the detour.

PROJECT LAVOS · MERIAN · AUDUBON · HAECKEL · FLORA · FAUNA · FOWL · MMXXVI

Specimens 045 through 049 stayed on the discipline's main road — the chord, the score, the étude, the molt, the period. This page leaves it. A living naturalist's plate after Maria Sibylla Merian's Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (1705), Audubon's Birds of America (1827), Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur (1899) — but moving. A meadow rendered in WebGL2; wildflowers blooming and fading; butterflies and fireflies adrift; a bird, occasionally, crossing the field; an ambient soundscape with FM birdsong and a low forest-air pad. Diverticulum. The side road. Off the path, the world is alive.

— Plate L · The living naturalist's plate · live — webgl2 · tone.js · flora · fauna · fowl

DIVERTICULUM · L

LIVE · MEADOW

SOUND · OFF · CLICK PLAY

— · — —

FLORA · ENTOMOLOGY Maria Sibylla Merian 1647 — 1717 · Frankfurt → Suriname Painted insects on the flowering plants they pollinated, in their actual life-cycle stages. Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (1705) — at sixty, alone, in a tropical colony. The first to document metamorphosis in the field.

FOWL · ORNITHOLOGY John James Audubon 1785 — 1851 · Haiti → America Painted every bird species in North America at life size. The Birds of America (1827–1838) — 435 hand-colored plates, double-elephant folio. Each bird drawn from a freshly killed specimen, posed mid-motion with ferocious accuracy.

FAUNA · MORPHOLOGY Ernst Haeckel 1834 — 1919 · Jena Kunstformen der Natur (1899–1904) — 100 plates of radiolarians, jellyfish, orchids, beetles. Drew biology as if it were architecture. The plates are still in print; their patterns reappear in everything from Art Nouveau ironwork to twentieth-century fabrics.

The illustrated naturalist's plate is the original synthesis specimen. Flora, fauna, fowl, on one page. Merian put the caterpillar on the leaf it ate; Audubon painted the warbler with the moth in its beak; Haeckel arranged a hundred sea-creatures into one symmetrical composition. The plate is the world, framed.

This page is that plate, alive. The flowers bloom on a slow schedule; the fireflies pulse; the bird visits; the ambient pad breathes. None of it follows the discipline of the studies series. It's a side road — diverticulum — a place to turn off the main route for a moment. The discipline returns next specimen. This one is the meadow.

everything that grows, sings.

The flora. The fauna. The fowl. The pad behind them. A meadow at golden hour, in a browser tab. Diverticulum.

— § VI · Motion · Detour —

Plate L · MMXXVI

projectlavos-bauhaus · 050