This show is dedicated to all of the people out there that band together, create community and stand up for others.
I like to make art that uses animals as allegories for the human condition and I often pair the animals with snippets of architecture to create a dialogue between nature and human constructs. I chose to focus on ants for this show because the more I learn about their behavior the more analogous they seem to our current condition, especially here in the U.S.
Ants are not singularly intelligent in the way that we, as humans, view intelligence, but together they solve complex problems through sheer persistence and numbers. It is a common misperception that ants are following orders from their queen, but that isn’t actually how they work at all. Really what is going on is that the colony has different divisions of labor based on epigenetics. All of the ants start out with the same DNA but the environment affects how those genes are expressed turning some of them into foragers, some soldiers, some workers, etcetera. All of these ants are just wandering around, doing their thing leaving pheromone trails to let everyone else know what they are up to. The forager ants are the ones that find food for the colony. While out exploring one ant will wander across some food and take it back to the nest leaving her little pheromone trail which is like a neon sign with an arrow that says, “Hey! There is food over there!” And then another ant will wander across her pheromone trail, uses it to find the food and heads back to the nest adding her pheromones to the first trail making the neon arrow even bigger so that more ants find it and the sign gets exponentially larger until all of the food is back at the nest. They solve all sorts of complex problems this way. Take the way they build a bridge for example. It doesn’t start with one ant being like, “hey y’all let’s build a bridge!” What happens is that a bunch of ants will be marching along and the first ant will come to a gap and slow down but the next ant behind it will keep going over the first ant. Somehow, probably through evolution, every ant knows that when an ant is walking over them they should freeze. The second ant gets to the gap and slows until the third ant is walking over it and it freezes and this keeps happening until the gap problem is solved and then the ants keep going. All this happens with no conscious thought or instruction.
I’m going to switch gears here for a minute, but I want you to hang on to how the collective interaction of simple components in a system (like ants) come together to produce behaviors that are smarter than the sum of its parts.
There is a poem that I read when I was just starting to make ants called “King Solomon and the Ants.” This might be a good time to tell you that the Google search engine is based on the same concept of emergence that explains how ants do what they do. Anyway, this poem by John Greenleaf Whittier who was a Quaker, abolitionist and political writer in the 1800’s relays a story of King Solomon, who was considered very wise and had the ability to speak to animals. In it, King Solomon is marching his army across the desert in the company of the Queen of Sheba and the path of the army is about to trample an ant mound when the King hears an ant say, “Here comes the king men greet as wise and good and just to crush us into dust under his heedless feet!” King Solomon, hearing the ant, translates for the Queen of Sheba and she is like (and I am paraphrasing here), “I know that’s right! Y’all should be honored to be crushed beneath the feet of such greatness!”
But King Solomon responds, like, “Whoa! No, That’s not how it should be! ‘The wise and strong should seek the welfare of the weak.’”
And so the poem ends with the Queen of Sheba, realizing her error, bowing her head and saying, “Oh king! Henceforth the secret of thy worth and wisdom well I know. Happy must be the state whose ruler heedeth more the murmurs of the poor than the flatteries of the great!”
This last line got me thinking about why, other than good old common altruism (because let’s face it, some of our current administration seem to be missing that) it would be important to keep the poor ants happy. King Solomon wasn’t worried about keeping the ants happy because he was a nice guy, I’m pretty sure nice guys don’t amass big armies. King Solomon in all his wisdom knew that though the ants were small, working together they would be more powerful than his army.
I swear this is all going to come full circle if you bear with me…..
Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of interviews with people in Minnesota who are standing up against ICE and how it is that they are doing it so successfully. One of the women I heard was talking about how no one is really specifically organizing the resistance. There is a very large group chat, people know what different jobs need to be done and they wander around and do them. There are followers, who follow ICE vehicles and report to the chat where they are going and what they are doing, kind of like a pheromone trail. Other people are doing other things, some go to where agents are looking for people and blow whistles and let the neighbors know to stay inside, while others bring food to people or do their laundry because they are afraid to leave their houses. All this seems very ant-like to me, and it is working.
Take from that what you will.
I would like to leave you with one more unrelated story about ants.
I read it in a book just yesterday, called On Trails: An Exploration by Robert Moor.
Apparently theoretical physicist and Nobel Laureate, Richard Feynman, had an ant infestation in his house and was curious why ant trails inevitably ended up so straight. So he put a sugar cube on the far side of his bathtub and waited until an ant found it. As the ant brought the sugar back to the nest it left a trail that was “quite wiggly” and he traced the trail with a colored pencil. The second ant following the first ant’s trail back repeatedly lost the first ant’s trail, cutting off the unnecessary curves making it slightly straighter and the third was even straighter until there was just a straight path back to the nest. An entomologist called this “optimization.” Without the error-prone ants, the trail would never straighten out.
“Everyone optimizes,” He says, “whether we are pioneering or perpetuating, making rules or breaking them, succeeding or screwing up.”