For this event, supported by Franklin Furnace Fund, aricoco shared her new video piece and we invited a biologist/chemical ecologist, Dr. Qian “Karen” Sun to give a talk on“Social Communication in the Insect World", followed by the presentation of live ants and termites by the local entomologist Lawrence Forcella.

PIPORNOT's Superorganism 101, video by aricoco

The video piece explores the existence of insect society as a superorganism -- a highly specialized altruistic community, where an individual is dependent on the greater system for survival. PIPORNOT’s Superorganism 101 follows an absurd narrative, which mimics the form of an introductory class. In this video, I used footages of an interview I conducted with other scientist, Aniek Ivans, who study the social evolution and behavior of social insects, as well as the footages of science lecture by Yuko Ulrich, another former Rockefeller post-bacc fellow scientist, and her slides and research materials she provided me for the video.