Untitled Superorganism

The aftermath of an ant mill is displayed in the gallery.

The piece was first shown at the exhibition "Anthropocene Monument" curated by Bruno Latour, Bronislaw Szerszynski at Les Abattoirs, Toulouse, 2014

The viewer first encounters an strange, slightly acidic, smell as they enter the gallery. There is a dark circle on the floor. As you approach the circle you realise it consists of hundreds of thousands of dead ants.

A neraby screen shows a video which has been filmed in the gallery during the process of installing the exhibition - the video describes the phenomenon of an ant mill.

"An ant mill is an observed phenomenon in which a group of army ants separated from the main foraging party lose the pheromone track and begin to follow one another, forming a continuously rotating circle. The ants will eventually die of exhaustion. This has been reproduced in laboratories and the behaviour has also been produced in ant colony simulations. This phenomenon is a side effect of the self-organizing structure of ant colonies. Each ant follows the ant in front of it, and this will work until something goes wrong and an ant mill forms. An ant mill was first described by William Beebe in 1921 who observed a mill 1,200 feet (365 m) in circumference. It took each ant 2.5 hours to make one revolution. Similar phenomena have been noted in processionary caterpillars and fish."

Text from Wikipedia