Ants have been and continue to be used to negotiate the fundamental conditions of human sociality. Since ancient times, there have been records in which ants are a metaphor for human social structures. Between anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism, books and films are full of descriptions of ant collectivity and its supposed parallels to humans, their sociability, and their technology. Their image is used flexibly for sometimes contradictory forms of sociability, ranging from loose association to total socialization. Through the normative content of nature, hierarchical structures are legitimized, among other things, in concepts of race, gender, class, or speciesism.

»ANT*HOLOGY: De/Bugging the Cultural History of Ants« is an algorithm-based video installation in which fragments of texts and imagery about ants and humans are continuously recombined, exploring how the same phenomenon is used to legitimize different worldviews. The resulting questions – about how perception, knowledge, and social standpoint shape one another – are taken up in performative sequences in which I perform the figure of the ant, critically reflecting on its representation as a cultural construct. The appropriation of nature thus becomes a reflection of the epistemic violence that is visible in the power structures of the knowledge discourse on ants.

In weaving together different images and quotes, their meaning is fragilized and a multi-perspective anthology is created. In this fragmentary narrative form, the documents become ambiguous and thus sites of negotiation for meaning production and documentary evidential value. Contrary to a linear narrative, in which history is viewed as an evolutionary process of progress, the algorithmic work results in an unfinished and constantly reorganizing narrative, in which transformations, parallels, and (dis)continuities in the descriptions of ants and human become visible.

In doing so, I do not regard the ant as an object of biological truth, but rather as a medium of cultural negotiation in which the boundaries between observer and observed, between knowledge and being, become blurred. Our descriptions are not pure representations, but creative inscriptions that bring certain realities into being and exclude others. What we see and what we can talk about is always pre-structured by the framework of our concepts, our language, and our cultural practices—this is how we write the world, even when we pretend to merely read it.

* GER, since 2021