Thursday 9 October 2025, 5 pm
Afrah Shafiq
Moderated by Filipa Ramos
Introduction by Faina Yunusova
On site
Auditorium D 1.04, Tower Building, HGK Basel FHNW
Online → Livestream
Supported by Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia
If the ant hill is the internet (or the brain)
and each individual ant is a single byte of data (or a neuron)
what place does the individual ant/data point (thought) have
on the outcome of the colony, fabric of the internet (or the workings of the brain)?
Afrah Shafiq is a multimedia artist based out of Goa. She intertwines archival findings, history, memory, folklore, and fantasy to create a speculative world born of remix culture. Her work takes hybrid forms that bring together text, sound, animation, code, and sculpture to create interactive, sometimes simulated atmospheres to experience and unlearn. She often seeks ways to retain the tactile within the digital and the poetry within technology.
Building on her interest in the overlaps between the physical and the digital, the virtual and the real, technology and the handmade, Afrah Shafiq will be presenting her latest long-term project Where Do the Ants Go?, which brings together ant colonies and algorithms. This project follows her interest in algorithms and looks at an existing tradition of algorithms inspired by ant behavior, such as Langton’s Ant in the 1980’s (a two-dimensional Turing machine with a simple set of rules but complex emergent behavior), which created pre-programmed ant colonies in c++ that not only regulate themselves but also create their own systems, to the more recent field of the “anternet” that discovered how data control protocols on the web are directly reflected in the way ants are deployed in their search for food. Drawing from this research, in the multi-player game Where Do the Ants Go? players interact with a virtual colony of ants to explore the linkages between algorithms and consciousness or how abstract invisible phenomenon defines behavior.
