Eight-Bit Ant Farm

This dialogue captures the collaborative process between Remo Campopiano, Guy Marsden, and Jonathan Schull, the creators of Eight-Bit Ant Farm. It traces the conceptual development of the piece and explores how the project embodies principles of complexity theory and semi-autonomous complex adaptive systems.

Origins of the Collaboration

Remo Campopiano: After being invited to show work in the Complexity exhibition at the Dorsky Museum, I began discussing the topic with my friend and science theorist, Jonathan Schull. We were exploring how ants move—whether randomly or not—and how that behavior could reflect systems of complexity.

The First Ideas

Campopiano: I showed Jonathan how ants interact with oasis material, and he proposed the idea of an oasis mobile in a glass cube. We weren’t entirely sure what this had to do with complexity theory at the time, but the idea intrigued us. Our first thought was to use the ants’ natural instinct to climb as a trigger for cascading events. As they moved upward, their combined weight—and their habit of chewing the platform beneath them—would eventually allow access to the next level.

Looking back, it was a bit like a real-world video game, except the players were autonomous—or at least semi-autonomous—ants.

Complexity and Self-Organization

Jonathan Schull: The idea seems clear to me. Here is a dynamical system whose parts (the ants) collectively shape the whole (the mobile with ants), and the whole simultaneously constrains and influences the ants, changing the way they shape the whole. The whole (and the parts) is much more than the sum of the parts.

Campopiano: From my perspective, it’s about the equilibrium just before a chain reaction—the moment right at the edge of chaos. When one level of oasis gets close enough to the next, it allows the ants to ascend. It’s like a paradigm shift—one small change opens the door to an entirely new structure.

Enter Guy Marsden

Campopiano: A few months later, Guy Marsden reached out via email. He was going to be in town for the Turning convention and wanted to meet. We were both ASCI members and had a lot in common. Like with Jonathan, the chemistry was immediate.

Together, we pivoted toward a new angle—focusing on the ants’ instinct to dig and modify their environment. We wanted to see if we could link that invisible activity to a more visible outcome—something visitors could observe and react to.

Having Guy’s technical mind on the project was a revelation. I was especially intrigued by his Digital Numeric Relevators, which I saw as some kind of poetic expression of time—machines generating data detached from chronology.

Guy Marsden: No, no, you’ve got me all wrong. I am not at all interested in the representation of time! It is randomness that is the recurrent theme in my work—so it’s more aligned with chaos. The term “Relevator” in my Digital Numeric Relevators is a made-up word that I define as “a machine capable of creating and displaying irrelevant information.”

Linking Systems Through Ant Behavior

At this point, Guy introduced the idea of using ping-pong balls in another cube, activated by solenoids—something both chaotic and highly visual. At first, we thought about linking this to the movement of the mobile, but that felt too disconnected.

Then it clicked. What if we removed the mobile and coated the inside of the cube with oasis? The ants’ gnawing activity could become the trigger. Guy quickly devised a way to electronically scan the oasis for light penetration—an indicator that ants had breached the surface. That data could then activate the solenoids in the ping-pong cube.

Evolving the Structure

So now we had a mysterious green cube and another filled with dormant ping-pong balls. To maintain the mystery, I suggested we not reveal the ants to the audience—only the curators would know. The slow realization that the artwork is being driven by ants excited us both.

I started to experiment with terrain mapping. If we averaged the patterns of erosion across four surfaces, we could trigger the release of ping-pong balls one at a time. They’d be suspended vertically using monofilament, forming a layered topography. I’ve always found that I think best when I’m visualizing three-dimensional relationships.

Schull Rejoins the Conversation

When Jonathan came back into the mix, the idea factory exploded. We brainstormed all kinds of wild concepts—things that would take years to build. With Guy, I’m forced to slow down and justify how something would work. With Jonathan, it’s all about exploring the idea, whether or not it’s technically feasible.

We imagined a third cube with laptops, ceiling-mounted cameras, even campus-wide sensors. But the next morning, we grounded the vision and distilled it into something more elegant—something doable. That’s how the idea of the four cubes emerged.

Adapting the System Further

The project had evolved, but the core elements remained. The ants would still trigger the ping-pong balls, but now we’d use a camera above the oasis cube to track their movement. The visual data would be translated into a binary grid. That grid could then: activate solenoids in the ping-pong cube; illuminate embedded red LEDs in another cube; and display video through a monitor at the base of the final cube—the mirror box.

The Mirror Box Concept

The mirror box needs a bit of explanation. Jonathan had long admired this element in my earlier work. It’s a configuration where four mirrors face each other, tapering toward a central visual focus. When paired with a video monitor, it creates the illusion of an infinite, suspended sphere. I’d known about the effect for over 20 years, but I first used it in a piece called Rupture in Cyberspace back in 1999.

Diving into Complexity and Reflection

Schull: Funny you should ask. To me, the piece in general is about visualization of the most fascinating kind of complex adaptive system. The “kind” of system that fascinates me is an adaptive semi-autonomous system composed of many adaptive semi-autonomous systems (which may themselves be composed of semi-autonomous systems). This is the architecture of the biological world, and it is increasingly the architecture of the cyber-world. But there is also something new here. Some of these systems are beginning to try to understand their own nature, and to ponder the nature of understanding. That’s what I’m trying to get into this piece. Let me try to explain. The ant colony is a classic and obvious example of an adaptive semi-autonomous system composed of many adaptive semi-autonomous systems (which may themselves be composed of semi-autonomous systems).

Less obviously, every person is an example of such a system: I am a nervous system, a circulatory system, a digestive system, etc. They are cells; the cells contain mitochondria. And so on. Many of these sub-systems can function on their own (for a while at least) and many of them are intelligent information processors in their own right (especially the brain and its neural subsystems).

Campopiano: And going in the other direction, we are part of something bigger.

Schull: Yes, each of us is a semi-autonomous component of larger systems (our social groups, our society, our species, the biosphere etc.). And those larger systems are themselves semi-autonomous and adaptive. (We talk about the “will of the people”, for example.)

Campopiano: This is great Jon, but before we get too deep into this, let’s define a few terms. By “adaptive” system, do you mean a system that alters itself to a changing environment? For instance, when we take 500 ants out of the Utah desert and place them in a new environment—a 13-inch glass cube layered with oasis—they adapt to the sandless environment by burrowing into the oasis material. Or is there a deeper meaning to adaptive systems?

Schull: There are deeper issues lurking, but you’re exactly right.

Campopiano: Am I right in assuming that a “semi-autonomous” system is one that can exist on its own but only in relationship to something else, like a parasite?

Schull: A parasite (or a partner, or an environment, etc.) able to maintain its character and pursue its goals, even in the face of environmental challenges and changes, but not of course independent of its context.

Campopiano: “No man is an island…”

Schull: Yes, no man is an island, yet each man is partially (but only partially) independent of others.

Campopiano: Does this mean that the “context” is an important element of a semi-autonomous system, as the desert is the ant colony’s context, and further down the hierarchy, the colony is context to the ant?

Schull: It does. In fact, according to systems theorists Gregory Bateson and H. Ross Ashby (don’t get me started), the “system” is actually the organism-interacting-with-its-environment. Those parts of the environment with which the organism interacts are the “context.”

Campopiano: I’ve often associated the ants in my artwork with the human neural system. The “Rat-Buddha” is an excellent example.

Schull: Well, you’re in good company. Bateson, Ashby, Hofstadter, E.O. Wilson and others have shared that insight. Perhaps it’s the role of the artist to move such insights from the realm of abstraction into the world of the senses and of the spirit.

Campopiano: So in your mind, this piece explores the similarity of ants and humans, ant colonies and human social systems?

Schull: Somewhat, but that’s secondary to a more interesting point: to illuminate and reflect, literally and figuratively, the differences and interactions between random systems, mechanical systems, biological systems, and self-reflective systems.

Campopiano: Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. Let’s talk more about “self-reflective” systems. I can see how this sets up a paradoxical situation. What happens to a system—or, for that matter, the other systems—when one becomes self-reflective?

Schull: I think the best way to answer that question is to say, “look in the mirror.” Or for that matter, look at this installation. Something strange happens… And something strangely similar happens when scientists (or philosophers) try to answer that question. “What happens” is something we don’t quite know how to talk about, which is why we’re trying to illustrate it.

Campopiano: I believe that is why I gravitate to this issue. Things that defy verbal explanation make great subjects for art.

Schull: But of course, we can’t resist trying to talk about it. Whether we are talking about classical sciences, the new science of complexity, or even about what we naively call “simple perception,” we naturally tend to take the stance of an objective observer looking “in” at our object of study from the “outside.”

Campopiano: The way we stand outside the ant colony looking in?

Schull: Exactly. This stance is natural and convenient, but it is an illusion. In this artwork we bring attention to this illusion in several ways. For example, our view and our stance when we look down at the gallery are apparently rather similar to our view and our stance when we gaze at the ant colony. “Apparently similar,” but deeply different.

Campopiano: Of course, because when we look at the webcam image, we see ourselves.

Schull: Indeed, we see ourselves seeing ourselves. And this act of self-reflection changes the nature of what we are observing in many ways. For example, when you suspected you were seeing yourself, you probably waved your hand in order to see your doppelganger move in the image. For a deeper example, consider that when you first saw yourself in the webcam image you were looking at someone who didn’t know they were on camera. Later, you were looking at someone who did know. What we see is a reflection of what we see. What we are is a reflection of what we see. And what we see is a reflection of what we are.

Campopiano: Jon, most people can follow your reasoning until these last three sentences. Do you want it that way or do they need some explanation?

Schull: I like the three sentences because each one seems to have several true and interesting meanings. What we see is a reflection of what we see. What we are able to see is determined by what we have learned to see. Right? And how do we learn to see? By looking, and learning. So, what we see really is a reflection of what we have seen. Now here’s a sense in which “What we are is a reflection of what we see.”

Learning is (quite literally) the process in which what we see changes us. Every experience changes us in some way, forever. And so it is also true that “what we see is a reflection of what we are.”

If these last paragraphs have done their job, you have been changed in some way, however small, by these words and this piece of art. Look at it again. If you see it differently this time, it’s in part because you are a different person.

Campopiano: As a 10-year-old child, I remember an important moment in my life. It was when I realized I was me. I wasn’t just a son of my parents, an animal running around on two legs. I would look down at my hands and say, “this is me.” I am different than any other person looking down at their hands and saying, “this is me.” It was empowering on one hand—and scary as hell on the other.

Schull: What I’m saying is, science is “a way of looking at the world.” And so, what we have been saying about “seeing” is equally true of science. The world that science shows us is a reflection of the way science looks at things. While the scientific stance usually supposes that the world we see is objectively real, that too is a convenient oversimplification.

Campopiano: Can we go as far as to say it too is an illusion?

Schull: Sounds like Buddhism, doesn’t it? I guess I’d say that perceptions (and illusions) are as “real” as anything we ever experience. There may be (must be?) something really real “out there” … but all we get to experience is a view of it, as reflected (and refracted) by our nervous systems (and our theories).

Campopiano: I hate to keep throwing my past work into the dialogue, but as an artist, my work often speaks more eloquently than my words. I did a piece back in the mid-eighties called Plato’s Cave. It also used ants and their seemingly mindless activity to bring attention to the fact that organized religion was attempting to undermine one of humanity’s truly progressive evolutionary documents—the U.S. Constitution, or more specifically, the Bill of Rights. It was Plato’s view that we are only seeing “shadows of shadows” (if I have the quote right), and if we are to see reality, we need to be outside of our perceived reality to really see.

Of course, with this line of thinking, it appears we are moving away from science and toward philosophy. Are you saying complexity theory has a foot in philosophy—not to say that science and philosophy are mutually exclusive?

Schull: All science has a foot in philosophy. And all philosophy has a foot in science. And historically, each has had an impact on the other, each has had to adapt to the other…

Campopiano: …uh does that mean…

Schull: …Right. Science and philosophy are themselves semi-autonomous complex adaptive systems. As our scientific theories change, our worldview changes too. Classical science (and physiological psychology) saw ants (and people) as mechanical objects reacting to complex but deterministic forces.

Campopiano: Rather like ping-pong balls reacting to mechanical impacts.

Schull: Right. But then early 20th century science introduced the idea of randomness, indeterminacy, and uncertainty. And we started seeing ants (and people) differently. Late-20th century science brings us complexity, chaos and emergence. Millennial science (I think) will come to grips with self-reflection, the nature of systems that can know themselves, and the nature of a universe in which self-knowledge and consciousness is possible. But the millennium is still young. For now, we invite you to look down into the mirror box. Gaze at the “objective” images on the computer screen and note that to see those images you must peer through your own image. The inter-reflection of these images (some “real,” some created by you, some created by and of you), viewed by you and from your unique perspective, creates a universe, which is in some mysterious way a reflection of the universe.