Parallel Paths is an exploration and experimental project studying paths created by bark beetles. Bark Beetles are a pest found in trees across California and widely across the United States and eat their way through trees underneath the bark creating intricate patterns and ultimately destroying forests. Using a 3D scanner and cell phone, images of paths created in the bark by the beetles were captured and translated into polygonal meshes, the mathematical representation of a collection of vertices, edges, and faces that define their shape in the real world. Each mesh was examined to reveal paths that shared visual similarities to the streets in the Long Beach as well as the greater Los Angeles highway system. Pointing to specific places of flow, obstruction, and planned versus haphazard pathways, the bark beetle’s paths are meant as metaphorical reference to our own human building patterns. Utilizing the red and cyan principles in visual 3D anaglyphs, as the viewer walks past the windows, elements of each path are highlighted, hidden, or revealed to the viewer through the colored film circles ultimately calling to the mark making and pathways being created all around us that we as humans fail to consider.
In this project, using other forms of 3D scanning (hand held devices) and aerial thermal imaging, other aspects of information of the paths created by the beetles will be captured and translated into polygonal meshes, the mathematical representation of a collection of vertices, edges, and faces that define their shape and force in the real world. Their paths of consumption ultimately reveal paths that share visual similarities to the streets and highway structures of our own city as a systematic enigma that is also swallowing the natural landscape. Pointing to specific places of flow, obstruction, and planned versus haphazard pathways, the bark beetle’s paths are ultimately a metaphorical and data driven reference to our own human building patterns and destruction. By re-creating their paths through complex forms of data capture through CT and 3D Scanning, a tangibility is brought to this data that is otherwise silently stored in the trunks of our shared mark making.
Images 1-9 Taken by Ruben Diaz
