Pherographia−Drawing By Ants

Carlos M. Fernandes

In 1844, Talbot defined light as The Pencil of Nature. Inside the camera obscura the artist’s pencil was being replaced by light and silver. Photography was born and the apparatus was no longer used exclusively to draw lines on top of projected images. But nature has other pencils and the scientific progress of the last decades opened the gates to new worlds. Several research fields are cooperating in order to understand how natural systems behave and how can we apply these lessons in real-world problems. Ants, e.g., are known for being able to act as swarms, find food and “build” rather stable travelling paths; ants draw lines on the environment. In 1994, scientists Chialvo and Millonas presented an ant model that may be tuned between chaos and order, were structured paths/lines emerge. As in nature, ants communicate by pheromone, which they deposit on the environment and tend to follow as long as they detect it. Other researchers (including the author of this text) followed this line of work, and modified and applied the system in order to look for alternative means to deal with image processing. However, new ideas arise when looking at the aesthetical and metaphorical potentialities of the pheromone fields created by ants. Like pencils in camera obscura, ants draw along the contours of an image by laying more pheromone were contrast is higher (thus attracting other ants that will reinforce pheromone in that area). As light, silver and film developing, the process is gradual, starting with a blank landscape were slowly emerges an image, a sketch of the original picture.

The “fields” in this application were obtained by evolving the swarm on black-and-white negatives found in a flea market. The ants can draw over any image, and an artifact/camera to capture it is possible, but this way we recycle old photographs, in a kind of ecology of the image. Also, the stage is given to those anonymous people whose faces are locked up in old albums. All photographs are memento mori, Susan Sontag wrote. By recovering and working on these images, we try to provide them with a last breath of life.

This text was written for Drawing by Ants, an Arts and Science project based on a Artificial Life model designed by Dante Chialvo and Mark Millonas, later extended to black-and-white images by Vitorino Ramos and then improved by Carlos M. Fernandes.

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