Ant Farm: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

ArtForum, April, 2004 by Pamela M. Lee

The inflatables neatly illustrate the attractions of a new architecture fashioned from vinyl or polyethylene: The ambition behind these shape-shifting structures was to produce cheap, instant cities used for social gatherings and alternative living arrangements. This taps into Ant Farm's DIY mission, which took inspiration from Brand's book, once described by Todd Gitlin as a "Sears catalog for the New Age." Pneumatic architecture was not only a function of technological experimentation but was meant to offer sites for communal enjoyment, participation, and education. The retrospective thoroughly documents how these inflatables formed the basis for various "workshops" across northern California, and the group's Inflatocook-book, 1970, featured in an adjunct gallery, details how anyone could get in on the action. Ant Farm's signature space-age escape pad, known as House of the Century, 1971-73, implied the "freezing" of the inflatable form in ferroconcrete, as suggested by the house's rotund dimensions and bubblelike windows.

Yet it is perhaps the deflated character of these pneumatic experiments that best explains Ant Farm's larger motivations and in the process justifies the overriding appearance of the show. A signal virtue of the inflatable, after all, is its capacity to store and travel flat: Its portability depends on its collapsibility. The transparency of the inflatable, moreover, signals openness and the revelation of information. (The inflatable, we could say, is the proverbial glass house of the new age: nothing to hide.) Taken together, the flat and the transparent stress the communicative potential of an architecture that reaches laterally across time and space, and its ambitions for enlarging its audience along the way. It's a model of architecture that corresponds to the social organization of the group, which besides core members Lord, Michels, and Curtis Schreier saw a commune-style revolving-door membership as its activities moved between San Francisco and Houston. (In this regard, it's critical to note Ant Farm's collaborations with some of the most important players in the burgeoning field of video--TVTV, Videofreex, Michael Shamberg's Raindance Corporation, and T.R. Uthco.) This notion of architecture as a space of mediation is explicit in Ant Farm's ideas for the "electrovideo landscape" of Freedomland, 1973, and it found its most visionary expression in the proposal for Dolphin Embassy, 1974-78. Drawings for both projects underscore the group's futuristic--indeed, utopian--ambitions. Shaped like a kidney bean and housed under a plastic roof, the "leisure time zone" Freedomland was imagined as a three-acre complex of restaurants, shops, and a TV studio: the world enclosed in a bubble. An even loopier conceit, the Dolphin Embassy was established as a nonprofit research foundation in the form of a mobile laboratory. A watercraft christened the Oceania was raised on triple hulls with room in the base for human/animal communion.

If Ant Farm's architectural projects are marked by an engagement with the pneumatic, their iconography is equally informed by the group's interest in the nomadic as represented by the automobile. Ant Farm evinced a deep, perhaps surprising faith in the car as a model for the mobility of information. Far from subscribing to environmental doctrine against the evils of American automobile culture, their romance with cars was steeped in hitchhiking lore and narratives about individual freedom tied to the customization of the lowrider and the flower-power VW van. As the Berkeley show amply demonstrates, Ant Farm's various proposals for "truckitecture" and other car-inspired phenomena suggest a newly emergent citizenship bound by flexible networks of communication. The techno-saturated Media Van, 1971, for instance, was a '71 Chevy outfitted with surveillance equipment and "hard-ware reminiscent of a B-52," whereas plans for Truckstop Network, 1970, imagined a "service matrix" for free-floating nomadic citizens liberated from conventional spatial arrangements.