With Peter Torpey
Bibliodoptera was a 2011 installation commissioned for the MIT 150th Anniversary Celebration FAST Festival of Art, Science, and Technology. A cloud of vellum butterflies, newly emerged from the chrysalis of MIT's diverse library pages, floats above in the corridor between the Lewis and Hayden Libraries on MIT's campus. Trajectories through the cloud illuminate to guide passersby along the length of the corridor. This installation is an unobtrusive but strikingly beautiful symbol of the guiding knowledge of the arts and humanities that have been developed and pursued at MIT over the last 150 years. The butterflies, printed with text from books, sheet music and pages of MIT theses, are interactively illuminated by small lights from within.