Mapping the Unseen

Tae Lee

Birth and Death

A birth and death experiment.

For my final project, I will be constructing a cage for butterfly (or a silkworm) cocoons that will be installed around the cheery mall of the Power Plant Live, Inner Harbor. The cage will be made of plexi-glass or window screen. Inside the cage, you will see a semi-natural environment for these creatures.

There will be three webcams set up around this installation. One webcam will be inside of the cage observing the birth of these beautiful creatures in their "natural" habitat. Another webcam will be set up outside of the cage shooting the pile of dead butterflies on the bottom, capturing the death of these creatures. The third will be more of a security cam where it overlooks the whole installation and the people around it. If I let them know, maybe vandalizes would respect my project al little more. And these can be seen online. As the viewer, you can either watch these innocent insects die trying to get out of my plexi-glass cage or you can save them by opening a hatch online.

Therefore, my evil scheme of mass murder of these insects won‚t seem too cruel. Depending on the range of the wireless network, I could get closer to the nearest park where I could set up a cage on a real life tree. Or even reach the holocaust memorial. As we discussed in class, it wouldn‚t be such a bad idea to display such a cruel installation in front of such a serious subject (holocaust memorial). My goal is to makes this project controversial as I can. As far as the interaction with the viewer, one has to go online in order to save these creatures. Depending on what kind of gadgets I could get my hands on, the viewer could physically open a hatch to save the trapped butterflies. So far, I have no clue how to go about that, but worse comes to worse, I‚ll just have a lock and the viewer could go online and find out the combination to open the hatch. This part will progress as I construct the cage. I will be recording my progress in my journal.