Exhibition specifications

• Available mid-2025.
• The exhibition best suits spaces 700 – 1000 square metres (7,000 – 10,000 square feet).
• Ceiling height minimum 5 metres (16.4 feet) recommended for 4.5m projection screens.
• Minimum 12 week hire period.
• Children’s publication available.
• Includes both large-scale wall projections and interactive floor projections, a bespoke and responsive soundscape synced across all galleries, supporting physical scenic elements, and interpretative text.
• All key technical equipment (including projectors and interactive tracking sensors), as well as the projection screen system, is available.

• Antopia features 8 gallery spaces

  Intro & Science: Presenting key scientific background about ants, the Intro gallery helps to contextualise the digital experience for visitors to set the stage for the digital colony experience to follow. This space also provides venues with an opportunity to showcase their own collection material on ants.

  Pheromone Wash: This space represents a visitor induction into the colony as welcome guests of the ants. Visitors are introduced to pheromone vision via the “Follow Me” pheromone, which will allow them to interact with and lead the ants once inside.

  Pheromone Hub: As visitors cross into the digital colony, they pass through a colourful cascade of the colony’s unique, signature pheromone. With each further step, visitors leave a wake of coloured pheromone trails, which ants will follow. This space is a gateway into the rest of nest as well as a visually awe-inspiring destination to observe, play and learn how to engage with ants.

  Mother Queen: Step to the beat of the colony as visitors encounter the queen ant. Visitors are invited to amplify messages to the queen via stridulation stations. Stridulating to the right beat helps the queen know how many new eggs to be released, which can then be tended to by visitors and ants alike.

  Nursery: Visitors experience the three stages of early ant development and assist the ants in caring for the young via pheromone trails. When visitors successfully lead ants to the right spot, the ants will then tend to the baby ant in need so that they can progress into the next developmental phase.

  Pantry: Here, visitors will work in parallel with the digital ants as they assemble physical 3D fungus towers. These towers act as food stores for leaner times, but this gallery also exemplifies the physicality of ant life and their ability to communally create impressive structures for the good of the whole.

  Outside: Now it’s time to venture outside, but it all looks different from the perspective of the ant. Weaving through giant blades of grass the size of trees, visitors will encounter and assist the ants in working together to collect food and traverse a dangerous landscape. Also on view in this space is the ants’ symbiotic relationship with aphids, which they protect from predators in exchange for their honeydew, a key ant resource.

  Outro: Visitors have left the ants behind but now have a new understanding of the world we all share. Upon exiting the digital colony, visitors zoom out and gain a snapshot of the role of the humble ant within our ecosystem as well as a look at different ant species from around the world.

Audience and outcomes

Antopia is perfect for families, kids and adults.

• Visitors will feel more connected to each other and our ecosystems. They’ll recognise that we live in - and are part of - an astonishingly complex world that’s bigger than any one individual or species.
• Visitors will relate to ants in a new way. They’ll notice ants out in the world and regard them with new positivity, curiosity and appreciation.
• Visitors will understand that there is more to the world beyond human perception. By discovering and playing with ant communication, visitors will become aware of new layers to our environments - our world is more amazing than we thought.

Tour itinerary

To be announced soon.