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.

6/8/2012|

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Went to field with the bat girls along pipeline road. First time out here in the evening. They were disappointed. The intense rain is maybe keeping the bats in hiding. Caught about 8 bats in the evening, all AJ’s and some other species name that starts with a soft C? Both are wicked fruit-eating bats. They sometimes look cute and fuzzy, sometimes the visual description of evil.

——side note, earlier today two evil dogs chased me around town earlier today and one tried to bite, until I brandished my tripod like a giant clobbering club——-

I’m intrigued and sort of horrified at the amount of work put in by these field biologists, and how little quantitative data is retrieve. This data is quite low density, they probably only take in a couple hundred bytes of information per hour. Unfurling and setting up tangled nets in the middle of the dark jungle every evening in order to get a few dozen bytes seems insane. This must hint at the values of the overbearingly-dense qualitative data beaming into the field biologists at every moment; for if this wasn’t extremely valuable, this type of research could not continue. The high-fidelity collectors and analyzers already built into the scientists have to be doing the most powerful research in the field.

While waiting around for bats, the girls asked me about what exactly I do, and what my research is about. For someone in the early drafting stages of his PhD proposal, this was one of those on-the-spot questions that can be tricky to elaborate on. It was super useful for me to chat about it. I busted out a (what I thought was pretty) well-formed history of the media theories building up to my Digital Media program, my research in computer vision, and how I planned to tie digital performance studies to digital behavior analysis.

A thesis seems like one of those things that makes more and more sense, the more and more you talk about it. Everytime you let those words out into the air, and they solidify into the past, you polish away the layers of bullshit that you were previously worried your arguments rested on.

Note to self: being a digital designer, I need to not worry when I’m not doing digital things to their uptmost-when I’m not exploiting the medium as well as possible. Instead, consider what factors are pushing me to do the opposite, or sub-optimal. Like why am I writing this diary in pen and paper? Think about all the reasons why. Diminish the annoying feeling of not being as digital as possible, just analyze one’s activities as effectively as possible.

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Heavy rain, taxi down canal, smooth salsa on radio “Vamos… Vamos.. un otra vez.” Feeling sleepy. Pick up others. Smooth temperature. Wearing button up shirt. Feel like a god.

6/8/2012

Up early. Getting up early isn’t hard out here. There is no, “uuuhhhhggggg, what time is it”-sort of feeling, more of just an urgent realization that the sun is up, and that lots of things in the jungle will only be visible for 12 more hours.

Ate Kristina’s weird mutant carrot cake for breakfast. Pretty screwed up as far as carrot cake goes. She accidentally put in 4 times as many carrots and was terribly undercooked, then put back in the oven and burnt. It tastes like eating spoonfuls of mushy carrot covered in raw egg. Probably not a good idea for breakfast.

Caught a velvet ant. Looks so cute! Stings like crazy! I was lucky not to get hit!

Body has acclimated to jungle life. Am no longer leaking water as constantly. Still am mentally camel-ing food whenever I get the chance though (hence the carrot cake mutant). Out with Ummat in jungle to old Gamboa Road. Found Ummat’s machete lying in the jungle; look super badass.

Abandoned leaves from Leaf Cutter Ants

There’s an ant that lives in the trees and uses its wide head to glide. This might be that ant.

Yesterday thought about phenomenology (I’m like the bomb in “Dark Star”). Though about situated practice. Its light and dark sides of accelerated, biting design, along with the inescapable, hyper-fixated, animalistic concentration on narrow parts of broader pictures. I contrast this sort of thinking, done with one’s entire body stuck, mounted, in the problem, with the disembodied reasoning possible in the lab or at home. In the disembodied thought, you do battle with the infinite possibilities of the mind. With a situated design, you fight the other infiinity, the unending complexity of the real world space. Kundera describes these two infinities in  The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

According to him, the first infinity that man fights is that of the physical world. Exploring, voyaging, probing. Then as we mature, we explore the second infinity of ideas. For me, however, I feel the reverse. As a child, I would learn about things in books, and explore these ideas constantly as I churn them over in my head. Concepts like “Army ants can wad up in masses and float in water” would intrigue me, and I would think  onto other aspects of this concept like surface tension, and how long an ant can hold her breathe. Then when someone discusses this topic, I would have an internal feeling of, “oh yes, I’ve been there. I’ve explored that concept.” But now that I am pushed up against the actuality of these sorts of ideas, I find that the idea and implementation (while not dissimilar) are utterly different experiences. The concepts still apply, the ants do hold each other and float, but the reality is a whole new area to explore. Also, I feel that it’s not just a deeper, higher-resolution set of concepts, but a different way of experiencing and thinking.

Early prototyping to see ant trail reaction to quick changes in heat.

Another note: It seems that e need 1.5-2 feet minimum distance for the GoPro 3D to converge correctly. Will do tests with Narrower 1080p option to boost subject pixel quantity at this distance.

Interviewing Ummat about his work