Description: This collection contains videos by media collective Ant Farm. Formed in 1968 by Chip Lord and Doug Michels, 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.
Our complete collection of Ant Farm’s work can be found here.
Subjects: American Politics, American Culture, Protest, Political Protest, Performance Art, Multimedia Art, Twentieth Century, Chicago Politics, Chicago History, American History
People: Chip Lord, Doug Michels, Curtis Schreier, Douglass Hurr, Hudson Marquez, Gunnar Birkets, Nancy Cain, Marylin Lusetkin, Tom Weinberg, Skip Blumberg
Dates: 1971-2017