Phil Hastings is an artist, filmmaker, and associate professor at
SUNY Fedonia. Creating work
that surrounds various themes
in science, Hastings has shown
his work internationally, is a 2012
NYFA Film/Video Fellow, and
was included in the 18th biennale of Sydney, Australia.Hasting’s work has also been lisenced
by National Geographic and the
Canadian Broadcast Company.
You can find his work at
www.philhastings.com.
desire to not artificially influence the behavior of the mantises for the sake of the video,
and the mantises’ personality is very determined. The old film saying that you should
never work with kids or animals because they
are unpredictable certainly held true for this
project. The mantises had a will of their own,
which typically meant that I would set up a
shot with cameras, monitors, lights, et cetera, and then introduce the first mantis into
the scene. Of course, as soon as it was out of
its holding cage, it would take off down the
support that it was to hang on in front of the
camera, crawl onto the stands holding the
support, sometimes onto the lights, or, more
times than I can remember, straight towards
the camera, where it would sit on the top of
the camera and stare at me with what I can
only assume was smug sense of ‘just try it’.
I started to realize that the mantis would
typically repeat their action, so if one mantis
always took off to the left, I would release
them much farther down to the right out of
shot, so that by the time they settled down
they were closer to where I wanted them.
These particular mantises were being studied
to determine how hunger affected predation
and how or if the males were able to sense
when was the best time to approach a female
so they’d get to mate another day. The age of
the mantises, time of the season—early or
late in the season, their level of hunger—all
played a part in how they behaved. There
SciArt in America April 2015
were many days when the male and female
were introduced with no interest shown
from eit \