Researchers at La Selva designed and built an insect collector. It is installed in the middle of their campus, which is the middle of the Costarrican rain forest. It is as simple an object as it seems: a white canvass surface with a linear black light on top and a small sheltering surface to keep it all dry. It is about 7 feet high by 7 feet long (2,15 x 2,15 m.) and from the distance it looks like one of those bulletin boards one may find in urban areas (see object 59). Although barely visible in the images, insects do populate the white canvass, a mini community of small and large bugs, spiders and things I never saw before. Collecting insects is usually a way to eliminate them and black, ultraviolet light is generally used for that purpose. In this case, collecting is a positive thing, an open door to new knowledge. This object has the rudimentary appeal of all things unusual or uncommon. It is not well designed and it is not intentional in its materiality; it is just put together and put to work. “But it does work,” people at the station told me, and that is good enough. I have always wondered if that is really good enough, if a world simplified by ad-hoc objects that “just work” is what we should aspire to. Ad-hoc objects that work seem a better option than over-designed objects that don’t work.
