Now Streaming in Austin: "Bug Filter"

"Bug Filter," the online experience created by UT Austin architecture students to explore the world through other, non-human eyes

Welcome to Now Streaming in Austin, highlighting locally made titles to watch while self-quarantining.
For a lot of parents trying to teach their kids at home right now, it may seem like screen time is a stressful distraction from learning. But not if their young students are viewing the world through Bug Filter.

Looking at a bee, you know that they see the world differently to us. Those complex eyes, that difference in scale, the cues they catch that are beyond our comprehension. Bug Filter gives us a chance to explore and understand the world from their viewpoint.

The one-hour video from students at the University of Texas School of Architecture started as a proposed installation for last weekend's Fusebox Festival. The plan was for students, working with UTSOA Materials Lab, to create filters that would allow viewers to see the world as insects do – specifically the pollinators of Central Texas. They would make casts using hempcrete, a concrete substitute using the woody core of the hemp plant and a lime-based binder. Some environmentalists see the potential ecological gains of this material as being huge, since not only does it increase hemp production (which would boost bee populations) but also hempcrete locks away carbon dioxide, and could have a positive impact on global climate change.

Unfortunately, the global coronavirus pandemic meant Fusebox had to go online. Fortunately, so has Bug Filter.

The installation has now become a video, a view (or rather views) of a meadow. Then it's seen through each of a series of filters, each breaking down an aspect of what bees see – different parts of the spectrum, polarized light – and how they see it through those compound eyes. The students also explain how they created these filters, making this not simply a class in entomology and optics, but also engineering and material physics. On top of that rounded curriculum that you can work through with your kids, it's also really, really pretty.

Congrats to Abigail Kash, Anna Henry, Baxter Estes, Elena Lyra, Elizabeth Cooper, Grace Esslinger, Hannah Harden, Lisa Yang, Marjan Miri, Michelle Huh, Nai’lah Bell, Natalie Avellar, Paola Hernandez, Payton Russell, and Taylor Schill, and assistant professor Nerea Feliz for this remarkable work, and still finding a way to bring it to audiences during this time of lockdown.

"Bug Filter"

• YouTube (Link)