University of Exeter Research Fellow, Thomas O'Shea-Wheller, and Falmouth University Lecturer in Photography, Catarina Fontoura, reflect on their fascinating collaboration co-creating artworks with ants as part of the pilot FX Creative Exchange programme.

Our project set out with a simple premise—to conduct a creative exchange with social insects, and thereby map their collective behaviour. During its course, however, we were forced to reevaluate the meaning of ‘creative exchange’ from a non-anthropocentric perspective, and indeed to consider the boundaries of human-animal cooperation. These questions were borne of the need to interact with our insect counterparts on their terms, and thus collaborate in a mutually beneficial manner, exploring collective intelligence through detailed observation and artistic co-creation. What followed was a journey into the emergent complexity of insect societies, with some fascinating and frequently surprising results.

Much of the impetus for this project came from discussions with Dr Daro Montag around his artwork ‘Leafcutter ants’, a piece that used soot and oil to capture the footprints of attine ants foraging in the rainforest. We were interested in visualising similar indexical traces, but for species of ants found in Cornwall, and were curious as to how diverse such traces might be, both across and within species. As part of this process, we wished to incorporate the concept of creative exchange, not just between researchers from Falmouth and Exeter, but with the ants themselves.

The first challenge that we faced was finding a suitable medium to express the ants’ behaviour. It rapidly became apparent that the forces of surface tension were not in our favour when working at the scale of an ant. Many ant species are small and light enough to walk over paint, across ink, and even on water without breaking the surface, thus leaving no trace. Our following attempts to coat ants with edible casein paint proved more successful in terms of mark-making, but were flawed as the ants were not truly willing participants, and simply wished to clean themselves and remove the paint. It thus became evident that we needed to curate conditions in which the ants could express themselves naturally, and hence without our interference.

With this in mind, we reconsidered our intentions from a more ant-centric perspective. We needed a collaborative medium that the ants would want to interact with, one that had value to them as an object of exchange. The obvious answer was sugar, specifically ~30-50% sucrose solution—this approximating the honeydew upon which they naturally feed. Thus began exhaustive trials across the greenhouses and gardens of Exeter’s Penryn campus, filming ants feeding on the sucrose in a variety of locations and light levels.

Watching back the footage, we had a breakthrough. We found that the ants created currents in the sucrose, appearing as fine silver strands when exposed to the light. While these strands were fleeting, and almost impossible to capture on camera, adding a drop of non-toxic ink to the solution revealed them in striking contrast. Equipped with this new process—which served both as a creative medium, and collaborative offering to the ants—we then set out to find a variety of species across Cornwall and beyond, from the fields of Kestle Barton, to the Rainforest Biome of The Eden Project.

The resultant fieldwork generated many notable moments, and highlighted the unique characteristics of each ant species. In Idless woods, we tracked the foraging trails of Formica rufa, using them to locate their mounded nests, while trying to avoid being sprayed with formic acid. In the Rainforest Biome of The Eden Project, we encountered thousands of the tiny Technomyrmex albipes, which initially seemed entirely uninterested in our sucrose solution, until we left for lunch, at which point they promptly swarmed it. Outside of the ESI building on Exeter’s Penryn campus, we struggled to maintain peace in the midst of a territory war between Lasius niger and Myrmica rubra, generating artworks with both species in the moments of calm between skirmishes. Finally, during a brief excursion to the cork oak forests of Alentejo, Portugal, Aphaenogaster senilis workers made an unexpectedly creative addition to our work, adding small pieces of absorbent leaf material to the sucrose, and producing something akin to an abstract sculpture.

The photographs taken during these trips revealed the unique ink patterns that each species generated, driven by differences in size, behaviour, morphology, and recruitment. Simultaneously, we became familiar with their individual characteristics, from the bold exploratory behaviour of Lasius niger, to the skittish habit of Cataglyphis hispanica, and perhaps most entertainingly, Formica rufa, that would actively watch us and react to our movements.

Aside from the ants, we interacted extensively with the public during fieldwork, engaging with people of all ages, and encouraging them to consider insects in a new light. We also held public workshops hosted by the ESI, and visited a local school to deliver an interactive talk and creative activity. Furthermore, from a citizen science perspective, we were able to use images from the project to record all species locations and taxonomic IDs on iNaturalist, and hence provide a resource for future research and conservation efforts.

Reflecting on the finished pieces, we found that there were indeed distinct signatures between ant species, and to a lesser extent among colonies of the same species, confirming the potential to capture such heterogeneity within an artistic medium. Through exhibiting the works created by these ants, we hope to visualise their emergent complexity and individuality in a way that engages human audiences, and thus provides a novel perspective on these otherwise familiar insects.

We plan to exhibit works from the project and lead further public engagement activities throughout 2024.