Material Beliefs' project, based in Goldsmiths University of London. Susana's most recent work aims develop collaborative relations between scientific research and design. She employs design, as a tool, to explore future technological implications for public engagement and awareness. Her projects have been shown in many exhibitions across Europe, USA and Japan and published internationally. Earlier this year, her work was exhibited in 'Design and the Elastic Mind' at Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by Paola Antoneli, becoming part of the permanent collection of the museum.

  http://www.susanasoares.com

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  Talkaoke

  Talkaoke consists of a doughnut shaped mobile table, hosted by a man in the middle with a microphone. Up to twelve people can sit around the table. Talkaoke is an active means of participation that is totally dependent on the context in which it is performed. There is no fixed agenda or expected outcome. Conversations are recorded for the on-line archive and can be webcast live.

  http://www.talkaoke.com

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  Tessa Farmer

  Tessa Farmer is an artist based in London. Her miniscule sculptures are constructed from bits of organic material, such as roots, leaves, and dead insects, and each of her figures stand barely 1cm tall, their painstakingly intricate detail visible only through a magnifying glass. Tessa’s tiny spectacles draw upon Victorian occultism, but they evolve further into something alien and futuristic. The worlds she creates are by no means twee, populated as they are by harnessed mayflies, battling honey bees, and malevolent spindly spiders.

  http://www.tessafarmer.com

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  Thomas Truax

  There's a fine line between the unique and the insane, and it's a line which New Yorker Thomas Truax (pronounced troo-aks) straddles with his chin held high and 'The Hornicator' firmly glued to his left ear. His collection of home made instruments look as though plucked straight from the mind of Tim Burton and are combined with loop pedals, guitars and lashings of imagination to create one of the most unusual and entertaining live shows you will ever see.

  http://www.thomastruax.com

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  Tim Knowles

  The exploration of Chance and Process is core to Tim Knowles' artistic practice. He explains: "Akin to scientific experimentation and investigation, the results of my projects [although operating within carefully developed controls and parameters] are unpredictable and outside my control. It is the wind, postmen, the motion of a vehicle, or players of a game that unwittingly determine the outcome. These drawings produced by the wind or in a vehicle, have a very unique and un-human quality and aesthetic. The viewer may try to decipher these varying marks, lines and patterns, in order to make certain conclusions, eg. the best courier, the weather conditions or the type of sport played."

  http://www.timknowles.com

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  Tue Greenfort

  Tue’s work is concerned with relating the human to the environment. Through his artwork, which is heavily politicized, he develops a natural and existential philosophy that recognizes the impact of human species on the ecosystem. He explains: “I see the question of our existence and the relationship between nature and culture as key. The very idea of a future progression – be it technical, cultural or in terms of how we treat other people – lays within our ability to expand our understanding of our position in this world.”

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