simulating collective behaviour
there is something deeply unsettling and beautiful about watching a thousand things move as one. no conductor. no leader. just local rules, repeated endlessly, producing something that looks like intention.
swarm xiii was an installation built from arrays of leds and simple electronics. each unit could only sense its nearest neighbours -- their brightness, their timing. from that limited awareness, patterns emerged. waves of light rolling across surfaces. clusters forming and dissolving. moments of stillness followed by sudden coordinated shifts.
i was thinking about bird flocking. fish schooling. the way insects seem to share a mind they don't actually have. i wanted to build something that felt alive without any central intelligence pulling the strings.
the rules were deliberately simple. match your neighbour's state, but with a slight delay. respond to change more than to stillness. that was enough. the complexity came for free.
what struck me most was how visitors reacted. people would stand very still, watching, waiting for the moment the whole field would shift together. when it happened -- and it always did, eventually -- there was this quiet intake of breath. the beauty of decentralized systems is that they surprise even the person who wrote the rules.
the piece breathes. it moves. it is not alive, but it performs something that feels like living.