Flights of Fancy
Entomologist Adrian Smith has captured the art of what it takes to take off.
By Eleanor Spicer Rice ’03, ’12 PHD
Most of us swat away a whining mosquito or buzzing fly without a glance. But Adrian Smith, research assistant professor in biological sciences at NC State and the head of a research lab at N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences, wants you to pay closer attention. He films entomological aeronautics as works of art, and now, in a collaboration with Spanish artist Xavi Bou, Smith creates visual pieces that reveal the beauty and diversity of insect flight.
Smith came to the museum to head the evolutionary biology and behavior research lab in 2016. Soon after he arrived, he began taking slow-motion videos of insect flight to expose the complex magnificence of our daily lives. “One of the first flight videos I did was male ants flying. I wanted to see what it looked like,” he says. “If I have access to tools to see the world in a different way, and what I’m seeing is astonishing to me, good chance it’s astonishing to other people, too.”
Smith puts his videos on YouTube and Instagram, and he also is working with a flip book company to turn his flight videos into experiences that each person can hold in their hand. He’d already filmed roughly 100 species when Bou contacted him with a request to collaborate. Bou, known for his visual poetry pieces, photographically captures natural phenomena, like the patterns traced by bird murmurations in the sky.
Smith films the insects at up to 6,000 frames per second, and Bou works backward from those sequences to compile the frames. “The resultant image is his creation from those frames,” says Smith. “He doesn’t manipulate the position or the image at all.”
Bou transformed Smith’s videography into a single still image for each species. Each image reveals the twists and ripples made by bodies in flight. They look like fireworks, flowers or colorful neckties. And to Smith, Bou’s images are a meeting place between the human experience and his own creations. “The images are in between how we normally experience insects as blurs of motion and how I usually film insects to make them make sense to us visually.”
