SurveillAnts

Interactive biological installation

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SurveillAnts is a window into the unseen world of ants, mediated through technology. Using 
computer vision and tracking algorithms, we capture the movements of individual ants in real
time, visualizing them as colorful line drawings that follow the ant on its journey. Over time, the
movements of the colony are captured and stored. Viewers can interact with controls to redraw
the ants’ history over time, revealing the colony movement as a whole. While the results of
these emergent patterns are up for interpretation, visual correlations can be drawn between the
paths and the pattern structure of neurons at a micro scale, or the way galaxies organize at a
macro scale.

Using the context of a gallery to physically and metaphorically elevate live ants to eye level, and
framing them within a seemingly scientific structure, we engage people’s interest who might
otherwise never take time to examine ants. Through this work, we aim to provoke people’s
curiosity about the non-human, living world that surrounds and supports us, even in urban
ecosystems.