Nicholas ManganTermite Economies

This publication brings together the three phases of Termite Economies, a major series of works produced between 2018 and 2020 with which Australian artist Nicholas Mangan explores the potentialities of animal social behaviour.

For the first phase of Termite Economies, Mangan developed research based on a hypothesis that termites’ abilities could one day lead humans to gold deposits. Phase 2 explored termite eusociality, pheromonal communication, building behaviour, biomimicry, superorganism and swarm intelligence. Phase 3 deployed termite collectivism as a speculative model for hijacking human neural pathways. In each phase, Mangan developed specific methods to explore these phenomena formally, spatially and through moving images. Termite Economies thus explored the potentialities of collective social behaviour and the complexities of systematically exploiting non-human intelligence.
The book presents each phase in the order of the exhibition series. It includes process and research photographs, diagrams, installation images and detail views. It includes an essay by artist Mariana Silva, a fictional text by writer ST. Lore, a conversation between Mangan and cultural theorist Ana Teixeira Pinto, and a re-edited essay by Guy Theraulaz, research director, member of the CAB (Collective Animal Behavior) team, Centre de recherche sur la cognition animale, CNRS.