Ant colonies have no one in charge. Thousands of workers organize themselves into trails, nests, and bridges with no plan and no ruler, and a hungry worker that asks a nestmate for food is fed, mouth to mouth. Whatever order a colony has comes from below, out of countless small acts of looking after each other. The queen does not govern. She lays eggs.

Formations turns that claim into a political experiment. Up to 150 ants per room live under a seeded queen whose archetype — Sovereign, Dictator, Diplomat, Anarchist, and eight others — sets how hard she recruits, how stable her rule is, how far her influence reaches, and the physical atmosphere of the room. Her colony has two impulses: to herd, copying whatever the crowd is doing, or to aid, feeding the neighbour beside it. Each room tests what happens when a ruler is placed over a society that does not need one.

The colony runs on its own time. It has seasons of plenty and scarcity, calm and agitation, and every so often a hardship: a hard winter, a flood, a drought. In nature, hard times tend to strengthen cooperation rather than break it, and here that is mechanical. When times are hard, the herd's pull weakens and the colony turns to feeding itself. No outside data enters the room.

The queen speaks. On significant events — the colony tipping into the herd or into mutual aid, a rupture, a hardship, a formation locking in — a short statement appears near her position marker, typed out character by character. Each line is generated in real time by a language model given her archetype, the state of her colony, her own prior statements, and the truth she half knows: that ant colonies run themselves and a queen only lays eggs. A Dictator denies it; an Anarchist embraces it. She does not repeat herself, and over time her voice accumulates. Queens in different rooms are occasionally aware of what queens elsewhere have said.

There is no fixed version of Formations. Every session begins from a seeded state and develops in real time, and no two runs of a room unfold the same way.

The artwork lives at this URL as an open-ended public study. Visitors can move among rooms and observe how different systems organize themselves, or fail to. There is no object to acquire and no preferred outcome; observation is the form of participation.

Every worker is either fed or hungry. Its food runs down as it moves, and it occasionally finds more on its own. A worker in aid with food to spare reaches for the hungriest worker beside it and gives it half the difference; the overlay draws each feeding as a short blue tie. Being fed is how a worker is drawn into aid. Herding works the other way: it is imitative, and the more of its nest is herding, the likelier a worker is to join. A starving worker slows down and loses its place in the formation.

The queen is seeded at room creation and fixed for the room's entire lifetime. Within her influence radius she recruits workers toward her own impulse, and some resist. The Dictator, the Sovereign, the Demagogue, and the Opportunist only ever build herds; a Reformer or a Visionary may lean toward sharing. Each archetype keeps its colony within its own population range, rising and falling with the seasons.

Each archetype bends these dynamics in a specific direction. The Dictator locks her colony into rigid herding and suppresses sharing, so hers is the hungriest room. The Anarchist does not rule at all: she recruits no one and gives no one anything to resist. She lays eggs, sharing runs freely, and her colony holds its shape by feeding itself. It is slow to form, hard to break, and strongest when times are hard. The Agitator combines strong recruitment with high volatility. These are real mechanical differences in how each room behaves over time.

The room itself is part of the queen's portrait. Its tiled floor accumulates seeded wear according to her stability, mood, and governing style. Boundary-to-boundary fractures split individual tiles, branches produce chipped junctions, neglected sections disappear, and Reformers leave visible repairs. A colony that looks after its members also looks after its floor. Under the Anarchist, wear follows the colony's hunger rather than her own instability. Vegetation follows the same logic: archetypes produce different densities, growth habits, clearings, paths, and flowers, and the Anarchist's room grows wild and self-seeded. Political character becomes environmental condition.

The camera also has a political temperament. Dictator rooms tremble during rupture attacks; Agitators jolt; Demagogues pulse; Recluses drift; Visionaries move with a slow, suspended wobble; and the Anarchist's room breathes slowly and evenly, because no one is in charge of the camera either. A queen's mood can modify that signature: Erratic and Fractured leaders introduce unstable vibration, while Volatile and Impulsive leaders produce a quicker tremor. These movements affect only the rendered view, never the underlying agent positions, and are disabled when reduced motion is requested.

Colonies continually resolve into named formations — lines, rings, blocs, chains, fields, and symbolic figures, among them a circled A that nobody draws and everybody holds — as the balance between herd and aid shifts. The analytical overlay exposes the pressures behind those structures through influence rings, feeding ties, tracking marks, recruitment arcs, cluster boundaries, and guide lines. Scan mode temporarily strips the room into a technical reading. Under Dictator rule, sufficiently low cohesion and organized protest can trigger rupture: loyal workers charge dissenters, the formation breaks, and the camera registers the impact.

The twelve queen archetypes are political typologies mapped onto behavioral parameters. They describe structural modes of governance: how a leader recruits, how stable her rule is, how she responds to dissent. They are not commentary on specific political positions. One idea runs underneath all twelve: every ruler here presides over a colony that could run itself.

An archetype is expressed across several synchronized systems rather than through color alone: agent dynamics, preferred formations, colony capacity, queen morphology, speech, vegetation, floor condition, and camera movement. The adjective attached to each queen adds a second seeded layer, allowing two rooms governed by the same archetype to behave and feel differently.

Population scale is part of each archetype's structure. A sparse Recluse room is not a failure — it is correct. Moving among the twelve rooms reveals how the same seasons are transformed by different systems of influence.