Found on every continent except Antarctica, there’s one animal almost every human has encountered. Forming winding lines across footpaths and climbing up walls in search of a forgotten sandwich, ants are everywhere. Melbourne Museum’s new immersive digital exhibition, Antopia, invites visitors to shrink down to the size of these omnipresent insects and see the world from their perspective.
Antopia follows Melbourne Museum’s first immersive digital experience, Tyama, which premiered in 2022. Unfolding across six-metre-tall screens, 35 projectors and 65 speakers, Antopia explores how ants communicate and collaborate to gather food, care for their young and nurture their colony. Exhibition producer Jillian Clark says that when developing the exhibition, the production team avoided anthropomorphising the ants. Instead, they chose to highlight the ways ants and humans are alike.
“Everyone has a direct experience of ants. They’re so ubiquitous – they’re so common,” Clark says. “They’re relatable, they have a lot of activities where they work together collaboratively, so in a lot of ways they do parallel human life. So we do get a little bit of that overlapping, and that kind of, ‘Oh, they do that? We do that!’”
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SIGN UPAntopia invites audiences to become part of the ant colony, which is considered a “superorganism” because the colony functions as one big entity. Visitors follow the ants through a five-part gallery, engaging with them through sound and movement. Before entering, you learn the basics of ant biology through a display of over 1000 ant specimens and items from the museum’s collection, including models of a bull ant and a white-footed house ant.
“The big, important part about understanding the ants before entering the large, digital immersive space is how they use pheromones, which is their main form of communication – where they can speak to each other, they can leave messages, they can relay information, and it’s really crucial to ant life,” Clark says.
As visitors enter the first room, pheromones are represented by an array of colours, allowing you to see the chemical scent trails ants use to communicate with each other. You can then interact with the ants, leading them to different parts of the room and helping them relay messages to the queen, the leader of the colony.
“At the centre of our digital ant nest is the central hub, and that is where you first enter the digital immersive ant nest, where you can then test out that pheromone mechanic. You can get familiar with how to communicate with the ants, how to bring them around. And you get this larger vista of ant activity within the larger structure of the ant nest,” Clark says.
This is followed by four more specific chambers within the ant colony to explore. Visitors are invited to engage in play and physical interaction in two of these rooms. In the pantry, you can build physical structures to mirror the fungus structures ants build as food stores. In the queen’s chamber, there are “stridulation stations” allowing visitors to help the ants pass messages to the queen by creating the sounds they use to communicate with each other.
The exhibition is built using the same gaming engine which used in Tyama, which won Large Project of the Year at the 2023 Australian Museums and Galleries Association Victoria Awards.
“I think our biggest excitement with seeing [Antopia] come to life is that it came to fruition in a really nice way, where we’re seeing visitors organically engage and understand and interpret the spaces,” Clark says. “We did work really hard on this one to be clear about how visitors engage with digital content and how to best optimise our sensor tracking, our ‘unreal’ world and the storyline we’re trying to fold into it.”
Antopia is open now and runs until March 10 at Melbourne Museum. Children’s tickets cost just $10 – find out more and get your tickets at museumsvictoria.com.au.
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