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.
