About the Film

Space, Land and Time

Underground Adventures with ANT FARM

A documentary by Laura Harrison and Elizabeth Federici

Before Burning Man, before The Yes Men, before South Park, before flash mobs, there was Ant Farm, the prototypical underground culture jamming architectural firm and performance art and media collective whose antics and anarchic guerrilla theatre paved the way for future armies of free-thinkers and public artists.

Born in San Francisco out of the subversive counterculture ethos of the 1960s, founders Chip Lord and Doug Michels, and later Curtis Schreier and Hudson Marquez, sought initially to challenge the conventional notions of how buildings and living spaces were conceived. They eventually evolved into an “art agency that [promoted] ideas that [had] no commercial potential, but which [they thought were] important vehicles of cultural introspection.”

For the uninitiated, the inflatable living spaces, extremely strange home designs, and savage guerrilla media commentary will seem all too familiar. 1975’s Media Burn, where a tricked-out Cadillac barreled full steam ahead into a pyramid of flaming televisions, the controversial re-staging of the Kennedy assassination and the iconic Cadillac Ranch could all have been taken right out of a little art show held each September in Nevada.

Luckily, Ant Farm was also an early pioneer of videomaking and documented much of their craziness. This film is a potent combination of video, music, animation and editing that captures the spirit of this underground group, which mixed political subversion and goofy good times to create an art movement that resonates today.