Insect populations worldwide are experiencing a meaningful decline caused by habitation loss, extreme weather changes, pollution and other environmental factors. Insects in the Anthropocene exist in complex systems, entangled with humans, plants, other-species and organic-matter. They are vulnerable to ecological changes and are involved in almost every part of the terrestrial environment and have been for millions of years.

Throughout Western history, at times of change, flux and transformation, artist examine the natural world and address these unstable and complicated relations. From 17th century naturalist illustrations to contemporary bio-mechanical installations, these are moments when disciplines collide, understandings of the natural world expand and artists offer new tools to make sense of ecological crisis and planetary change. By extension, this effort also questions what it means to be human.

This paper focuses specifically on moths and explores the ways artists engage with the biological process of metamorphosis in pupal stage, and the related concepts of transformation and symbiosis. A number of artists working at the intersection of science and art approach moths in imaginative and intimate ways. This paper addresses how artists imagine transformation and plant-moth symbiosis through interdisciplinary art practice. Primary case studies for this paper include, Maria Sybilla Merian’s  Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium  and The Wonderous Transformation of Caterpillars 1705, Tomás Saraceno, How to Entangle the Universe in a Spider Web, 2017, Anicka Y, Biologising the Machine (tentacular trouble), 2019,  Mire Lee, Carriers 2020 and Robert Hooke Flea, 1664. 

The diverse stories told about moths in popular culture, art history, biology and literature are evidence of moths being both real and imagined – figurations. The small and often un-regarded world of moths is a valuable point of research and an existing line of artistic inquiry.

This research paper is framed by wider debates on the Anthropocene and the role of art in the Anthropocene. Including by theorists such as Anna Tsing who proposes methods of understanding human-nature relations in terms of interspecies complexities and dependencies, Donna Haraway who emphasises story-telling and ‘staying with’ non-human actors and The Extinction Studies Group’s call for a ‘witnessing’ of the dramatically changing world and its inhabitants. 

Artistic imaginings of moths, with moths provide valuable contributions to inter-species thinking and offer ways of living on a damaged planet, understanding human-ness and finding hope in loss. 

In 1847 (two years before Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species and a quarter century before The Descent of Man), gorillas enter the western scientific record, in a paper by Thomas Savage and Jeffries Wyman entitled, “Notice of the External Characters and Habits of Troglodytes Gorilla, a New Species of Orang from the Gaboon River,” published in the Boston Journal of Natural History. The bulk of the paper, as suggested by its title, comprises physical descriptions, and the authors go into tedious detail about the various shapes and measurements of their subject animals' bones and skull. Peppered throughout, though, are acknowledgments of and disavowals of African people’s claims and understandings regarding the kinship of “orangs” and humans. Savage and Wyman go out of their way to disclaim what they call “[t]he silly stories about their carrying off women from the native towns,” as well as the “natives’” belief that the “orangs” are in fact “human beings, members of their own race, degenerated. . . The majority,” they aver, “fully believe them to be men, and seem to be unaffected by our arguments in proof of the contrary.” Such stories enter the western popular imagination through such works as Paul du Chaillu’s Adventures and Explorations in Equatorial Africa (1861), and reemerge in twentieth-century popular culture touchstones including Tarzan of the Apes (1914) and King Kong (1933). How might considering how these claims to kinship and Western scientists’ resistance to them help us rethink our own understanding of the relationships of human and non-human primates? How in turn might engaging with the history of these idea’s persistence in popular media lead us to rethink the role of narratives human/non-human intimacies and violence in the Western popular imagination?

 One of the grimmest figures for ecological hope and collapse in Blade Runner 2049 (2017) appears as Officer K stumbles upon an unlikely apiary in the ruins of Las Vegas. Honeybees cluster on feeders suspended from an intravenous drip stand or buzz in apparent disorientation through thick red air. When K’s hand becomes covered by bees, he regards it with no emotion beyond mild curiosity. This scene plays out for less than two of the minutes of an almost three-hour film, and the bees are not explicitly referred to again. What, then, do they mean?  

Earlier iterations of Blade Runner (1982; 1992) explore a set of fundamentally Enlightenment-era questions about materiality, mentality and the human. In Blade Runner 2049, the earlier films’ revelation that machines are capable of putatively human, supposedly mental modes – empathy, anger, moral reasoning ­- is old news; that Nexus-9 replicants like Officer K can feel is taken for granted. Instead, K worries about a personhood that he believes to be contingent not on the possession of mental properties or feeling but of biological relationship. His search for evidence of his own biological origins plays out alongside the film’s representations of technologized, denatured organic material. 2049 updates the original Blade Runner’s questions about the materiality of personhood by asking instead if a person, or indeed any organism, can have a meaningful existence outside of its ecological relations. The honeybees that K encounters illustrate a possible answer to this question: without plants, they mill incoherently in the dusty air. 

In the second half of this paper, I turn to two nineteenth-century books about pollinating insects to show how understandings of bees’ ecological relationships have travelled alongside or against mechanistic understandings of these insects. The first of these books is John Evans’ poetic natural history, The Bees (1806); Evans understood the role of flowers in honey production but did not know of the role of honeybees in plant pollination. The second is Charles Darwin’s Fertilisation of orchids (1862), a landmark study in pollination ecology that argues for the co-adaptation of pollinating insects and insect-pollinated flowers. Reading these two works against Blade Runner 2049, I tease out the genealogy of ideas about bees, ecology and a more-than-mechanistic mode of material being, and consider how a small stand of pollinating insects with nothing to pollinate stuck in a post-apocalyptic Las Vegas might symbolise K’s tentative reach for personhood.