Aggregation + Space Architecture = The Swarm Manifest: Representing Environments of Flux and Constant Feedback
Ayrton Laucks
ARC 242 Prof. Eversole
TA Morgan Noone UGA Nicholas Chung
Preamble:
Provoked by environmental alarmism, pod architecture, and the emergence of swarm intelligence, this exhibition posits representations of new realities formed from the aggregation of interfaces. These artifacts are representative of a complex world of constant flux and feedback loops, a world of real-time communication and change. Artists, engineers, and architects have grappled with emergent pluralities and complexities in attempts to represent the constant change of these environments. Some of these artifacts deal directly with their attempts at representation while some emerge seemingly on their own, as monuments of a new organization. These monuments are not built of stone but exist in the interfaces and connections of the digital world, modulated and created through real-time change. The stage for this new reality is set in the fluidity and vibrance of the constant virtual flux: the swarm reality.
Introductory Essay:
Aggregation forms the basis of the emerging reality of the swarm. It is the means through which the small relates to the large, the “formation of assemblies of particles brought together by collisions, held in contact by surface forces.”1 It is experienced as a multidisciplinary phenomenon, ingrained in ideas of the natural sciences, object-oriented programming, material culture, architecture, and systems of complexity. Of particular interest are its manifestations in physical systems (herds, swarms, particles) and their counterparts in mathematical models. The definition put forward by Elimech posits aggregation as a whole composed of particles2. These particles are influenced and move throughout an environment based on “surface forces” and exist as inert subjects to the forces which they are subjected to3. While this is helpful in the case of describing natural particle systems, there is something missing when this idea is translated into mathematics and computation. Henderson-Sellers and Barbier get at this issue, laying the groundwork for a computationally based definition of aggregation.4
This definition of aggregation stresses the existence of emergent properties and resultant properties, meaning that there are some characteristics of the whole that cannot be determined from an examination of the parts and
some characteristics that can.5 They also stress that a part cannot simultaneously exist as a whole at the same level of complexity.6
As systems scale and computation power grows, this sensibility towards the part as inert and the whole as simply emergent become problematic. Observations of collective intelligence in swarming behavior pushes these assumptions to their limits, questioning the qualities and quantifications of groups under aggregative and swarming forces. When the inert particle is scaled to the human, the relationship between the individual and collective becomes synonymous with swarm intelligence.
Architecture beyond the safety of Earth’s atmosphere pushes these ideas of separation and connection to their limits. Space architecture emerged in a contemporary of aversion to “the outside”. Environmental anxiety of the 1960s and 70s laid the groundwork for the formation of completely internal systems both in space and on Earth.7 Lydia Kallipoliti explores this idea and its relation to “closed worlds” stating that the inability of humans to cope with the true extent of the Earth and its systems manifested first in the space program and then in counter-cultural groups interested in autonomous living.8 This creates the idea of the pod. In recent work by MIT and NASA like the TESSERAE Project9 and the International Space Station, the pod is manifested in its purest sense. It is a container, an ecosystem, an autonomous unit that completely constructs the world of its inhabitants. At the same time projects like Hans Rucker’s Environmental Transformers and Archigram’s Plug-In cities explored earthly manifestations of the same ideas. The pod emerges as something that contains the individual yet modulates its interactions with the world of the whole. It is an interface. A “boundary condition that is at the same time encountered and worked through toward some specific end.”10
With the dawn of the digital age the ideas of the pod and interface progressed toward the non-physical and virtual. By the beginning of the 2000s, the computer had emerged from its technological and computational niche as an important player and filter in culture. After another two decades, the computer and its corollaries took over all aspects of daily life. Key in the
functioning of these devices is the monitor, the window, the looking glassthe screen or interface through which the gaze of the individual is met with its virtual counterpart. This interface takes the form of “a cinema screen, a wall in an art gallery, a building and a book, a new situation manifests itself.”11 The pod is totally reformed in accordance with the digital shift. From the individual in the domain of the pod emerges the individual with a device, a connection to the rest of the world in the palm of their hand. “All culture, past and present, is filtered by a computer, mediated by its interface.”12 Just as the pod was the mediator of the part with the whole, the outsourcing of the collective to the digital, virtual space resulted in a shift in the means by which this mediation occurred. The physical pod situated in a collective housing architecture was part of the physical whole, but became separate from the virtual whole. The virtual interface was thrust into this power vacuum, mediating and reinstituting the relationship between individual and collective.
Contemporary to the emergence of the virtual interface as the new pod was the expansion of virtual space and initial attempts to both simulate the physical world and move its processes to the virtual. In this, the history of the interface as the creator of environments of feedback loops and spaces of constant flux and interaction was born, and was governed by a proto-swarm logic. Habitat, created by Lucasfilm, was the first multiplayer virtual environment, where “players” were projected into a 2 dimensional virtual space as avatars, where they could interact with both the environment and each other.”13 Crucially, this interaction did not take place through a single computer but through each individual’s personal computer.14 Simulation Network (SIMNET) developed by DARPA developed these ideas and expanded into 3 dimensions, incorporating a high-speed connected network of individual simulators which knew the locations and movements of the other avatars in real time.15 This trend continued with the development of the internet, a network that connected and has now connected billions of people - changing, developing, morphing, and reinventing itself with each interaction. The digital interface as the manifestation of the pod mediates these changes, and creates systems of aggregation in which each particle has the depth of the whole, adding complexity on complexity and leading to
the development of the swarm.
But these manifestations of the digital interface continued to grow smaller and more multiple. This is a process called ubiquitous computing, or “the shift which away from computing centered in desktop machines and towards smaller multiple devices distributed throughout the space.”16 The diaspora of the computational device into the hand, the pocket, the face, the home, and every aspect of life along with its continued tendency toward smaller and smaller packages constitutes the emergence of the swarm. As means of interaction become ubiquitous and the layering of physical and virtual environments becomes thicker and more complex, patterns emerge. These patterns are new, unexplored, and chaotic, yet they have underlying structure - the structure of swarm logics.
The foundation of the differentiation between aggregation and swarming underlies this chaotic organization. It is quite simply that swarm exhibit signs of intelligence.17 Where the part and whole in aggregation are lifeless, emerging as simple results of constituent forces acting on individual particles, the swarm explodes with the contingencies and complexities of a life form. This is a resultant of the closed interiors of the pod - the individual entities separated in space but brought together through interface. While the interface may be a bottleneck,18 the bottle it finds itself in is fluid, dynamic, and broad in possibility. In fact, Hookway posits that it is the very existence of the modulator - the very existence of the means of simultaneous separation and unification - that the new relationship between part and whole emerges.19 “The interface demands of the entities or states that enter into relation with it a surrendering of claims of self-sovereignty and of identities distinct from the threshold, as it is the threshold that becomes the standard by which these are defined and the source from which their agency is derived.”20 As such there is a constant relationship between part and whole as each pushes and pulls in every action and reaction. The swarm is manifest. Swarm intelligence and its theories play a pivotal role in computer science. In its broadest sense it is concerned with “analyzing the collective behavior of decentralized and self-organizing multi-agent systems.”21 These systems are based directly on the natural world, emerging from the studies of herd-
ing and other social behaviors in animals, bacteria, and slime molds. Like conventional computation techniques, the studies of these swarms involves the introduction of an outside source (input), and a corresponding behavior (output) of the group.22 Typically, these observable behaviors (outputs) are generalizable and fall under patterns that can then be applied to logic gates.23 They begin to imply some sort of collective intelligence - existing not in the individual but in the whole. Collective intelligence, or “a group of individuals acting collectively in ways that seem intelligent”24 is an important facet of swarm theories. In computation it is driven by two main factors: self-organization and division of labor.25 Self-organization concerns the emergence of features and the arrival at decisions or outputs in real time while division of labor refers to the part-to-whole relationship, mirroring that of the pod and society or the interface and the collective.
Computational models are important in the understanding of swarm intelligence methods and the general principles of swarm dynamics. They speak to the ways in which individuals, pods, or interfaces relate to their aggregations in dynamic, constantly changing ways. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), introduced in 1995, was meant for the simulation of groups of animals but has become ingrained in the swarm intelligence literature.26 It posits that cooperation is the fundamental instigator of swarm behaviors, being that each particle (individual member) changes their behavior based on its own and other member’s experiences.27 Just like Habitat by Lucasfilm and other examples of virtual spaces, particle swarm theory describes a world of constant flux and feedback loops, a reality in which real time changes propagate and construct the means of behaving and being in the virtual.
The intersection of Game Theory and Swarm Intelligence provides the basis for exactly why swarm dynamics are so complex and powerful. Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (IPD) is a model proposed by Game Theory that artificially simulates the landscapes of cooperation and dissent.28 Chiong and Kirley posit that N-player Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (NIPD) provides a better means of understanding the way that interactions between individuals in cooperation and dissent change over time, constructing a “lattice-based… evolution of cooperation.”29 While simple in nature, the core idea of these
models is that individuals can choose to either cooperate with the group or dissent with the group, with each choice bearing consequences or rewards unknown to the individual (as the behavior of the rest of the individuals is masked).30 As time and scale change, the behavior of the individuals in this model changes drastically,31 alluding to an idea that particle interactions and their corresponding outputs are modeled by non-linear relationships as opposed to the constant “surface forces” of aggregation.
PSO is defined by constant relationships of attraction and cooperation, but this is not how humans, and other possible particulates, interact with each other in the real world. Game Theory and NIPD thus present a means of complexifying the models of swarm intelligence. Cartwright and Hendtlass explore this idea, proposing a heterogeneous swarm logic.32 By extending the possible behaviors of particles from a single variable of attraction to the dialectic of attraction or repulsion, both complexity and computation power increases dramatically.33 Understanding that this dramatic increase in power and effectiveness was enabled by a simple doubling of the particle states, more flexible particulates to one order of magnitude higher would result in incredibly complex but powerful computational models.
Swarm theory’s applications in various tasks of optimization along with its real-world prevalence in natural aggregative systems brings about questions as to why it is effective. Why do herds organize themselves in this collective consciousness? Why do its models predict and optimize to such a great degree?
Information Theory may provide the key to understanding the performance of the swarm. This theory, put forward by Claude Shannon, states that the important aspect of sending and receiving information (communication) is not the meaning of a particular message but it’s non-meaning, or what the message does not mean in the context of possible meanings.34 Because instruments of communication must be able to send and receive all possible versions of a set of available messages, there is always a risk that the message received will be different than the message sent.35 This introduces the concept of noise, or entropic anti-information, which corrupts and changes the original message in its path from sender to receiver. It is this noise - this
breakdown of the integrity of the message - that constitutes the central issue of information theory and the efficacy of the swarm.
The first means by which the swarm succeeds surrounds new ideas of surveillance and field logic. The shifting miasma of points and information contained by the swarm reverses the Foucaultian metaphor of the Panopticon when it comes to human sight and the visuals of discipline36. Instead of relying on binaries - true/false, seen/unseen, good/bad - the shifting conditions of bluetooth, radar, and computationally derived systems can be described as functions or fields, since from the point of view of these new technologies, every point in space has a particular value on a continuum of possibilities.37 This spectrum-based approach to communication is less susceptible to the issues of noise as it allows for more possible outcomes and a greater flexibility in these outcomes.
The second, and more powerful, strength of the swarm in the realm of information and communication derives from its decentralization and redundancy. Here, the power of the part and its mediated relationship to the rest of the parts and the whole results in fragments of reciprocity and redundancy. While deemed inefficient in many conventional notions of communication, the swarm is powerful for the very fact that it is redundant. The chances of a particular communication being incorrectly sent or received vanishes as that same information is repeated through the swarm, aggregating through the systems of constant feedback and bombarding each part with the information to the degree that the communication simply cannot fail. As the parts, the pods, the interfaces of the swarm grow, its internal communication grows exponentially. It is in virtual spaces that this power is felt the strongest. Advances in data capacity and processing power along with the connection of the world through the internet and its interfaces are resulting in explosions of complexity and swarming.
The swarm is manifest.
From natural processes its tendrils lurk under the operations of all complex systems. It feeds off the constant fluctuations of the world, nudging, push-
ing, and ultimately reshaping the very means by which we interact and the environment in which we conduct these actions. It pulses in likes, retweets, shares. It transforms images, text, and cinema. It shakes the very core of the ways in which we come to terms with reality and ourselves, questioning every action, every choice, every step, every glance, every thought, every reaction, every moment in the conscious continuum of our existence.
Yet it does not have a language. What it has in terms of influence and world-shaping power it lacks in clarity and representation. It courses under the fabric of our every action yet its whole is transient, escaping the ideas of language and theory. It is in the visual and virtual arts that the true scope of its structure is glimpsed. Works, research, and emergent phenomena of past decade begin to glimpse the inner structure of the beast, pulling its form and un-form into understandable parcels. While incomplete, these fragments are projective in formulating new sensibilities towards the collective swarm.
Some are emergent phenomena made possible by the aggregation of interfaces across a virtual environment. Unsolicited and largely unexplored, these artifacts emerge from the very fabric of the swarm. Some are visualization-based forays into the abstractions of a world whose complexity we see only faint glimpses. Projectively created through focused observation or broad aesthetic understandings, these works are pulled with great difficulty from the web of the swarm.
Some are computationally-based attempts to understand the world through swarm-like behaviors and infrastructure. These are means of quantifying the world of the swarm by harnessing its own constructive powers.
All three are means of glimpsing the swarm. They are possibilities and fragments, incomplete renditions of a world of which we cannot see and feel completely. It is through their synthesis that the impossible becomes possible, the unseeable is seen, and the human race is at last compelled to face the forces which structure its existence - the swarm is manifest.
Emergent Phenomena:
“Some are emergent phenomena made possible by the aggregation of interfaces across a virtual environment. Unsolicited and largely unexplored, these artifacts emerge from the very fabric of the swarm.”
The virtual is a space of change. It is a space defined only by its ability to be undefined - its ability to morph, transform, and wriggle its way out of any formal definition or categorization. It is a space of constant feedback loops, a space where the busiest intersections in the world are dwarfed and the physical bounds of the world are broken. Through autonomous interfaces, physical users are granted access to these worlds. Through the aggregation of these interfaces, the virtual world is inundated with the constant flux and feedback that marks the emergence of swarm logics.
Thus, from the brightest parks to the darkest alleys, pieces and parts of the swarm are manifest. They are unplanned, unsanctioned, ungoverned, and unexplored. They speak to a reality coursing beneath our physical facades, influences politics, economics, and society at large. In the examination of these holes - these violent punctures in the fabric of centralized meaninga new understanding of the forces governing our existence can be explored and ultimately understood.
ThebesAndSound, 2B2T, Minecraft Render, WindowsCentral, 2021, https://www. windowscentral.com/how-2b2t-minecraft-server-was-almost-toppled-exploit.
2b2t
Minecraft Factions Server, 2010
As Minecraft’s oldest anarchy server,38 2b2t is situated as the epitome of interactive world building and world destroying. The server, or platform on which many online accounts can interface with the same world, began in 2010, months after Minecraft Multiplayer was enabled.39 As an anarchy server, the server was unique for its little to no oversight or rules, resulting in a complex mix of creating and griefing. Griefing as a term and idea has been used in video games since the 1990s, and corresponds to a malevolent actions taken to destroy something that another has built or created without their permission.40 It is the combination of lack of oversight and the tendency of the minecraft community to grief and sow chaos that creates this dynamic, complicated world of action and reaction, creation and destruction, order and chaos.
Modulated through the interaction of individuals using computer interfaces and manifest in built work on the server, the landscape of 2b2t is pure carnage. From monumental figure ground messages to debris fields stretching for miles,41 the formal language of anarchy is manifest, and can be understood as emerging from swarm dynamics. Each individual logging onto the server represents an autonomous unit that orients itself within the world of 2b2t independently. Interactions between these individuals and groups of individuals (factions) result in world-changing formal creations. The spawn point of the server represents this dynamic perfectly. As the place where most interactions between autonomous units (players) takes place, the spawn point of the world has been built, unbuilt, changed, griefed, destroyed, controlled, and emasculated to the point of no return. Every block, every 3D pixel has been morphed and changed countless times, resulting in an artificial landscape. This landscape does not conform to the world generating rules of Minecraft, but to the complex social rules of the swarm.
r/place Reddit, 2022
r/place is a Reddit interactive board in which individuals are able to change 1 pixel of the communal 1000 x 1000 pixel image every 5 minutes.42 No pixels are locked, no pixels are safe, yet what emerges is a fluid and contingent landscape of patterns, politics, and relationships mediated by the autonomy of each interface. Patterns emerge, communal thoughts emerge. The size and resolution of particular images bear a relationship to the size and strength of their following. (amount of people) x (how often they change squares) = “power” or “size of influence”. Hidden within the image and its temporal manifestations are conflicts and resolutions, animosities and symbiosis, from the community fight against the VOID to the struggle of Canadian redditors to draw a leaf, r/place embodies the complexities of the world.
This artifact represents the emergent aesthetic of the virtual swarm - an aesthetic that represents the relationship between individual autonomous interfaces and their aggregative wholes. It integrates constant fluctuation, feedback loops, and systems of change to create an amalgam of power and relation. Pictured are thousands of separate communities, individuals, failures, and triumphs. Each one has a following. Be it one, be it many, they come together to make a collective mark of the digital world.
u/Iovefull, This is what Luxe Finals Look Like, Web Screenshot, Reddit, 2019, https://www.reddit.com/r/FortniteCompetitive/comments/b7v831/this_is_what_ luxe_finals_looks_like/.
Luxe Cup Finals, aftermath
Fortnite, 2019
Like most multiplayer video games, Fortnite involves the occupation of a digital space by a set of human and non-human entities that interact with this space through interfaces (in this case, the computer, the mouse, the keyboard, the controller). This real-time interaction of interfaces, along with the emergent qualities of building and its strategies in Fortnite: Battle Royale, allows for the creation of static representations of the movement of bodies through a space as a swarm.
Building exists primarily through the interactions of individuals (or their interfaces). When a virtual character encounters another, they must protect themselves in order to avoid mutual destruction. As the landscape of these interactions and their physical forms plays out over the course of a match, the concentration of players, their interfaces, and consequently their interactions are forced into smaller and smaller confines. The forms of building then explode sectionally, as distances in planometric space are converted to sectional space, creating a landscape that is constantly transformed through the three modulators of structure in the game: building, destroying, and editing. What is left after the annihilation of all but the singular victor is a complex battlefield of the war that was fought, as pictured here. This war’s territories were not drawn on a map but were constantly in flux as feedback loops between players and interfaces ran their course, leaving behind an aggregative monument of relationships, feedbacks, fluctuations, and chance.
Levente Juhász, Pokemon GO user adding fake footsteps to OpenStreetMap, Web Screenshot, ResearchGate, 2020, https://www.researchgate.net/figure/a-Smartphone-running-Pokemon-Go-PGO-with-its-map-interface-and-b-a-PGO-useradding_fig1_340233654.
Pokemon GO Niantic, 2016
Pokemon GO represents ways in which a seemingly benign mobile game can change the world and the means through which the city operates and orients itself. Released in 2016, Pokemon GO is based on the successful Pokemon franchise and brings the adventure of catching and training pokemon to the real world. Using Google Maps and augmented reality built into each phone or device, this game allows individual users to explore their real world searching for pokemon and interacting with other trainers (users).43 Randomized pokemon spawns throughout the world serve as literal swarm attractors, with individuals playing the game flocking towards rare pokemon sightings. Pokegyms and pokestops are ways that individuals can interact with the swirling miasma of players directly, as one can place these locations to allow users to battle and gain experience (pokegyms) or get useful items (pokestops). These virtual locations form another set of attractors, further influencing the way that individuals engage with public space. In fact, there are many reported incidents where store owners with any of these virtual attractor locations have increased their business many times over. Circumstances like start to ask the question of just how far this virtual game can go in reforming public space and interaction.
Through extensive research regarding the relationship between virtual and physical geographies in Pokemon GO, scientists have determined that the game has resulted in large-scale shifts in human mobility patterns.44 As a result, game serves as a means of virtually adding and changing the attractors and repulsors implicit in human interactions. It speculates on the possibilities of controlling the very way that individuals interact with the built and public environment through swarm modulators. In the case of Pokemon GO, the shifts in human movement tend toward more dangerous interactions with transportation systems. On multiple accounts, Pokemon GO has resulted in an increase in traffic accidents and even deaths.45 On the other hand, the appearance of Pokestops and Pokegyms can be used to map demographic and socio-economic levels within and without the city, as the movements that the game inspires tend to reinforce existing disparities and biases within the built environment.
Eve Online, CCP Games, 2019
Eve Online represents one of the most vast and populated shared virtual spaces. It is composed of over 5,000 solar systems, hundreds of galaxies, and almost 10 million individual users. Released in 2003, the game is premised on a single vast swath of space that the user interacts with however they wish (sandbox game).46 In the wake of firm rules and oversight, there is a complex system of politics and anarchy within the Eve Online world, manifesting in the creation of four large factions (loose government-like organizations) and hosts of smaller political players. This results in a multiscalar political miasma of cooperation, conflict, anarchy, world-building, and world destruction.
Despite the vastness of the online world, scarcity of resources and power dynamics result in conflict. The true beauty of this virtual world as an emergent swarm intelligence comes in its battles. “The Massacre at M2-XFE” is known as the largest of such battles, involving over 4,000 individual ships and 5,000 individual users.47 It marks the largest virtual battle to ever take place, and resulted in another record in the most money lost in a virtual battle, with losses (based on in-game currency exchange to the dollar) placed at around $700,000.48 As the culmination of months of tensions between the factions PAPI and IMPERIUM, the battle represents the formal possibilities of swarming behaviors in an online environment, modulated by individual users, hierarchies within factions, and the extensive politics between these factions. At each scalar power level autonomous units act in swarmlike behavior, creating a battlefield landscape dynamic and spatially fluid.
Abstract Visualizations:
“Some are visualization-based forays into the abstractions of a world whose complexity we see only faint glimpses. Projectively created through focused observation or broad aesthetic understandings, these works are pulled with great difficulty from the web of the swarm.”
Swarms are hyperobjects. They are viscous, attaching themselves to surrounding entities and complicating the interrealtionships between their components. They are nonlocal, stretching across time and space through their networks of influence, working on multiple scales simultaneously to form and miasma of complexity. They operate on scales of geological time, but also Planck Time, integrating entanglement and constant feedback loops.49
As a result swarm logics cannot be encapsulated within singular forms of representation. They are transient, fleeting, yet at the same time bear a heaviness through their entanglement with the world(s). All attempts at representing the swarm have failed, yet there are particular artifacts, objects, and visualizations which come close. They speak of movement, of change, of feedback. They abstractly represent the billions of interactions that occur in our midst daily, pulling meaning out from under the swarm.
On Broadway
On Broadway is situated as a contemporary foray into the representation of the complex city. Based on works like Every Building on the Sunset Strip by Edward Ruscha, the creators constructed a data visualization that seeks to quantify and describe the city in real time. In order to do this, they turned to the web and social media, scraping data in real time to inform the creation of the work.50
This emphasis on real-time change is imperative for the work’s relationship with the reality of the city. Streetview photos, instagram posts, twitter posts, and their subsequent analysis over time reveals a means of quantifying complexity and feedback behavior, representing the movements of the swarm of people and objects within the city over time. The creators state “a city talks to us in data” revealing overlaps in wealth, activity, walk-ability, vibrance, that ultimately constitute the whole of Broadway.51 It is through the aggregation of these individual posts and points of data from individual interfaces that the city in its complexity can be viewed. As such, Broadway emerges as an overlapping, undulating, multidimensional surface of complexities and contradictions, compressed into a readable form in On Broadway.
MIT Senseable City Lab dir. Carlo Ratti, How can we use social media to measure the impact of slow zones on street life, Web Screenshot, SLOW ZONES, MIT Senseable City, 2022, http://senseable.mit.edu/slow-zones/.
The operative element in this artifact is not the conclusion but the process. It lies not in the prescription for slow traffic zones in Paris but the means by which this prescription was oriented. This is a question of representation, namely, how does one represent the movement and social activity of the city? For this study, the students chose to represent the flow of people and social happenings by looking at geo-referenced twitter data.52 The result is a continuously updating map of social connection and urban engagement.
Movement and density are the hallmarks of this representation. Blips and points in the social fabric are projected upward into the sky, seemingly joining the previous data collected. This imagery speaks to the movements of people and how these groups interact with their environments through interfaces as a swarm.53 It is very specific in its concept and form, as it is only through the isolation of a single contingent system that such clarity can be achieved. There are thousands of ways in which individuals interact with the space of the city, yet the students chose virtual interactions. There are thousands of ways in which city spaces are virtually interacted with, yet the students chose social media. There are many ways in which social media platforms virtually interact with city spaces, yet the students chose twitter. There are many ways in which twitter as a social media platform interacts with the city, yet the students chose geo-referenced posts. The layers of specificity continue, and through the beauty of SLOW ZONE’s representation one is not only able to glimpse the complexity of human interaction and its environmental precipitators but also the other interactions that go unseen and unrepresented, invisible to the casual glimpse but imperative to the swarm.
Jan C. Schacher, Flowspace. Screenshot from Video, jasch.com, 2021, https:// www.jasch.ch/flowspace.html.
“Impacts” - Flowspace
Jan C. Schacher, Daniel Bisig, Martin Neukom, 2009
Music presents a fascinating language with which the complicated world of constant feedback loops can be represented. Following The legacy of works like Xenakis’s Metastasis, “Impacts” by Jan C. Schacher seeks to use audiovisual representation techniques to model swarming behavior. As part of the 2009 Milieux Sonores exhibition, the piece was “performed” within a dodecahedron outfitted with surround sound and TV panels.54 On top of the low ambient sound captured from inside Notre Dame, interactions between virtually-modelled particles result in piano notes, changing in intensity and length depending on density of particles and the specifics of each interaction.55 These same interactions are represented visually on the LED panels that form two of the sides of the dodecahedron. What results is a transformational sensory experience of the swarm - its organizations, its chaotics, and its beauty.
The coding of the particles that create the piece is explicitly based on swarm intelligence. As part of a greater series, “Impacts” focuses only on the idea of attraction as a swarm-based mechanism.56 A three-leveled hierarchy of particles each reacts to the attractions of the particles one level lower. The lowest level, or primary attractors, are controlled directly by the visitors and users of the exhibit. Utilizing a touch screen below the LED panels, users can see and manipulate the particles directly, able to drag and change the characteristics of the music and visuals with a touch of the screen.57 This transforms the piece into a didactic exhibition regarding the forms and transformations of bodies under swarm logics, and while abstract, represents the world and its forces in a profound way.
The internet is a complicated and dynamic space constantly in flux. It is so complicated that few representations have come close to encapsulating its nuances, micro-politics, and fluidity in a meaningful way. Utilizing abstraction, though, one can get a sense of its scale and power - the ways in which it transforms and changes both its users and world(s) that they share. The Shodan Pingmap is one of the most comprehensive of these visualizations.
The basis of this map is very simple. John Maherty wished to understand and quantify all the existing devices that are connected to the internet at any given time. As a result, he quite simply sent out a ping - a query that provides a positive response to whatever hears it. Over the course of 17 hours, Maherty is able to pinpoint each return ping geospatially, thus creating a map of every device connected to the internet.58 While static in each iteration, the transformation of these maps over time speaks to the fluidity and constant flux of the internet. From blank areas in geopolitical enemies of the west to population centers in the United States and Europe, these maps are powerful tools in representing the ways in which virtual and physical worlds overlap. They speak to political, socioeconomic, and human rights issues on the largest of scales, bringing to light inequity and western power issues while at the same time speaking to an interconnected globe. As an abstract representation, it is imperfect in the worlds it projects, but these worlds are a step closer towards understanding the forces that govern human interaction - swarm forces.
The idea of human movement is entangled with swarm logics. On its largest levels, these forces describe the migration of individuals as refugees, with individuals moving in, out, and through countries and territories in the search of home. In 2008, Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro were commissioned to find a better means of describing these movements and the complex relationships that they engender. This culminated in the creation of Exit, a video-based reframing of the refugee phenomenon in the contemporary world.59
One of the most profound aspects of this presentation was a series of particle-based representations of the inflow/outflow of refugees over time. It speaks to the foamy, miasmic nature of this phenomenon and the forces at play. It is a representation of the ways in which people, ideas, and homes move throughout the world(s) - combining, interacting, repulsing, and ultimately transforming the world(s) that we knew. Each particle acts autonomously, each person has their own fears, hopes, and dreams, yet DSR’s representation speaks more to the convergent intelligence of the group. While autonomous, the geometries of the masses - the swarm - form particle-based geometries similar to what DSR represents. Like all other abstractions of real-world phenomena, it is incomplete. The particles are too ordered, the forces too simple, the individual interactions are glossed over. What emerges, though, is a complex series of actions and interactions that begins to speak to the way in which human movement changes over time at its largest scales.
Computational Accuracy:
“Some are computationally-based attempts to understand the world through swarm-like behaviors and infrastructure. These are means of quantifying the world of the swarm by harnessing its own constructive powers.”
There is a reason that the swarm is emerging as the fundamental building block of entity interaction within a complex space. Despite its redundancies, overlap, and general disregard for the well-being of its individual constituents, using swarm intelligence as a means of mapping, analyzing, and generating has obvious benefits. For one, the redundancies that multiple units create are insulation against the entropic forces of decay. Analyzed through Shannon’s Information Theory, swarming is vastly superior to centralized communication as it provides more methods and paths for communication to be correct. Units are constantly receiving input and outputting input to all surrounding interfaces, resulting in a complex and robust network of communication.
Whether it is mapping the surface of another planet, the roads on which our computers will soon drive, or providing a blanket of Internet access across the entirety of the globe, swarm intelligence is emerging as the most accurate and robust means of advancing in accuracy and speed.
High Definition Maps - What Are They? Web Screenshot, Lidar News, 2022, https://blog.lidarnews.com/high-definition-maps/.
DRIVE Map
NVIDIA, 2022
Advancements in AI systems and autonomous driving have led to a need for High Definition (HD) Maps of transportation routes to facilitate the driving accuracy of autonomous vehicles. The process at the forefront of this solution is the DRIVE Map by NVIDIA. DRIVE Map utilizes DRIVE Hyperion data suites mounted on cars that traverse and map transportation routes.60 The data from these sensors is then compiled into a comprehensive map accurate to 5cm utilized by autonomous vehicles to plan and execute routes.61 It is important to note that this data is collected by a “fleet,” or swarm, of cars that each are actants and interfaces in the creation of the total map. This artifact purports real-time accuracy, utilizing swarms to map and remap constantly, creating a virtual reality just as real yet different from the reality humans encounter. The act of outsourcing data collection to the “fleet” (swarm) reverses the previous notions of observance from above (satellites). While these images provide comprehensive totality in their data collection they do not have the accuracy or efficacy of the swarm of vehicles constantly collecting data.
This creates issues in how HD maps are updated, as roads traversed more often will be mapped and updated more often, leading to greater confidence and a greater likelihood that autonomous vehicles will choose the given route. The city’s traffic flow is literally reconfigured to the will of the swarm.
Look up at the sky and most likely a small satellite will be looking down at you. Decentralized and autonomous, Starlink satellites form a blanket around the very surface of the Earth.62 Their low altitude allows for low-latency internet connection across the globe, but means that its web must be constructed from swarms of small satellites as opposed to fewer large ones. Due to the curvature of the Earth, each low-orbiting Starlink Generation 2 mini only “sees” a small portion of the globe, but this vision is intensified and stronger.
Because of the sheer amount of satellites necessary to cover the globe in this way, they are constructed as a swarm, providing a blanket of connection through their multitude and redundancy. Each individual satellite is autonomous, including a star tracker to pinpoint its location, krypton-powered thrusters to manipulate trajectory, and a collision avoidance system to allow it to maneuver unharmed in the congested upper atmosphere.63 While relatively stable in their orbits, their independence allows for flexibility that only swarms can provide. They are concentrated most in the latitudes of dense human civilization, forming a dense band around the globe, but this band is able to morph and change to reflect the internet usage of the world. This illuminates one of the biggest benefits of the swarming system: its redundancy. Where previously blackouts of a single satellite would mean a crippled communication system, the swarm of Starlink satellites means that any hole in coverage can be easily filled through the cohesive movement of multiple units. Despite over 700 inactive or destroyed satellites, the system still functions adequately with the remaining 3500 active satellites.64
Getty Images, 3D protein structure of an antibody, Web Image, CNET, 2022, https://www.cnet.com/science/biology/googles-deepmind-ai-predicts-3d-structure-of-nearly-every-protein-known-to-science/.
FoldIt
David Baker, Seth Cooper, 2008
FoldIt is a video game created by David Baker, Seth Copper, and a conglomerate of University Labs and Research Departments concerning the development and understanding of protein folding.65 Utilizing the concept of crowdsourcing, the game is an attempt to outsource the analysis and generation of protein structures to the general public.66 Instead of using supercomputers and extensive simulation, this game relies on the ingenuity of the uneducated individual, with some of the most important and influential discoveries coming from people with no background in protein structure and folding.
In its reliance on the power of autonomously guided units working together towards shared goals, FoldIt uses the power of swarming and environments of constant flux in order to collectively map the world of the microscopic. As discoveries and advancements are made, the landscape of the game changes and morphs to meet the new reality, constantly providing new possibilities and problems for its users to solve. Where other uses of swarms result in high accuracy or constantly updating maps, FoldIt results in a new landscape of information and knowledge able to be reintegrated into the mechanizations of science. It uses the power of redundancy and chance to its benefit, as for every big breakthrough, there are thousands of protein creations and folding sequences that do not work. It is the competitive nature of each autonomous individual - dumb to the complex understanding of protein structures and folding but powerful in relation to the abstracted rules of the game - that creates the breakthroughs in their interaction with other users and the fabric of the game.
grasshopper3d, Swarm[al] Morphology 03 [Swarm], Web Image, Pintrest, https:// www.pinterest.com/pin/375980268861976595/.
Swarmies!
NASA, 2014
In 2014 NASA launched an initiative attempting to explore ways in which swarms, as opposed to single larger robots, could both map and collect samples of extraterrestrial bodies like the Moon and Mars.67 Their advantage lies in their maneuverability and fluidity with regards to natural obstacles along with their ability to cover more ground faster and with less resources. NASA hopes that eventually these robots will be pivotal in finding water ice, liquid water, and other important geological artifacts on a lunar or martian surface. NASA engineers also envision that these robots could be used in commercial, Earth-based situations, especially in pipes and water mains.68
The key aspect of Swarmies that makes them more advantageous in exploration and data collection on an extraterrestrial body is their speed and redundancy. Compared to centralized, single rovers, the swarm of Swarmies would be able to investigate an exponentially larger surface area in less time. Conceptually based around ant colonies and the ways that they map and forage their territory, Swarmies act independently of the group besides location avoidance (repellent) during regular use and location convergence (attraction) when something of note is found.69 In this way, the swarm of robots would act as autonomous units and receive the benefits of decentralization while simultaneously utilizing centralization if there is danger. Similarly, their numbers and redundancy in operations (all the robots are programmed the same way) means that if one malfunctions, the rest can continue on with the mission.70 This is a vast improvement to the singular rover, which is completely unusable if so much as one part breaks. This also plays a role in communication. Past rovers were controlled partially from Earth-based engineers, meaning that the rover had to wait 3-8 minutes each way for instruction. By decentralizing the means of exploration, there would be fewer communications between Swarmies and Earth, meaning faster and more efficient exploration and problem solving.
Kittiphat Abhiratvorakul, Futuristic Holographic Terrain Environment, Stock Photo, Dreamstime, 2022, https://www.dreamstime.com/futuristic-holographic-terrain-environment-futuristic-holographic-terrain-environment-geomorphology-topography-digital-data-image151485789.
NUVIEW Mapping
NUVIEW, 2023
As a combination of AI Driving HD Maps and Starlink satellite swarms, NUVIEW attempts to map the entire world.71 Simple in words, complicated in engineering, and chaotic in socio-politics, this idea is nowhere near new but largely unexplored in its long-term consequences. Operating through a swarm (or constellation) of many satellites, these point cloud lidar scanners would constantly be on, mapping and remapping the Earth’s surface to great detail.72
The economic and political ramifications of such a technology are enormous. In using swarm methodologies to develop a constantly-updated version of the physical form on which we operate, its power and flexibility become a liability with regard to the wealthy and powerful. As a commercial company, NUVIEW is selling their product. They are literally selling the fabric of the globe to those who can pay. Similarly, the flexibility and redundancy of the swarm means that it could be shifted and controlled dynamically, moving towards mapping the areas of most interest to its backers and customers. What results would be a map of the world through which socioeconomic status is immediately relevant. The low-resolution contours of poor areas and nations would be in immediate high contrast with the exactitude of urban centers. The swarm is powerful and provides an immense amount of computational accuracy, but the politics of its accuracy and inaccuracy are what animates it as a political force.
Endnotes:
1 Elimelech, M. and J. Gregory, X. Jia, R.A. Williams, Particle Deposition and Aggregation: Measurement, Modelling, and Simulation, (Toronto: Butterworth-Heinemann Ltd, 1995),xiv.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Brian Henderson-Sellers and Franck Barbier, “What Is This Thing Called Aggregation?” Proceedings Technology of Object-Oriented Languages and Systems, TOOLS 29 (1999): 238-239.
5 Ibid, 239-240.
6 Ibid, 240
7 Kallipoliti, Lydia, The Architecture of Closed Worlds: Or, What Is the Power of Shit? (Germany: Lars Müller Publishers/Storefront for Art and Architecture, 2018),14-15.
8 Ibid.
9 “TESSERAE: Self-Assembling Space Architecture,” MIT Media Lab, (2021), https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/tesserae-self-assembling-space-architecture/ overview/.
10 Branden Hookway, Interface, (Spain: The MIT Press, 2014), ix.
11 Lev Manovich, “The Genealogy of the Interface,” Self-published, Lev Manovich, (1997).
12 Ibid.
13 Lev Manovich, “The Aesthetics of Virtual Worlds: A Report From Los Angeles,” CTHEORY, (1997): 1.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Lev Manovich. “The Poetics of Augmented Space.” Visual Communication 5(2), (1997): 222.
17 Andrew Schumann, “Logic of Basic Swarm Reactions,” Journal of Physics Conference Series 1479, (2020): 1.
18 Hookway, ix.
19 Ibid, 16.
20 Ibid.
21 Schumann, 1.
22 Ibid, 1-2.
23 Ibid, 2.
24 Adam Slowick and Halina Kwasnicka, “Nature Inspired Methods and Their Industry Applications — Swarm Intelligence Algorithms”, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics 14(3), (2018): 1004.
28 Raymond Chiong and Michael Kirley, “Co-evolutionary Learning in the N-player Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma with a Structured Environment,” Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 5865, Edited by R. Goebel, J. Siekmann, and W.Wahlster, (2009): 32-34. 29
32 Luke Cartwright and Tim Hendtlass, “A Heterogeneous Particle Swarm,” Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 5865, Edited by R. Goebel, J. Siekmann, and W.Wahlster, (2009): 201-202.
33 Ibid.
34 Claude E. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” The Bell System Technical Journal 27, (1948): 379.
35 Ibid.
36 Manovich, “The Poetics of Augmented Space,” 5.
37 Ibid.
38 Kristina T. Litherland and Anders I. Morch, “Instruction vs. emergence on r/ place: Understanding the growth and control of evolving artifacts in mass collaboration,” Computers in Human Behavior 122 (2021): 1.
39 “2B2T Timeline,” The Official 2B2T Wiki, https://www.2b2t.online/wiki/ Timeline
40 Ibid.
41 Victoria L. Rubin and Sarah C. Camm, “Deception in video games: examining
varieties of griefing,” Online Information Review 37(3) (2013): 370.
42 “2018 - Overworld - 100k,” daporkchop.net, https://map.daporkchop. net/#2018_100k_isometric/0/8/815/194/0.
43 Ashley Colley, Jacob Thebault-Spieker, Allen Yilun Lin, Donald Degraen, Benjamin Fischman, Jonna Häkkilä, Kate Kuehl, Valentina Nisi, Nuno Jardim Nunes,Nina Wenig, Dirk Wenig, Brent Hecht, and Johannes Schöning, “The Geography of Pokémon GO: Beneficial and Problematic Effects on Places and Movement,” Uniqueness of Geographical Information, May 6-11, (2017), 1179.
44 Ibid, 1179-1188.
45 Mara Faccio and John J. McConnell, “Death By Pokémon Go: The Economic And Human Cost Of Using Apps While Driving,” papers.ssrn.com, (2017): 1, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3073723.
46 Andres M. BelazaI, Jan RyckebuschI, Koen Schoors, Luis E. C. Rocha, and Benjamin Vandermarliere, “On the connection between real-world circumstances and online player behaviour: The case of EVE Online,” Plos One 15(10), (2020): 1-2.
47 CCP Aurora, “The Massacre at M2-XFE,” Eve Online, (2021), https://www. eveonline.com/news/view/the-massacre-of-m2-xfe.
48 Ibid.
49 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World, (Minneapolis: Univeristy of Minnesota Press, 2013), 1-2.
50 Daniel Goddemeyer, Moritz Stefaner, Dominikus Baur, and Lev Manovic, “On Broadway App,” on-broadway, (2015), http://www.on-broadway.nyc/app/.
51 Daniel Goddemeyer, Moritz Stefaner, Dominikus Baur, and Lev Manovic, “ON BROADWAY,” on-broadway, (2015), http://www.on-broadway.nyc.
52 MIT Senseable City Lab dir. Carlo Ratti, “How can we use social media to measure the impact of slow zones on street life,” SLOW ZONES, MIT Senseable City, (2022), http://senseable.mit.edu/slow-zones/.
53 Ibid.
54 Jan C. Schacher, “Flowspace,” jasch.com, 2021, https://www.jasch.ch/ flowspace.html.
55 Ibid.
56 Jan C. Schacher, Daniel Bisig, and Martin Neukom, “Composing With Swarm Algorithms – Creating Interactive Audio-Visual Pieces
Using Flocking Behaviour,” Proceedings of the International Computer Music Confer-
ence, (2011): 100-103.
57 Ibid.
58 Nickolaus Hines, “This Internet Map Shows Our ‘Connected Worldview,’” Inverse, 2016, https://www.inverse.com/article/19357-internet-map-of-every-connected-device.
59 David Allin and Matthew Johnson, “EXIT”, Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro, 2008, https://dsrny.com/project/exit?search=d9cxrp2y5k00mv.
60 NVIDIA, “NVIDIA Drive Map,” NVIDIA Developer, (2023), https://developer. nvidia.com/drive/mapping.
61 Ibid.
62 “Satellitemap - Starlink,” satellitemap.space, 2023, https://satellitemap. space/?constellation=starlink.
63 “How Starlink Works,” SpaceX, 2023, https://www.starlink.com/technology.
64 “Satellitemap-Starlink,” 2023.
65 “About Foldit,” foldit.com, https://fold.it/about_foldit.
66 Ibid.
67 Steven Siceloff, “ Meet The ‘Swarmies’ - Robotics Answer to Bugs,” NASA, (2014), https://www.nasa.gov/content/meet-the-swarmies-robotics-answer-tobugs
71 News Desk, “ NUVIEW to Map the Entire Globe in 3D with LiDAR,” Geospatial World, (2023), https://www.geospatialworld.net/news/nuview-to-map-the-entireglobe-in-3d-with-lidar/.
Pgs 22-23
IronException, Render Of Spawn (July 2019), Web Image, DeviantArt, 2019, https://www.deviantart.com/ironexception/art/Render-Of-Spawn-July-2019-807199092.
