We started design work on the "City of Ants" stand for the Floriculture pavilion at VDNKh in early 2018, commissioned by the Department of Nature Management and Environmental Protection of Moscow, as part of the "Museum of Ants" project, which also included two large stands with ants. The stand took 1.5 years to build and was installed at the site in December 2019. Upon completion of the preparatory work in the pavilion, the stand will be fully populated with an ant colony and launched in normal mode.
Since we were faced with the task of making the best and unique stand with ants in the world, we applied all our experience gained from previous projects, knowledge and imagination in order to fill this art object with all possible options, such as animation, interactivity, illumination, sound accompaniment of events, video surveillance using macro cameras and much more. But the main thing we wanted to achieve was the complete realism of what was happening inside the stand. So that the viewer, watching the ants, could forget that they are ants, perceive them as people running at a frantic pace in their city. After all, initially, the very idea of the "City of Ants" project, which we showed to St. Petersburg residents back in 2016, was to draw a visual parallel between the structure of human society and an ant colony.
This stand has 3 residential buildings, including 1 business center, in the windows of which we can observe the life of ants, their movement between floors and their daily life. 2 railway and 1 tram line have been built, with moving trains and trams, stopping stations, suspension bridges and crossings, along which, over the humming trains, ants cross the tracks. A functioning water pumping station, where ants go for water, a grain storage facility, where ants unload railway cars with grain, a network of roads with cars that turn on headlights and side lights in night mode, and special vehicles have flashing lights and sirens. Everything has been worked out to the smallest detail. Visitors, using interactive control buttons, can start trains, trams, operate carousels in the park, turn on the time of day change mode, in which the stand gradually darkens and turns on the lights of cars, road and sidewalk lighting, windows of houses, architectural lighting of monuments. Advertising video billboards are installed in the city, on which the content of "ant social advertising" specially developed by us is broadcast.
The stand, with a total length of 6.4 meters, consists of three parts: two with urban infrastructure and one water part, 1 meter wide, in the center. The central part is dedicated to the element of water and sea creatures. Inside the water part, there are three transparent tunnels, through which ants, underwater, among fish and aquatic plants, move from one city part to another. We have already successfully tested and worked out such a layout in the first stand "City of Ants", in our Complex, in St. Petersburg. In addition to the tunnels for ants, an underwater tunnel appeared in the water part, through which trains run underwater.
To date, we have already conducted a test colony settlement, with the aim of the initial adaptation of ants to the stand space. At present, the museum is conducting preparatory work before launching the exhibition in the normal mode.
