Ant Farm (group)

Ant Farm was an avant-garde architecture, graphic arts, and environmental design practice, founded in San Francisco in 1968 by Chip Lord and Doug Michels (1943-2003).

The architects Buckminster Fuller, Paolo Soleri, and utopian Archigram inspired their early works of the giant inflatable structures.

[6] Ant Farm traveled America with a tour of "architectural performances" during which the group unfurled its anti-architectural Inflatables - inexpensive, portable shelters made of vinyl that provided the stage for lectures and "happenings."

Their "aim was to develop the perception of the body in space while working through the pleasurable and anxious feelings prompted by social interaction"[7] In collaboration with architect Richard Jost,[8] Ant Farm designed and built a Futurist ferro-cement residence.

[19] In Amarillo, Texas, Ant Farm half-buried a row of 10 used and junk Cadillac automobiles dating from 1949 to 1963, nose-first in the ground, at an angle corresponding to that of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

"[33] Lord and Michels designed the Phantom Dream Car to appear futuristic, and have an "Apollo element;" meaning, they could only enter the vehicle's cockpit by crawling in, and their communication would be controlled by radio.

'"[33] An article written by George McGovern for Rolling Stone about mass media's power directly influenced the content of this speech.

In the video, no real reporters were not shown conducting interviews in order to create a freer exchange of information, which was commonly employed by Guerrilla Television artists at the time.

Uthco and Ant Farm, the iconic event that signified the ultimate collusion of historical spectacle and media image was the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963.

The work begins with an excerpt from one of the most iconic and significant film documents of the twentieth century: Super-8 footage of the Kennedy assassination shot by Abraham Zapruder, a bystander on the parade route, which is one of the very few filmic records of the event.

Uthco and Ant Farm construct a multilevelled event that is simultaneously a live performance spectacle, a taped re-enactment of the assassination, a mock documentary, and, perhaps most insidiously, a simulation of the Zapruder film itself.

Performed in Dealey Plaza in Dallas — the actual site of the assassination — the re-enactment elicits bizarre responses from the spectators, who react to the simulation as though it were the original event.

"[35] As they traveled the United States, Ant Farm drove in the Media Van, a customized Chevy complete with a bubble skylight for videotaping road side scenery.

Today we are no longer in the realm of video proper therefore the very modes of access to these works have changed and were for a distinct generation of interactive media.

Transferring these videos from VHS to DVD is very important in order to preserve the work yet these new technological substrates create a historical distance from this earlier mode of viewing.

The film was put together by Elizabeth Federici and Laura Harrison, including members of the group Doug Michel and Chip Lord.

Taken from the film's summary, "the Ant Farmers created a body of deeply subversive work that questioned everything by posing a set of creative and comedic alternatives.