South Asian Digital Art Archive

Their Dystopia is my Utopia II

Category

In this work, the restless movement of an ant colony is transformed into a reflection on attention, influence, and repetition in online culture. The piece begins with her discovery of a colony nestled inside a brick, which she carefully documented, capturing the uncontrollable chaos of countless small decisions. From these raw images, a single ant was digitally isolated and reproduced, forming a looping labyrinth.

The video manipulation evokes how a single action, message, or idea on social media can be amplified infinitely until it becomes a trend, with followers mindlessly circling each other in endless repetition. What begins as a spontaneous, natural movement is meticulously reorganized, mirroring the way online media and propaganda manipulate chaos into persuasive narratives.

 This work invites viewers to reflect on cycles of imitation and the consequences of collective attention, as well as the tension between autonomy and conformity in natural and human systems.

 

Year Published

2021

Type of Art

Video Art

Theme

Identity
Borders & Sovereignty

Softwares Used

Adobe After Effects

Audience

Everyone

Samyukta Bhandari

Samyukta Bhandari

Nepal

Samyukta Bhandari is a Kathmandu-based multidisciplinary artist and designer whose practice explores the intersections of art, ecology, and human experience. Since 2018, she has been creating works that provoke dialogue around environmental themes, often examining the delicate balance between freedom and boundaries. Through painting, installation, and design-based approaches, she investigates how lived spaces shape and are shaped by natural and human systems. Her current research focuses on house sparrows in Kathmandu—their nesting, breeding, and territorial habits—and how these birds have become deeply co-dependent on human lives. By situating sparrows as a lens to view urban ecology, Bhandari’s work highlights the fragile entanglements between species, raising questions of coexistence, adaptation, and shared survival in contemporary city life.

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