Ant Farm’s 1973 20/20 Vision exhibition framed their prognostication of the year 2020 as a synthesis of four key dates – two past (1939 & 1955) and two future (1984 & 2020) – that exemplified in their collaborative imagination the nexus of a century of American culture, ambition, politics, industry, creativity, technological innovation, and (ultimately) dominance and destruction. The exhibition was presented in Texas, the heartland of the US oil industry, during an international fuel crisis brought on by US foreign interventions. The exhibition featured “readymade” displays of vehicles and fuel pumps, collages of ephemera collected from previous Ant Farm projects, and two key new works: Kohoutek: Dollhouse of the Future, a Barbie-doll scale model of a techno-dystopia in which an all female colony of humans is raised by giant insects for food, and Convention City, an architectural proposition for the 1976 US Presidential nominating conventions where politics fused with a made-for-TV game show set.
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Punk Preservationists envision reuse for Ant Farm building at Antioch College
In the early spring of 1970 members of radical architecture and media art group Ant Farm, alongside fellow travellers SouthCoast, coordinated a seminar on “inflatables” – plastic, air-inflated buildings – on the Columbia, Maryland campus of Antioch College. Ant Farm, at this date, consisted of recent Yale architecture alum Doug Michels and Tulane architecture alum Chip Lord. SouthCoast members Tom Morey and Pepper Mouser documented the proceedings on the new recording medium of ½ inch format videotape.
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