Originally installed at the Bannister Gallery, Rhode Island College
Video Studio for Insects was conceived as a living experiment in telepresence and scale—bringing the miniature world of ants into full view through digital and remote-access technologies. While the installation was created specifically for the Bannister Gallery, it also anticipated a larger arc in my work: an exploration of emergent behavior, decentralized systems, and the human desire to observe and interpret life through lenses of technology and art. This trajectory continues to evolve today in new sculptural and conceptual works exploring the intersection of AI and education.
Project Description
At the heart of this installation is a colony of 3,000 live red ants inhabiting an 8-foot circular environment sculpted from water-saturated floral oasis—a material both fragile and absorptive. Arranged in a radial geometric pattern, the oasis structure cradles a central sand cone, approximately one foot in height. Over time, the ants instinctively move the sand outward toward the perimeter—a subtle yet profound choreography of labor and instinct. A time-lapse digital camera mounted overhead captures this transformation continuously.
Two additional video cameras are stationed at the perimeter, one of which is user-controlled via the Internet. Viewers can pan, tilt, and zoom the live video feed—transforming the passive act of looking into an interactive, participatory event. In this way, Video Studio for Insects builds on my earlier experiments in remote-access art that began with artnetweb, a collective I led in a New York City storefront during the formative years of internet-based art.
Another iteration of this concept, Under the Volcano, was exhibited at the DeCordova Museum, extending these ideas through a different medium and scale.
Conceptual Threads
The goal of this piece, like much of my work, is to offer new ways of seeing—especially by shifting perspective, scale, and context. Observing from above, navigating from afar, or zooming in at insect-eye level invites a voyeuristic curiosity, but also a reflective awareness. These micro-worlds act as mirrors, not only of our need to witness but of our impulse to organize, categorize, and teach meaning into existence.
In Video Studio for Insects, behavior and structure are inseparable. The ants become sculptors of their own terrain, even as the installation captures and frames their activity as data and image. This tension between autonomy and observation has become increasingly central to my recent thinking around AI and emergent learning systems—where knowledge evolves less from top-down instruction and more from interconnected, often invisible exchanges.
Interconnections
Throughout my career, I’ve been drawn to the unseen relationships between things: how form emerges from function, how systems echo across scales, and how meaning can arise not from the objects themselves but from the gaps, crossings, and feedback loops between them. Video Studio for Insects serves as a conceptual hub in this network—a living metaphor for decentralized knowledge and collaborative intelligence.
As I look ahead to future installations—particularly those exploring AI as an educational partner and sculptural medium—I see this work not as a closed experiment but as an open node, quietly forecasting where things might be headed. The Bannister Gallery installation was, in many ways, a seed—both literal and symbolic—of what is now beginning to take form.