Sim Ant is a computer game that enables you to simulate the fun of living in an ant colony. Created in 1991, it was one of the first 'Sim' series games, and is briefly mentioned in the book Emergence. The aim is to organise an ant colony that can take over an entire yard, and, if possible, a house – all the while battling with competing colonies, foraging for food, and avoiding losing too many ants to other bugs and humans. As one of the first simulation games, it uses a nice agent-based system to control an entire colony, not unlike StarLogo. 

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http://www.ted.com/talks/marcel_dicke_why_not_eat_insects.html

Marcel Dicke asked "Why not eat insects?" in July 2010 at TED. Vincent M. Holst asked the same question in 1885.

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The Godot Machine is featured in this month's edition of Art World Magazine's quarterly publication Snacks. If you're in mainland China, you can purchase a copy from this list of outlets; alternatively peruse the images below.

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English-speakers curious about the text can read a poorly translated version here (thanks to Google; apologies to Mandarin-speakers).

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I'm sure all readers will be delighted to read this good news from Tetrahedron Letters in 1986 (doi:10.1016/j.jtbi.2004.06.022).

We can synthesise component chemicals of particular ants. This affects Monomorium pharonis (Pharoah ant), tiny little orange ants who have a predilection for invading hospitals, and form colonies around nice warm things like heating pipes. Interestingly, the species lack colony recognisation, which enables them to form multi-queen colonies. They have extremely poor vision (an average of 32 ommatidia), so rely heavily on pheromone trails to navigate. Originally from the deserts of Western Africa (hence the name, colour, preference for warm places, ability to eat pretty much anything), they have since spread to all continents except Antarctica, mostly thanks to the spread of humans.

Spread throughout the world:

click for map

 

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Good news! Do you remember this story I posted last week about an Oscar-winning filmmaker looking for funding for a mobile insect museum? The project is now fully funded to the next stage, thanks to the input of kind Kickstarter visitors. View the project here, and look out for mobile insect museums in New York next year!

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Although we're researching links between ants and electricity (particularly those nasty critters Solenopsis invicta and Lasius neglectus), we like magnetism too. This video rather beautifully shows a variety of magnetic fields on ferrous materials, and acts as a source of inspiration for the films that will document Physical Virus' ant ballet.

Of course, it's worth remembering that one of the early concepts for the project involved Ferrofluids...

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Ollie Palmer will be presenting Physical Virus project at Goldsmiths University's Thursday Club this week (aptly, on Thursday). Also presenting is Artemis Papageorgiou with her Fabrique project.

The talk is in the Goldsmiths Digital Studios, Ben Pimlott Building at 18.00 on Thursday 28th October.

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Just came across this fantastic insect project by Oscar-winning filmmaker Zana Brinski. Her photographs are "a tribute to insects, to their intelligence, personality and elegant beauty.” Watch the film and you'll see what she means.

Zana is currently looking for $50,000 to turn the photographs into a travelling museum. Take a more detailed look at the project on the Kickstarter blog, or help fund its future through Kickstarter.

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Odontomachus, a carniverous genus of ant, have jaws that can close at 140mph. In the above video, researchers from the University of Arizona show some incredible footage of these ants snapping their jaws against objects in order to perform staggering jumps through the air.

 Odantomachus bauri showing off huge jaws. Grr! Image: Wikimedia.

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Cataglyphis bicolor ants are remarkable not only for their ability to survive in the desert, but also for their 'internal pedometers' and navigation etechniques, which enable them to always take the most direct route back the the nest.

Their navigation is based on two elements: visual centring, a process by which they periodically stop and measure the angle between the sun and the nest*, and step counting, whereby they remember the distance from the nest in steps.

The latter thesis was proposed and proven by a team led by Harold Wolf, who tested the theory by taking control ants by a known feeding ground, and either shortening or lengthening their legs. The ones whose legs were shorter stopped before they had reached the nest, whereas the ones with pig-bristle extensions overshot it completely. Read more about this in the original paper, or an overview article on the Seed website.

Cataglyphis bicolor. Image: Wikimedia.

*Footnote: I'm not sure if there's evidence for polarised vision in these particular ants, although this has been found in many other ant species.

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This is a beautiful project about making trails with GPS signals. Takahiro Yamaguchi cycled around the streets of Shibuya with a GPS receiver, recording locations, images and sound. This was then fed back into a computer with Processing, and turned into a region-specific typeface.

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The gallery presentation is beautifully simple, but highlights the time and effort this project took.

Project website / download the typeface / view the trails on Google Maps

via Cesar Harada

 

 

Related, but less poetic: Read Ann Rand

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A selection of videos as visual (and aural!) stimuli for the Physical Virus project.

Arrangement for four painters and musicians by Petter Yxell and Kristopher Hagbard:

Physical Virus is involving some fantastic musicians with Fiorella Lavado's weaving soon – watch this space!

Ants by Kristopher Hagbard

Ameising 1 by Sean Dockray

Pseudo-pheromone trail tracking. Pheromone signals approximated by visual tracking – research suggests that not all ants lay trails all the time, but this is a nice introduction to the concept of trail-laying.

Visualising London by Urban Tick

Urban Tick records a lot of GPS trails and turns them into visualisations. If you like this, also look at Plan B (who utilised this technology back when it was expensive!).

Digital technology such as GPS and augmented-reality applications (the so-called data-layer) are enabling us to become more like ants or bees in laying digital signals. Facebook Places and Foursquare are excellent examples of this, and technologies such as these are only going to become more prominent in the coming years.

Lumibots

Lumibots are small, autonomous robots that move around and leave light trails on luminescent surfaces. If you're interested in Lumibots without the lumination, or swarm behaviour, look at James McLurkin's Swarm Robots page (or any other MIT Swarm project, for that matter).

Know of any other similar projects? Send me a link!

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Insect colonies offer insight into the mysterious conversations of neurons, illuminating how billions of individual brain cells work in concert to make a single decision.

There's a lovely article on Seed Magazine about ants and neurons, as currently being researched in Bristol by James Marshall and Nigel Franks. For copyright reasons, I won't syndicate it here, but the article is worth five minutes of anybody's time.

If you get a chance to see one of Nigel's talks as part of Creature Collective, do – he's one of the most informative, funny and fascinating speakers in the world of entymology.

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One of the curiosities that the Physical Virus project is examining is the similarities between ant foraging behaviour and neural networks. Fortunately, one of the uncredited co-founders of the neuron theory was also a keen entymologist. It's time to meet Auguste Forel.

Forel on an older Swiss 1000 Franc note.

Auguste Forel (1848-1931) was a Swiss entymologist, neuroscientist and psychiatrist. He made a number of discoveries about ants, including ant farming (cultivation of fungi) and ant cattle (the raising of aphids). 

In 1914, Forel donated his entire ant collection to the Zoological Museum, which totalled entire two truck-loads of specimens. He personally collected more than six thousand species of ants, and named three thousand five hundred of these. Charles Darwin wrote to Forel after reading his 1874 book Les fourmis de la Suisse to say: “I have now read the whole of your admirable book and seldom in my life have I been more interested by any book.”

Farel is definitely one for the budding entymologist/neurologist to take a look at. Whilst his investigation of the psychic power of ants may seem today a little far-fetched, it does hint heavily at the olfactory senses (and consequent discovery of pheromone signals) that would later be identified by Wilson and Hölldobler in the Ants, and will be used heavily by the Physical Virus project in the creation of its ant ballet. 

Here are three biographies of Farel's life, each of which with a slightly different perspective on his work:

Historical Neuroscience

parent_forel.pdf Download this file

British Medical Journal review of Forel's life, 1932

brmedj04305-0020a.pdf Download this file

Lights of 'Irfán – Forel's chosen later-life religion Bahá'í

Forel_4.pdf Download this file

Resources

• Review of Forel's The Social World of Ants Compared with That of Man, by W.M. Wheeler, 1930
• David McNeely's essay Dr. August Forel, Pro Humanite
• Forel remembered in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry
• Hygiene of Nerves in Mind in Health and Disease, A. Forel, 1907

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Over the past couple of weeks I've been building version 2.0 of the Godot Machine – the first of the machines that form the Physical Virus project. It's still in production, but here's a preview...

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This is what 77 Queen ants in test tubes look like. 

They've got ample air and moisture in their cool, dark box, and as soon as the eggs have hatched will find their way into more appropriate, larger habitation jars.

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Remember, ants are living creatures, so it's important to take good care of them.

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Godot Machine is a device to hold an ant in one place for as long as possible. It is the first in a series of investigations and installations by Ollie Palmer as part of the Physical Virus project. Iteration 5 is currently being developed.

www.physicalvirus.com
art | architecture | biology

Music: FB-01 #2 by Christian Njoerklund

NB – This video is currently being exhibited at the Bartlett School of Architecture Summer Show (until 3 July 2010).

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