Tina O’Connell, Associate Professor in Art at the University of Reading, and Neal White, Professor of Art/Science at the University of Westminster, explain how artists and scientists are joining forces to save our nocturnal wildlife.
Who is afraid of the dark? Most of us it seems. Simply put, as humans we are either wary, naturally afraid, or conditioned culturally to be scared of the dark from a young age. Part of this cultural story relates to creatures of the night that appear in ghost or horror stories and films, of bats (vampires), or creepy crawlies.
But perhaps it’s the creatures of the night that should be afraid of us. The sad truth is that our nocturnal ecologies are under threat from anthropogenic noise – environmental disruption caused by humans. Our research explores and aims to address this eco-social issue through advancing cultural engagement with our shared habitats, whilst we sleep.
Beyond human perception
As research-led artists, working in academia, we have been exploring nocturnal ecologies through the lens of light pollution specifically. At the 2024 Hay Literary Festival, author Jeanette Winterson elegantly articulated a perspective that aligns to our thinking about reality and our relationship with darkness. When introducing a ghost story from her book “Night Side of the River”, she observed:
“Our ancestors accepted reality as layered both visible and invisible (and those that believe in a God continue to experience reality on different levels or that they believe they do). Humans can see less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum and we call this visible light. We can’t see radio waves, gamma rays, x-rays, ultra-violet light and we manage just fine. Our mistake is to rename visible light, what we can see, as reality. There is more out there than meets the eye.”
The reality of the night that interests us exists, as Winterson notes, beyond our limited human perception – we only see a fraction of human-made pollution that is all around us, but beyond our sensory reach. Humans impact the world with the sounds we make, the chemicals we release, and the artificial light we create. But while we might see or hear this disruption only sometimes, for other species the experience is overwhelming. According to the World Health Organization, noise is one of the most hazardous forms of pollution and is now widespread in water and land ecosystems.
“Millions of moons”
Over the last two years, we’ve consulted with experts about how insects sense and experience the world around them, while partnering with the Natural History Museum and zone2source, an arts organisation focused on ecology based in Amstelpark in Amsterdam. Our aim is to understand some key issues facing species that inhabit or share our own reality at night. As artists, we want to bring some light to the dark, but in a more acceptable form.
Herein lies the crux of the problem, the issue that underpins our methods. The facts are simple – scientists have estimated that there has been a 60% decline in winged insect population in Northern Europe since 2004. Many studies have linked winged insect decline to the spectrum of light we use in street lighting. The white LED light that is now commonly used floods habitats or creates rivers of light, creating isolated areas within cities and urban areas for nocturnal species. It blinds moths or interferes with their navigational systems. As Geoff Martin, a leading entomologist at the Natural History Museum, recently commented, “for moths there was only one Moon up to 150 years ago, and now there are millions”.
A message in light
So, what is to be done? Science as usual provides both the insights and a possible solution. The answer is simple – change a lightbulb to a spectrum which does less harm. Better options exist, and can be very easily implemented. The question is less “what is to be done?”, and rather “who cares enough to do it?”
As artists, we use visual tools, and in particular light, as the key medium of our message. It is the most visible medium to humans, and using basic equipment, can help us see or imagine how other living beings might perceive the nocturnal environment.
Using phone cameras and UV lights, we explore and document nocturnal worlds, linking scientists’ insights into the vision systems of other species with our own insights into the reality we inhabit. Our approach includes making art, films and installations, as well as giving talks about our work.
We are in the early stages of developing mobile nocturnal field labs, aiming to integrate with the National Education Nature Park programme in the UK, and working with Dutch organisations exploring the future of urban planning and identifying where we see best practice. This includes the Swiss Federal Railway (SBB) – in the 2024 World Biodiversity Forum in Davos, we listened to Andreas Heller’s aims to convert the entire network to ecologically friendly lighting at night. Practically, it also includes highlighting this work with you, the reader, to ask – “how hard is it to change a lightbulb in your garden, or ask to change lighting on your street?”
Our work bridges art and science to advocate for what matters to both fields: the recognition that other species deserve consideration in how we design our world. Ecological breakdown is happening throughout our complex ecologies, impacting all levels of life and concerning individuals across nearly all disciplines. Our role is to address this by making art using methods developed during extensive nocturnal fieldwork, that in part highlights other realities, and brings together disciplinary insights towards mobilising action. Here we speak to everyone as citizens of the planet, who live in shared habitats with other species.
It is not the night that we fear, but a silent night, free of nature. This fear is motivational, and our role is clear – to imagine and visualise for others an adjustment towards a future that is kinder to our nocturnal wildlife, and to work with schools and other partners to enable children as stewards of this alternative future. Out of sight is not out of mind.
To find out more about our research, read our visual essay for the Journal of Cultural Politics; “A Multispecies Red Light District for Amsterdam”.