Light is energy. for Timothy Weaver, it is a triggering element that stimulates reactions from all sorts of living beings.
so is for the monarch Butterfly, whose biological morphology is stimulated and directed by light.
every year, thousands of Monarch Butterflies embark in a 3 months journey from the US canada border south to a very small strip of land (a few miles) in Mexico.
light stimulation and ecological memory are key triggers to this journey. A biocultural journey, inspired by the sensorial attraction to the element as well as by the very biological morphology of the butterfly.
A protein superfamily, opsin, is apparently responsible for this journey.
In fact, inside the opsin there is a chromaphore that gets excited and vibrate, pushing the monarch towards light. Thus, an element inscribed in the butterfly’s genes starts a bioresponse, its “journey of light”
In his bionarrative (which he defines in a paper posted on his website as “biomimetics” that is a narrative that reproduces and “mimics” both biological and environmental sensibilities) Weaver has rendered the elements that produce the composite responses (the biocultural encoding and the ecological memory) during the butterfly’s journey through “live cinema”, in which the sound (the opsin’s reactivity) constitutes the live component.