Ant Death Spiral

First described in army ants by Schneirla (1944). A circle of army ants, each one following the ant in front, becomes locked into a circular mill. They will continue to circle each other until they all die. How crazy is that? Sometimes they escape, though. Beebe (1921) described a circular mill he witnessed in Guyana. It measured 1200 feet in circumference and had a 2.5 hour circuit time per ant. The mill persisted for two days, "with ever increasing numbers of dead bodies littering the route as exhaustion took its toll, but eventually a few workers straggled from the trail thus breaking the cycle, and the raid marched off into the forest."

The above quote is from a post on a blog called The Ant Room. More info here

Imagination Playground

http://www.imaginationplayground.org

Open Arts Archive

Lots of videos and podcast about art from the Open University to be found here.

Timelapse Video of Mushrooms

Walkthroughs of IMMA Shows on Vimeo

South East Wing - Carlos Garaicoa from Vinyl Matt on Vimeo.

Guillermo Kuitca Talk at Walker Art Center

William Eggleston Videos

A trailer for William Eggleston in the Real World, a documentary about the photographer.

Winston Eggleston on his father's work.

Lyre Bird Imitates Building Site Sounds

Francis Alys Videos Online

Francis Alys has made many of his videos available online through his website. Most of the videos have been made public domain through creative commons licensing and can be downloaded while a small number are only available to be watched online.

image: still from Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing, Mexico City, 1997, 4:59min

How Architecture Helped Music Evolve

David Byrne's talk at TED 2010 exploring how context has influenced and continues to influence the development of music.

For more try his book How Music Works

Lorna Simpson Talk

Documentary on Cildo Meireles

Tania Kovats - Tree

Here's a video documenting the production of Tania Kovats' artwork Tree made for the Natural History Museum in London.

The artwork is a slice cut from the centre of a real oak tree and was inspired by the work of Charles Darwin.

Tony Cragg Video

A short video of Tony Cragg talking about his solo show at the Lisson Gallery.

Julie Mehretu Talk

Concrete Cast of Enormous Ant Colony

"A giant ant colony pumped full of cement,and then excavated reveals one of Mother Nature's marvellous wonders.

We've seen what these giant ant mounds look like above ground but this is an incredible view of what the structures looks like underground - which some have called a wonder of the world."

3d Printing with Paper

There is an Irish company called Mcor Technologies who have developed a machine for 3d printing using layers of ordinary paper and PVA glue. The Models shown here were created entirely by the machine. Below is a video from the late late show.

Paperplane

Above are some installation images of my piece Fleet installed at the Joinery for the exhibition paperplane.

Still images from the piece are featured in the focus section of the Paper Online Visual Art Journal

Video documenting the installation:

Roman Signer

I saw a couple of Roman Signer's installation/pieces in the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin on Thursday and have been looking at some videos of his work on youtube. Some of my favourites are below:

Katie Holten's Tree Museum

There's an article in today's Irish Times about Katie Holten's Tree Museum and her upcoming show at the Hugh Lane as a part of the Golden Bough series. The Tree Museum was a public artwork that examined people's relationships to trees in the Bronx area of New York through an audio guide featuring recordings of local people. Below is a short video about the Tree Museum and the audio recordings are available through her website.