Yanran Wang

With 8.7 million known species in the world, it’s a shame we can only experience one! Why not be a fruit fly lingering in your kitchen? Some people really hate them, others don’t care about them, but they are with us nonetheless.

The project demonstrates possibilities beyond humans by transforming and translating the senses of fruit flies so that humans can experience the world that other species live in. The project has two parts, Sweetness Chime and Giant apple.

Giant apple shows what an apple looks like when seen through the eyes of a fruit fly at true scale and colour. Sweetness Chime convert the sugar content of different fruits and vegetables into sound, allowing humans to experience how fruit flies perceive environmental information.

Visitors can stand in the table centre of Sweetness Chime make their own music by knocking on different bottles, which represent different fruits or vegs.

By converting the different fruits or vegs’s sugar content to the bottles’s CO2 content to changed air pressures, the higher the sound, and the sweeter the fruits and vegs represented. This method translates the fruit fly’s sense of smell into human hearing.

All images in the project simulate the visible colour range of fruit flies, the processing of image pixelation is a mimicry of the Drosophila compound eye presentation. By converting apple, human, and fruit fly size data, Giant apple’s image presented is the surface of an apple in fruit fly eyes in real scale. This translates fruit flies vision into human vision.

When visitors play with this project, their behaviour is just like a fruit fly lingering in people’s kitchen, landing on the surface of an apple, looking for a safe and sweet place to live. By seeing what fruit flies see, and doing what fruit flies do, this experience could let human beings feel what fruit flies might feel.

Green design is scientific and sentimental. Project showcases Innovative uses of scientific data in art, Use of Design in Environmental Sustainability. Through interdisciplinary understanding, entertain and educate the audience to rethink our relationship with the environment and other living beings. With the fruit fly as an anchor, look beyond the human race to a wider, more probable world, look down and be aware of every "other" around you at the moment, even if it is insignificant.