Team:Weimar-Heidelberg Arts/Project/Sutainable-luminousity

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Natural midges (chironomidae) form swarms with the shape of a circulating sphere. The swarms consists of male adults congregating for courtship. They are organized through the sound of the wingbeats of the male midges. Our system uses the sensitivity of chironomidae for sound and organize them with synthetic wing beat sound.
above: Fly pahts of wild type chironomidae
right: Sound system for the neuronal training of the midges

"what happens, if nature is becoming a mirror of our culture?"

Product Description

'Sustainable Luminosity' takes your advertising message and delivers it using the medium of glowing insects. We train non-biting midges (Chironomidae) to fly in a way that their swarm takes the shape of your advertisement message. The insects are genetically modified to glow in the dark and alter their genetic make-up according to the training and sound input we provide. This initial training will be inherited over generations and keeps the swarm in shape.

Keep your energy bill low and be good to the environment - the natural light source we use is unchallenged by any man-made alternative to date and won’t disturb other animals. 'Sustainable Luminosity' provides cheap and sustainable advertisement with a natural charm.

Technical Description

Our midges are genetically modified to glow in the dark and trained to form into letters in small groups in response to spatial sound treatment. After the completion of complex training units, the midges learn to fly in the shape of the requested letter. Once this ability is acquired it will last and be passed on to following generations.

How can Letters be tought to insects? How can we teach the alphabet to midges? As chironommidae are sensitive to sound, we use a real-time sound spatialisation system to teach the midges. Until now we are only able to produce clouds of midges forming a simple LED Font

Midges are sensitive to sounds within the range of the wing beat of their species. This sounds are normally ± 50 Hz around the specific frequence. To teach midges the alphabet, letters are coded with nine different sounds withing this range. Through the spatial placement of the loudspeakers midges learn to react in a certain manner to polyphonic tones by memorizing sound frequencies and the letter-related collective behaviour of their swarm.