Last serious trip on Pipeline. What am I filming? The road. Camera pointed down the road. Regular and HDR video.

Could be used for detecting Blue Morphos, but also sitting with and observing this slice through the forrest.

First thought is just boring. Dead forrest with an occasional jungle truck or Blue Morpho. But there are some decent soft metrics one could probably pull from this. This constant, jungle monitoring camera. Daily weather patterns, wind, leaves falling, sounds, tree movement, general movement along transect, traffic patterns.

Chased butterflies. Figured out how to make Hamatam army-ants retreat.

It was a different day knowing that these probes and pokes would be my last.

Thinking about how tracking shots on a dolly look so beautiful because they are a rigid, grammatical way of representing 3D information. Each tracking shot is the temporal equivalent of a gorgeous data visualization.

Thought up a possible full title for my thesis-

Digital Naturalism: Cybiotic Media and Digital Biocraft for Exploration and Dissemination

6/21/2012

Let’s hurry up and get some facts down. Quick for memory.

Early to bed. Up at 7:30 but not going till 9. K_____

Just went to cecropia lot for last bits of footage, sugar water testing and termite rebuildings.

Turns out they can rebuild one of these tunnels within an hour.

Long-ish lunch discussing experimental ideas for Peter with Stephen. Back to parking lot. Tested whether ants prefered the taste of human blood over sugar water. They really seemed to like the blood.

Met with Yann returning from San Blas.

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Wanted to go to Bambi talk. It’s impressive how organized biologist are in this STRI commune. (http://www.stri.si.edu/english/about_stri/seminars/index.php)

The talk was all booked however. Peter said his roomate wasn’t going, so I subbed for him. Turns out that guy wasn’t actually registered, but when I showed up to the guard guy, my real actual name was on the list. (Of course I didn’t notice that until after I told him I was Willie, got awkward when I told him my real name was andy)

Got a ride in the boat.

Saw Ummat’s talk. One of the best I’ve been to out here!

Came back to record Kenro’s interview, and attend Victoria’s going-away party.

6/20/2012 (recorded 6/22)
Long part of 2 day-long day.

Down at 330, Up at 5:30 for canopy tower visit. Saw blue cotinga.

All girls were super tired. They left to go sleep. I stayed in jungle for work. More army ants.

Found em, experimented with them. They were raiding leaf cutters. Pipeline road serves as a decent permanent transect. Elucidates animals corssing through the forrest.

Made it back (walking) around 1:30. Ate changed, prepped for my talk. Lots of mad rushing around. All the parts and projectors and arduinos i needed were somewhere else. The talk was a huge success though! Biologists seem easily impressed by decent presenting and have an impressive enthusiasm for attending these sorts of things. I’ve never really seen anything like it before.

Finished chatting at 6:45. Packed up, went with Peter to eat at 150B. Asleep at 10:45. Decided to donate my arduinos and prototyping equipment for the residents of gamboa. Hopefully they will play around with these things!

Bullet Ants

With Marc Seid’s original plan of lifting a bullet-ant infected log into a container, and having several spotters, we successfully managed to collect and entire colony of Bullet ants! There were some hairy moments but we ended up with a full colony, queen and all!

Once we had them though, it was sort of tricky to figure out next steps. We kept them in the dish but quickly learned they were very strong and could escape most situations. We had to recapture them twice!

Caught 6:30 ride with Vauter to the Rio Limbo area of Pipeline. He drops me off from the truck and says the army ants are around here. He says this matter-of-factly. He drives off, I look down and there is a snakey, unilateral line of an army-ant raid at my feet. There they are.

Walked back to town around 11:00 am. Grabbed a ride with BAT GIRLS to bakery. Spanish was too shitty to order specifics so I just said, “Uno de todo.” Bag of delicious for $7.

Went to 2 talks at Tupper. Great talks. Fun chats after. Sushi and later Partying.

6/17/2012|

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First morning  with official housing again! No longer homeless! Down 3:50 Up 9:00

Huge breakfast, work on robotic woodpecker. More random difficulties in making a portable servo motor behave like a woodpecker than I would have thought. Pays off though.

The Azteca ants respond like crazy! [Update Peter actually published some science about this]

Crazy lunch. Join Stephen Pratt in pipeline for army ant hunt. Find nothing. Great hike however! Go back home to the ridge to film our captured bullet ants. Watch fight club and write script for cecropia documentary with Peter. Get back to 150 to film bat girls experimenting with bat. I set up camera array and do my custom calibration technique. Since I’ve never actually worked with many multi-cam tracking systemes, I just dance in front of the cameras shouting numbers for long enough to hope that something i get is usable. Hit bed at 2:45.

One of the biggest stressors faced by the Technojunglier is losing equipment. I find that 90% of things I lose actually stay with me in some form. Usually they are just hidden in nooks or lost in areas of quick decision placement (like when rain strikes).

It can be interesting when a seemingly innocuous peripheral is lost, for designing its replacement / or dealing the  consequences FORCE you into the mindset of this article. Forces you to understand exactly what the thing does, and why it was made this way and not that way. Puts you in the role of the thing. [Update thought, oooh what some Object Oriented Ontology up in here from losing things?]

Going hard and strong. Yesterday shot more Cecropia documentary footage. Shaved a tree, squirted it with nail polish remover. The ants seem not to bite as hard these days. For some reason I’m a little freaked out that I may be developing a tolerance to their venom. Walked to grab lunch. Paid cinco at a shitty shop. Pesco de seca. God it’s disturbing ho much more you viscerally recognize a person as more human, more like oneself when you understand what they say. Perhaps people of different languages should be barred from opening their mouths upon meeting. At least for a while. Can only share more universal communication like pantomime, gestures, or tones.

After lunch struck out for the interior jungle to do my Morse Code ants experiment. Insects, rain, and darkness crept in as I toiled, absorbed in my prototype. Decided to leave via a through-the-jungle route. Poor, ultimately adventurous idea. Blockages, flooding, disorientation, fatigue.

My cosmic guiding forces lead me to a steep viney bluff covered in garbage. I crawled up up and emerged muddy, with visible stink rays, in the back of a dinner party in the backyard of someone’s vacation home. It was across the street from

[end of entry]

Did ant-based morse code today.

Ended up being a far more interesting project than I had thought it would be. At first, merely considered it a rote exercise in one of the most basic digitally augmented interactions I could place in the field. Servo with blocking door + Arduino.

But when actually doing it, performing these actions for hours with the ants, I flooded myself with new questions and concepts. Did not count on this.

1) This project features a time-dependent blockade. This is quite unlike anything these ants would experience in nature. Some sort of living creature, like an animal or plant, crossing or lying in their path could block the ants for a short or extended amount of time. This middle ground, the semi-permanence of blocking on-and-off with a regular frequency, seems unnantural.

2) What should be used as a signal? Presence or absence of ants?

3)What temporal limitations are there? Better data would come from longer blockades, but the more permanent the block, the more likely the ants will be to start a new route altogether. Short pulses give lossier data due to differences between ant walking speeds. Different limitations are also caused by different types of ants! Different limitations can also occur due to time of day, the mood of the ants, or the density of particular castes of ants that happen to be forming the current trail.

4) Factors affecting signal. -Traffic jams destroy data—> releasing too many ants before a critical junction (such as when the ant path turns to climb over a root) stop the clear sharing of information across a path. Cleanest signals come from smooth, already formed paths. The basis of this type of sinalling is that the ants move continuously with an average speed and density. Now that I think of it, these factors should be true of any signalling media, from semaphor to fiber optics. They all must have irregularities which do have some sort of impact on our communications, but so much effort has gone to quash these effects that we view certain systems (like fiber optics) as perfect models. Doing this experiment exacerbates communication problems not found much more in our high-speed data transfer systems. These ants bring the signalling quirks to the foreground at macroscales.

This can be thought to model the larger, metamessages in our new society. Not the direct, instant messaging we have mastered, but the social filtering and wide-dissemenation that we are still working on streamlining.

6/11/2012|

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Stephen Pratt arrived today. Just as super nice and helpful as always! Bought and brought me waterproof boots and got Peter some extra collection vials and SD Cards.  Right now, they are out dealing with headquarters in Panama City. I’m out all day in the field.

Last Saturday|

—————— went with Ummat into Oleoducto and 3D filmed some chubby ants. Found a gargantuan bee crawling and flying.  Thought it was a tarantula at first. Back into town at 1. Relaxed with other scientists by sneaking into the hotel’s luxury pool featuring a swimmup bar and hot dogs.

Feeling euphoric all day. the jungle was misty and brimming with creatures. Went to catch the 5:30 bus into Panama City. It fails to show. Taxi man pulls up, says bus is broken. I say I don’t beleive him. We haggle until I get an $8.00 fare for the 50 minute ride to the city. I wander serendipitously into Casco Viejo (the part of town I was meeting our friends). Fantasmo BBQ tuna was served off the balcony of a crazy apartment. Ginger and Coconut Ice cream to follow. Dance so hard that everyone in the club stops to cheer me on. Seriously.

Down 4:10 Up 9:00  Slept on roof. Came back on bus with 88 people and 22 seats.

Power nap and then Cecropia filming with Peter.

Decide to look at cutaway for filming. Leads us to WANT TO COLLECT a live colony. First try with just cutting a tree open in the parking lot. Went poorly.

Ants everywhere. Pain (annoying pain) everywhere. Lost the queen.

2nd try was more thought out: Chop Tree at base. Toss into truck [andy has to hold in truck with barehands -not as well thought out of a part]. Race home. Layout sheet on ground [Andy waits for Peter to get sheet while holding swarming ant tree-again not as well thought out]. Chop tree into small bits on the sheet. Cut off leaves. Wrap in sheet. Toss in garbage bags. Toss in mini-fridge for 1/2 hour to calm them down. Pull out one stick at a time. Run downstairs to other sheet. Cut up. Aspirate into tefloned bowl.

6/14/2012|

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Went to talk on Barro Colorado Island (BCI). Apparently huge river systems, like the Mississippi or Chattahoochee basins are now more of humongous highly controlled public utilities. Scientists, regulators and politicians fight to adjust flow metrics in specific parts. It’s weird coming to panama to hear a whole speech about the Chattahoochee.