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The Prix Ars Electronica Archive is a collection enabling search and viewing of all the submissions since 1987. The award-winning projects are documented with catalogue texts and audio-visual media. All other submissions can be searched by title/artist and displayed with year, category in list form. Please cite the credits (artwork name, artist and photographer) and only use the materials if your article is related to Ars Electronica.
0h!m1gas: biomimetic stridulation environment
Kuai Shen
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The _0h!m1gas: biomimetic stridulation environment_ is an artistic research and audiovisual installation that approaches the self-organization in ants as a cybernetic system with emergent manifestations. _0h!m1gas_ ‘is based on a do-it-yourself approach to bioacoustics, measuring the vibratory sounds and mapping the activity of an ant colony and their relation to the artificial ecosystem where they live. By means of contact microphones and video surveillance interfaced with the computer, which feeds this bio-data to two turntables, the life of the ant colony emerges as a soundscape of scratching effects.
The activity of an ant colony is observed, archiving the ants’ movements and sounds inside a digital matrix. A pair of turntables constantly reacts to the changes that emerge from the colony (e.g., recruiting units for defense, task allocation when rebuilding the nest or organizing the harvesting of vegetation), thus spinning vinyl records that produce scratching sounds similar to the original stridulations (rubbing noises produced by body parts) of some ants. Leafcutter ants use the stridulatory organ, human DJs use the turntable: a reactive soundscape that reveals the connection between scratching as an aesthetic expression created by human culture and the stridulation phenomena of leafcutter ants as a modulation mechanism for communication.
I believe we can learn from the way the ants construct their miniature ecosystems. Like them, we can apply an experimental design approach based on self-organization, where sounds and physical interaction promote and consolidate the interaction of life.
Links: http://kuaishen.tv
The activity of an ant colony is observed, archiving the ants’ movements and sounds inside a digital matrix. A pair of turntables constantly reacts to the changes that emerge from the colony (e.g., recruiting units for defense, task allocation when rebuilding the nest or organizing the harvesting of vegetation), thus spinning vinyl records that produce scratching sounds similar to the original stridulations (rubbing noises produced by body parts) of some ants. Leafcutter ants use the stridulatory organ, human DJs use the turntable: a reactive soundscape that reveals the connection between scratching as an aesthetic expression created by human culture and the stridulation phenomena of leafcutter ants as a modulation mechanism for communication.
I believe we can learn from the way the ants construct their miniature ecosystems. Like them, we can apply an experimental design approach based on self-organization, where sounds and physical interaction promote and consolidate the interaction of life.
Links: http://kuaishen.tv
Kuai Shen (EC/DE) was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador. He has a BA in digital arts from the University of San Francisco de Quito, a diploma in media arts with honors from the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, and he recently finished an interdisciplinary research in game design and development at the University of Applied Sciences Cologne. He has exhibited in well-known international media art festivals, galleries and biennials worldwide. Kuai Shen's publication on his research on ants has been published in _Biologically-Inspired Computing for the Arts_, a reader on data visualization, and in the _Leonardo_ MIT journal for the Siggraph.