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Ursula Damm/Birgit Brüggemeier: In the Language of the Flies

February 2020

Authors:

Ursula Damm

Bauhaus-Universität Weimar

Birgit Popp

Fraunhofer IIS

The artist Ursula Damm and the neuroscientist Birgit Brüggemeier talk about interspecies communication between humans and flies. Flies and people share habitats, but there is hardly any communication. Birgit Brüggemeier studied the song and dance of flies in her doctoral thesis and communicated with flies in experimental set-ups. Ursula Damm was inspired by this research and created Drosophila Karaoke Bar, where visitors can experience communication with flies.

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Ursula Damm/Birgit Brüggemeier: In the Language

of the Flies

A conversation with

Peter Tepe

| Section:

Interviews

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there is hardly any communication. Birgit Brüggemeier studied the song and dance of ﬂies in

her doctoral thesis and communicated with ﬂies in experimental set-ups. Ursula Damm was

inspired by this research and created

Drosophila Karaoke Bar

, where visitors can experience

communication with ﬂies.

The installation

Drosophila Karaoke Bar

–

Drosophila

is the Latin name for the genus ﬂies

belong to – results from a collaboration between the artist Ursula Damm and the

neuroscientist Birgit Brüggemeier. Cooperations of this kind are important for w/k. The aim

of this interview is to explore this type of collaboration as precisely and comprehensively as

possible and to investigate the artistic concept on which the installation is based, in order to

enable a deeper understanding of this art form.

Ursula Damm (D)/Birgit Brüggemeier (B): We are open to this.

Ursula Damm:

Drosophila Karaoke Bar

at MoMuseum Vilnius (2019). Photo: Ursula Damm.

It would be good to start with a description: What can you see – among other things – in the

installation?

B: The ﬁrst thing that strikes me is a large heap of sand, in which, when I get closer, I

discover a framed wooden box. There is a wooden footbridge that leads me into the pile of

sand to the box. Once there, I can take a look inside the box with an open hatch and I see

devices: a camera, four microphones and a loudspeaker. There is a ﬂat, round glass bowl

under the camera, which is ﬁlled with a gold-brown mass. This mass consists of corn ﬂour,

yeast and water, which is food for ﬂies. From a distance, the ﬂies appear like black dots on

the gold-brown surface. I can see their wings, eyes and legs up close. They gather on the

food and ﬂy around in the box.

Ursula Damm:

View into the ﬂy box of the installation

(2019). Photo: Rytis Seskaitis.

Ursula Damm:

The ﬂies in the focus of the camera

(2019). Photo: Rytis Seskaitis.

When I step back from the box and look around, I see a screen with a live transmission of the

ﬂies on their food. The four microphones are also in the picture and concentric circles

appear and vanish around them – following a principle that cannot be understood

immediately. There is a microphone stand in front of the screen, and headphones are

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waveform of what I have said on the screen. When I growl loudly, it seems like the ﬂies are

reacting and forming chains that look like conga lines. I hear more buzz and hum from the

ﬂies. Then I take off the headphones.

Next to the screen is a tablet that shows a video, in which I explain the installation. I’m

talking about ﬂy song, ﬂy chaining – the dance of the ﬂies that they dance when they hear

ﬂy song. I explain that when visitors speak into the microphone, their words are translated

into ﬂy song. This is done by extracting amplitude structure, i.e. by the ups and downs of

volume in speech and replacing the speech waveform with ﬂy song recordings. The

installation is intended to create an opportunity to enter the world of ﬂies, to communicate

with them.

Ursula Damm:

Schematic layout of the installation

(2019) Photo: Ursula Damm.

Before we turn to your joint project, I would like to know how it came about. When and how

did you start to collaborate?

B: In September 2016, I received an email from Ursula, in which she told me about her

artistic work on swarms of mosquitoes, which I loved. A few months before, I had given a

lecture on fruit ﬂies at the Free University of Berlin that Ursula had heard of. This is how we

came together: Ursula found someone in me who was enthusiastic about the behaviour and

sounds of insects, and I found someone with an artistic perspective on my research and a

continuing interest in it.

Before we take a closer look at your collaboration that resulted in

Drosophila Karaoke Bar

, I

ask Birgit Brüggemeier to summarize the most important results of her ﬂy research, which

have been incorporated into the installation, brieﬂy and as generally as possible.

B: In my doctoral thesis

Is Drosophila song amplitude structure a communication signal?

submitted at the University of Oxford in 2017, I study ﬂy courtship song. Researchers

investigate ﬂy song to understand basic neuronal and muscular processes that ﬂies and

humans have in common. Flies court to reproduce, and typically the males produce a song by

vibrating with one of their two wings as they dance around the female. It is up to the female

to decide whether she wants to mate or would rather run or ﬂy away. In my work, I describe

Song Amplitude Structure (SAS) in fruit ﬂy song as a factor that ﬂies use to make decisions

about whether they want to reproduce. While working on my dissertation, together with two

engineers, I built a machine that makes ﬂy song audible, a

ﬂy song box

. This enabled me to

record the barely audible song of fruit ﬂies. Fly song has been studied by scientists for over

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beats on a drum, while sine is quieter than pulse and sounds like a noisy sinus tone.

In my doctoral thesis, I show that amplitude, the ups and downs in the volume, of ﬂy song is

a communication signal. I prove that ﬂies are able to perceive minimal changes in volume. In

addition, my research shows for the ﬁrst time that SAS is species-speciﬁc, i.e. different ﬂy

species produce consistent patterns.

Females of a species can tell from the singing of the males whether they belong to their

species. I also found that male ﬂies also react to SAS. In my research, I worked with ﬂy

chaining, the dance of ﬂies. This unusual behaviour was ﬁrst described by Daniel Eberl in

1997. Chaining is based on homosexual courtship behaviour: a group of male ﬂies creates a

kind of conga line, because every male in the group courts the ﬂy male in front of them.

My next question addresses the artist: What did you take up from Birgit’s research, and how

did the concept for

Drosophila Karaoke Bar

evolve?

D: Initially I was impressed that Birgit’s research showed that ﬂies communicate. They seem

to have some kind of language, and if they had no memory they would not be able to

communicate. Birgit was able to tell me about ﬂy song codes. These were codes that I was

not aware of and they were different from the type of codes I already knew about, like codes

in a computer or genetic code of our species (DNA). There are correlations between sound

and meaning in ﬂy language.

But it would be wrong to present our dialogue as limited to these simple facts. What

fascinated me most was Birgit’s sensitive observations of fruit ﬂies, which she articulated in

descriptions of highly complex social behaviour. She allowed me insights into a new cosmos.

Have you previously worked with insects?

D: Yes, I have indeed. My ﬁrst experience was with non-biting midges (chironomids). These

midges swarm, and you see them in swarms on mild summer evenings. I was fascinated by

the coordinated behaviour of these small creatures, which is still not fully understood, and

thus I began to work artistically with insects. This resulted in the artworks

Double Helix

Swing

The Outline of Paradise

and

Insect Songs

I experience fruit ﬂies quite differently: They are not simply coordinated, i.e. uniform in a

swarm and hence subordinate to a recognizable rule (which we can describe with a swarm

algorithm), but they are highly individual, even cultivating friendships, which results in

rather chaotic behaviours, which makes them lovable in a completely different way.

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D: That’s true. For a long time, as an artist, I worked exclusively with computers and was

occupied with sets of rules and algorithms. Now I wanted to explore environments,

situations, habitats: How do the habitats, i.e. the physical/geographical/biological

environments and spheres of survival of humans and ﬂies overlap? Where and why do we

encounter each other? Do we have meaning for one another in our respective worlds?

Inspired by the writings of Jakob von Uexküll, I investigated how a form of sensual coupling

of animal and human spheres of experience can be achieved beyond the boundaries of

species-speciﬁc “Umwelts”. Meeting Birgit led me to singing – of people and of ﬂies.

Fly songs sound less like singing than conﬁdential or intimate conversation. Sine song

sounds like a mixture of sighing and “Hmmm”, pulse song reminds me of excited chatter. In

reference to Birgit Bruggemeier’s dissertation on the ups and downs in the volume of ﬂy

song phrases, we have used a vocoder that modulates the human voice with the envelope of

the singing of the ﬂy (a vocoder is a device – in our case a software – with which any (text)

information is modulated so that it sounds as speech).

The visitor in the exhibition needs a while to understand these sounds, which is why we are

currently thinking about an additional interface (i.e. a technical structure to facilitate

communication) – as well as a visualization of ﬂy song and – to improve the previously used

vocoder – its translation by software that can imitate voices via artiﬁcial intelligence.

Did you incorporate

chaining

of ﬂies, which was mentioned by Birgit earlier, in your artistic

work?

D: Yes, I was actually particularly intrigued by ﬂy chaining. Science still has no explanation

for this behaviour of male ﬂies. We can explain their eating and mating behaviour, even their

singing has a necessity. Chaining, on the other hand, immediately leaves the impression of a

cheerful, funny frolic. The chains of ﬂies look like processions, forming when excitement

increases.

Ursula Damm:

Drosophila during Chaining

(2019) Photo: Toshihiro Kitamoto (top), Birgit Brüggemeier

(bottom).

Have you gained particular insights into chaining?

D: I gained insights especially when observing responses to our karaoke. If you sing

repeatedly to ﬂies with our vocoder voice, they become stimulated, and start to chain.

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ﬂies’ behaviour, e.g. with a ﬂy tracker, and examine their activity levels over time. A ﬂy

tracker is a special video tracking software, which is optimized to record the movement

traces of ﬂies.

Ursula Damm:

Screenprint of the installation

(2018) Photo: Ursula Damm.

What stays with visitors after experiencing

Drosophila Karaoke Bar

D: The installation shows that ﬂies and humans live in different worlds and have limited

awareness of each other. After all, ﬁve cubic meters of sand are necessary to attenuate

outside noises of human civilization and make ﬂy song audible to us. Flies are known as

synanthrope (species that follow humans): They choose to follow humans because we collect

the fruit that fruit ﬂies like to eat. Is there something in the song of ﬂies that makes it

interesting for us to follow ﬂies as well? Not only Birgit and I have answered this question

with “yes”, hundreds of scientists have also become fruit ﬂy followers in a certain sense, for

example when they research genetic diseases (which occur in fruit ﬂies in a similar way to

humans) or when they do brain research. Thus, a great many people look at themselves and

our civilization through the eyes of the knowledge we have acquired from fruit ﬂies.

My next question refers to a passage from the w/k report by Irene Daum and Moritz Niehues

on the current Biennale

: “A thematic focus of the Research Pavilion is the relationship

between art and biology. In the project

Insect Karaoke

sounds produced by insects are

presented and visitors are asked to imitate and interpret them using contact microphones. In

connection to this, Tuula Närhinen exhibits on the subject of

Entomological Encounters

.” Is

your collaboration between an artist and a scientist connected to similar science-art

constellations?

While Tuula Närhinnen and Tytti Arola refer to a scientist’s publication from 1952, our

cooperation is based on current ﬁndings by Birgit personally. Furthermore, there are also

differences in terms of content: Närhinnen and Arola carry out an aesthetic evaluation of the

different insect sounds. In contrast, we are concerned with attempting to enable an aesthetic

experience in the installation itself and leave the evaluation to the visitor. In order to obtain

a coupling of communication between insects and humans, we modify the real-time acoustic

signals of people with a vocoder so that ﬂies can perceive them; in this way, we enable ﬂies

to react to human sounds, thereby creating the possibility of a certain form of understanding.

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Instead of dealing with insect sounds in an atmospheric, metaphorical interpretation by the

artist, we try to mediate by providing immediate, repeated and mutual feedback. That’s what

is new for me about our installation. Even if the aesthetics of sounds is and remains the

leitmotif, it is also about irritation and breaking of listening habits in order to expand the

sphere of our (aesthetic) understanding.

How did you develop your working method, and what discourses do you take up?

The ﬁrst artwork in this context was

Sustainable Luminosity

, an integral part of

The outline

of paradise.

Sustainable Luminosity

we propose swarms of self-luminescent mosquitoes

as illuminated advertising. The question was: Is it possible to teach mosquitoes to swarm in

the form of letters? With this speculative art project we wanted to investigate whether there

was a scientiﬁc basis that would make such a product possible. In a performance that took

place in 2010, we formed a group of nine people, blindfolded ourselves and experimented

with how often we had to clap our hands until our group could form a letter. We found that

we were successful with four claps: The clapping enabled us to locate our neighbours and

position ourselves in the middle of the group.

Sustainable Luminosity

was shown at

Elements of Art & Science

in the Ars Electronica Center (Linz) in 2015.

Ursula Damm:

Screenprint of Sustainable Luminosity

(2012). Photo: Ursula Damm.

03:00

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explore the song of swarming chironomid midges (Chironomus riparius), which are used as

model organisms in Ecotoxicology. In a studio environment we experienced their ability to

respond to our music.

Normally we cannot hear the faint sounds of non-biting midges. Only when they swarm they

cross our perceptional threshold with their collective singing. In a feedback situation, we

ampliﬁed the sounds of a swarm by using traditional studio technology to adapt the insects’

sounds to our senses in order to better understand their messages.

Ursula Damm:

The midge box during the performance

(2017). Photo: Ursula Damm.

In a ﬁrst performance, we discovered that Christina Meissner was able to stimulate lethargic

mosquitoes to intensive swarming with her cello by playing stimulating sounds. We were

thrilled to discover that it is so easy to blend into the cosmos of mosquitoes as humans;

swarming took place in dialogue.

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Ursula Damm:

Simultaneous performance of mosquito and chello player

(2017). Photo: Ursula Damm.

How did you handle this in detail?

To aid understanding, we visualized the behaviour of midges and, using software (a

difference ﬁlter, combined with technically standardized video tracking), we drew continuous

tracks of the midges. This visualization shows changes in the speed and direction of midges

in real time to make it easier to recognize their reactions to cello playing. It was our

aesthetic decision to use only one basic technology and instead to motivate the audience to

pay attention to the quiet sounds of midges in peace. The work consists of the performance,

but needs a simulated habitat for the mosquitoes. They are bred in a box with water, light

and air conditioning.

This installation, similar to

Drosophila Karaoke Bar

, aims to highlight the different

environments, i.e. “Umwelts” in the sense of Jakob von Uexküll’s biosemiotic concept. There

is now a lively international discourse on interspecies communication, of which I would like

to mention here only Heather Barnett’s article

Being Other Than We Are…

She speaks of

“embodied modes of inquiry” and of practices of a “shared experience” in which one is on the

threshold of another kind of knowledge. With our installation

Drosophila Karaoke Bar

add further practical experiments to these discourses: we focus on ways of (natural) self-

expression of animal and human, search for intersections of our perception window and

spheres of common interest, and enable the open-ended feedback of an interaction. We are

less concerned with being or becoming an animal ourselves, but rather with forming a new

common sphere of experience.

Birgit Brüggemeier, Ursula Damm, thank you for this productive conversation.

Picture above the text: Ursula Damm:!

Drosophila Karaoke Bar

!at MoMuseum Vilnius (2019).

Photo: Ursula Damm.

Further Informationen

▷ About:!

Ursula Damm

!&!

Birgit Brüggemeier

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▷ About Tuula Närhinen!

Insects among us

Epistemic Bugs at Worldmaking

!(2020,

forthcoming)

▷!

WING BEATS – a Karaoke Booth for Insects

Biology

Birgit Brüggemeier

ﬂy research

Peter T

science-related art

Ursula Damm

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Ursula Damm/Birgit Brüggemeier: In the Language of the Flies

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