Digital filmmaker François Vautier installed an ant colony in his scanner and scanned it every week for five years. The movie he made of the results is fairly astonishing. It’s high-tech ruin porn at insect scale, and a reminder of the materiality of our digital world. Also this: where are the ants? They’re lost in time, like the Parisian passers-by in Louis Daguerre’s famous first photograph of a street scene in the Boulevard du Temple, in which the lengthy exposure time erased all human figures save those of a stationary shoe-shiner and his customer.
ANTS in my scanner via François Vautier‘s Vimeo.
November 11, 2010 11:55am
I love ants in art. I saw Yanagi’s World Flag Ant Farm a number of years ago, where the flags were colored sand-art in flat plastic boxes, with interconnecting tunnels. Then the ants were introduced. By making their home, and their way, they of course slowly rearranged the sand particles, and intermixed the flags.
http://www.iniva.org/dare/themes/space/yanagi.html