
Every now and then, one of the Amazons’ tiniest predators, the army ant Eciton spp gets caught in a suicidal dysfunction of what is one of its strongest assets: its pheromone trail.
Heavy rainfalls wash away the trails leading back to the colony and can effectively cut off large groups of ants. Unable to find a trail back, the group starts walking in circles, one ant blindly following the ant in front if it and at the same time avoiding ants on its side.
Through mutual reinforcement the ants start forming a spiral march lasting many hours until exhaustion and ultimately death take their toll.
Eventually, the unintentional drive to self-organisation, which makes ant colonies thrive, is also the seed to their own destruction.
During the summer of 2017, on an expedition to the Brazilian Amazon with a team of scientists and a cameraman, we set out to interact and communicate with the collective mind of the Eciton ‘Army’ ants.
Tracking their trails and by analysing their chemical signatures, we managed to decode the ant’s pheromone signals and manipulate their movements.
The pheromone trail enables an ant colony’s collective intelligence.
What neurons are to the brain, pheromone signals are to the ants. They create a shared memory of space and converge over time to solve complex problems.

The movement of an individual ant seems random, but as a collective, the colony is highly organized, like a single organism.
Manipulating pheromone trails opens up a world of interactions. Artificial memories can be written like letters on a piece of paper. The ants chose to follow or to ignore it, adding their own pheromones over time or letting the artificial trail evaporate.

Harking back to the origins of photography, I’ve developed a technique that allows me to permanently record the fleeting collective movements of ants, using soot covered glass sheets.
In collaboration with Mariko Montpetit and Nikolai Zheludovich I’m working on a 20’ film, a musical composition and a multichannel video installation.
A trailer of this work in progress can be seen here.
Machines of Sunshine (preview)
Episode I: Paper 8’27”
Episode II: Bivouac 3’53”
Episode III: Glass 5’43”
Kamera: Nikolai Zheludovich
Schnitt: Mariko Montpetit
Forschung: Nicolas Chaline, Ronara Ferreira, Hilario Lima, Cecilia Winter
Musik: Robin Meier: diverse Field-Recordings und Montage; David Lang: “Vent”, Laurie Spiegel: “Old Wave”; Eliane Radigue: “Kyema”
Produktion 2017-2018: DEMONOAMONO, Pro Helvetia