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The mantis shrimp – Dave Richardson

Dave Richardson ’s The mantis shrimp is an explosion of multisensory stimuli.

We remember scenes full of colours, we remember gestures, places, objects, sounds, smells. Memory sieves these images with a particular light. A light that never reproduces the original richness of the moment. We humans have 3 cones of light: red, green and blue. A butterfly has 8. And there is a shrimp, the mantis shrimp, that has 16 cones of light. How wonderful would it be to have them, if only for being able to appreciate the complex variations of colour of a tiny yellow blouse, a memory from the past.

So speaks Dave Richardson’s poem about nostalgia and the desire of embracing colour. A desire that translates into a vibrant image: overprinted texts, dancing colour shapes, illustration, photography, textures, layers, animations… and a sound atmosphere led by a “canned” voice, surrounded by delicate sound effects. The mantis shrimp is one of the first videopoems we discovered. The feeling of surprise still remains.