AntVenture
Inhabit the Ants in your World
AntVenture is an interactive storytelling walking app that brings you the inside scoop on how the ants beneath your feet understand the world around you.
As you walk through your neighborhood, your route to work or around your yard, you experience a day-in-the-life of four different types of common ants.
INTERACTIVITY
The stories you hear are classic “choose-your-own-adventure” so there are countless ways your “ant-walks” can happen. But what’s really cool is that the way a story develops changes with how you are interacting with your environment.
ART AND SCIENCE
Sure, the AntVenture app imagines that your cell phone is a receiver, able to pick up the chemical signals that ants are making, but to give you a sense of how exactly a specific ant might experience the world is based in peer-reviewed science.
David’s process is to research an ant species or genus to have a detailed understanding of the behaviours we can likely expect from an individual ant. From this point, Dave picks up the artist’s pen extrapolating from behaviour to build personality, et voilà, realistic and believable characters are created!
In today’s concrete laden cities, sometimes it is hard to appreciate that nature is everywhere, and AntVenture reminds you that nature, at least in the form of an ant, is likely right underneath your feet.
Download the research PDF:
ABOUT DAVID
David Merleau is a folktale storyteller and radio maker with a background in ecology and ethics of technology. These facets inform his site-specific installations and his new-media works, locative-storytelling apps that playfully explore the hidden structures that underpin our human experience. These stories are inspired by science and blend walking meditation with Orson Welles-style radio theatre.
Check out his award winning project:
THE TEAM
WORKSHOP
david@antventure.ca
The AntVenture project is composed by a walking app and a workshop. Designed to be embedded seamlessly in your arts festival, conference or natural science museum, AntVenture allows participants to explore the many ways that ants interact with their colonymates and the environment around them.
CONTACT
david@antventure.ca
AntVenture was researched, written, produced and narrated by David Merleau. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. And many thanks to those who contributed to the Indiegogo campaign.
The AntVenture audio story was written and produced on the traditional territory of the Anishnaabeg, specifically the Ojibway, Chippewa and Odawa peoples. This territory is covered by the Williams Treaty of 1923 and the J. Collins land purchase of 1785.