#barcode art

WAR OF THE ANTS — self-portrait in static, signal, and ants

Before Processzine, before Ezra, before the barcode + thermal print experiments, there was War of the Ants. A personal, sprawling, 4000×3000 grid of chaos and order, analogue and digital, cosmic and mundane — a mirror of my own inner noise: misophonia, tinnitus, overthinking, endless mental chatter.

Part visual/conceptual artwork, part encrypted personal archive, WOTA threads together metaphysics, physics, philosophy, space, time, duality, entropy, CRT static, QR codes, ISBNs, and ants (both as metaphor and as pixel swarms). The ants here are both cosmic microwave background noise and human civilisation: moving, building, destroying, networking, fragmenting.

The piece explores:

Order vs Chaos: turning thought noise into patterns, only to loop back to static.

Duality: light/dark, above/below, mind/matter, birth/death.

Entropy: half-lives of media, links, and memories — even static changes over time.

Micro vs Macro: you can’t see the whole picture and the detail; you choose your resolution.

The Unknowable: black holes, other minds, inaccessible truths.

The book goes deeper — expanding on ideas, documenting hidden references, and giving better access to material normally trapped in the massive digital form (or only legible if printed several metres wide).

It is also a self-portrait. A map of obsessions, curiosities, and fixations. A precursor to my later experiments in signal/noise, interference, and mediated self-representation.

This is the last copy — retired from Amazon, now filed on shelf 5066004A, above the VHS recorder. One copy, one artefact.

(Photos: inside spreads, table of contents, QR swarms, pixel decay, black hole pages, and the ants themselves.)