Ant Farm

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Ant Farm formed in 1968 by Chip Lord and Doug Michels in 1968 in San Francisco. The collective later expanded to include Curtis Schreier, Douglass Hurr, and Hudson Marquez. Ant Farm worked with a variety of media, including installations, media events, and videotape, always producing and promoting non-commercial art with a distinct political conscience.

Ant Farm is perhaps best known for the performance art piece ‘Media Burn’: part-spectacle, part-statement, this piece aimed to criticize passive interaction with television and news. It featured a car crashing through a pyramid of televisions. Though the group disbanded in 1978, they are still influential today to a new generation of artists and architects. (Source)

Work

• Ant Farm in Media Burn Archive
• Ant Farm on UbuWeb

Publications

• Ant Farm 1968-1978, eds. Constance Lewallen and Steve Seid, University of California Press, 2004, 194 pp. [1]
• Steve Seid, Media Burn: Ant Farm and the Making of an Image, intro. Chip Lord, Inventory Press, and RITE Editions, 2020, 128 pp. Publisher.