Director's Welcome
Crickets deserve some respect – and a visit to their own museum. We humans can come along too, but we must shrink ourselves down so we fit inside the Museum for Insects. And so we don’t crush anyone.
This museum is a space for friendly interaction between humans and crickets. With a combination of contemporary artwork and current communication technologies we hope to increase human appreciation for insects and to provide a safe and enjoyable experience for the house cricket museum-goers. The possibility of shared aesthetic experiences through artwork, song, and play motivates the artists who create work for the museum.
Please feel free to chirp along with us. Visit our interactive webcam and visit our physical location at the OSU Urban Arts Space in Columbus, Ohio. We are part of the Engineering Utopia exhibition on view May 30th through July 15th, 2017.
The Museum for Insects was previously hosted by the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachussets for their Beyond Human exhibition in 2013-2014.
– Amy M. Youngs, Artist and Director of the Museum for Insects
www.hypernatural.com
Biography
Amy M. Youngs creates biological art, interactive sculptures and digital media works that explore interdependencies between technology, plants and animals. Her practice-based research involves entanglements with the non-human, constructing ecosystems, and seeing through the eyes of machines. She has created installations that amplify the sounds and movements of living worms, indoor ecosystems that grow edible plants, a multi-channel interactive video sculpture for a science museum, and community-based, participatory video, social media and public web cam projects.
Youngs has exhibited her works nationally and internationally at venues such as the Te Papa Museum in New Zealand, the Trondheim Electronic Arts Centre in Norway, the Biennale of Electronic Arts in Australia, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Spain and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA. She has earned an Individual Artist Grant from the Ohio Arts Council, contributed writing to interdisciplinary publications such as Leonardo and the recent book, Robots and Art, and her work has been profiled in books such as, Art in Action, Nature, Creativity & our Collective Future. She has lectured widely, at venues such as the Australian Centre For the Moving Image in Melbourne, Australia and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN. Born in Chico, California, she moved to San Francisco, where she received a BA in Art from San Francisco State University. On fellowship, she attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and earned an MFA in 1999. In 2001 she joined the faculty at the Ohio State University where she is currently working as an Associate Professor of Art, leading interdisciplinary grant projects and teaching courses in moving image, eco art, and art/science.
