# SWARM /// Interview of Roland Snooks

Third and last interview for this SWARM thematic. This one is of Roland Snooks from Kokkugia. Roland speaks about his research about multi-agent strategies in his studio and in the schools he is teaching (Columbia, Pratt, Sci-Arc, UPenn, RMIT...)

You are using swarm/network intelligence as a process of creation. Would you say that it is a form of loss of control from the architect ? If it is the case why would you think it is relevant in our era ?

Designing through complex systems, in particular through multi-agent design methodologies, does not represent a loss of control in the design process, however the nature of design and authorship changes. It is a shift from invention of form to the orchestration of processes. Within highly volatile algorithmic design processes topology and dimension are not directly controlled, however the formal and organisational characteristics, which are tied to the internal behavior of the algorithm are controlled through an iterative design process.

Swarm intelligence is based on a neighborhood negotiation; how do you make that happen as a designer ?

Swarm Intelligence involves the encoding of design intent at the local level through seeding agents with behaviors. It is the interaction of these behaviors that generates a collective intelligence and complex order. Consequently it shifts not only the operation of the design process, but also the design intent to the micro scale.

What are the political impacts of such a process ?

Agent based systems do not have any a priori political bias, however the distributed nature of the process offers the opportunity to use this design methodology in a more inclusive or democratic way. The interaction of a diverse set of individual desires are capable of self-organising into a coherent whole without homogenizing its constitutate parts.

Would you say that we are heading towards an interactive ubiquity ? May you tell us a short story about it ?

It is not the interactive aspect of swarm algorithms that are the focus of Kokkugia’s projects or academic research. We are less interested in applying these algorithms for their real-time interactive possibility or for the simulation of reality. Instead we are intrigued by the possibilities these techniques offer for generating new situations and emergent order.

# SWARM /// Interview of Francois Roche

This is the second interview of the Swarm thematic about R&Sie(n)'s work and research.

Interview Leopold Lambert / september 17th

Short stories from an acephala body / f. Roche

You are using swarm/network intelligence as a process of creation. Would you say that it is a form of loss of control from the architect ? If it is the case why would you think it is relevant in our era ?

This notion has to be used carefully, to avoid a direct and reductive analogy between bird, ants and humans. The swarm intelligences work in the nature at the condition to reduce and limit the inputs, but contradictorily, humans are known to de-multiply inputs and outputs, between their perception and the illusion of their perception and the paranoia of the both…

The first who introduce for me the politic hypothesis of Swarm intelligences was Ilya Prigogine in his book ''the end of certainty’, where his thermodynamic analyze showed the opposition between Newtonian and Entropic scientific approach.

- In the Newtonian one, people consider the trajectories of particles as the way to describe a system, where everything has to be in the spectrum of predictability and forecast.

- In the thermodynamic one, people consider the whole system as a permanent and endlessness research of equilibrium and disequilibrium. The knowledge of its disorder, with the calculation of the value of entropy is not only describing it’s convulsively and the dynamic exchange, but it s integrating the non reversibility of the movement as the acceptation of the arrow of time. In this case each particle cannot be entirely predictable in their individual trajectories, and their relationship, their contingent and reciprocity behavior are able to be analyzed and described as a protocol of transformation, of dynamic metamorphosis. By this way the freedom of the system has to be qualified in his mutation with the criteria of exchange linked to internal and external environnement.

In the first case we are talking about determinism and master-planning, where everything has to be fixed, predicted and redacted, and in the second we are manipulating uncertainties, permanent adaptation, and reactive mutation according to the inputs within and around the system.

The swarm intelligences notion could be linked as the second law of thermodynamic > While a system can undergo some physical process that decreases its own entropy, the entropy of the universe (which includes the system and its surroundings) must increase overall.

If we consider the swarm as a pure protocol of neighborhood exchanges, we are reproducing again a new version of closed biotopes, with more complexity, but without entropy. At the contrary, if swarm intelligences become a strategy, a vector to resolve a dynamic conflict (as obstacle for bird), its internal logic will be intrinsically embedded in the reason of the confrontation and the agents of disequilibrium will force the system to react.

We cannot, by this way dissociate swarm intelligences to the final purpose (to avoid the obstacle). We cannot dissociate the emerging aesthetic to the recognition of ‘’causalities and dependencies’’ inputs and outputs. That is for us the first point. Swarm intelligences as to be contradictorily functionalized, or more targeted…

Ilya Prigogine demonstrated not only the importance of this permanent entropy as a factor of knowledge, he also compared the policies, the politic of the both system. On one way, the permanent research of equilibrium and disequilibrium could be compared to a democratic situation, and on the other, at the opposite, the determinism of positioning of each particle (each citizen) can be the expression of a frozen situation, as monarchy or autocracy, or the worst fascism.

But it s not innocent if Antonio Negri, in the Multitudes reactivated this notion, in it s political and social organization term, but he never tried to define the toolings, the protocols which could be able to apply this physiological and ideological approach in a human social contract and organization…

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Swarm intelligence is based on a neighborhood negotiation; how do you make that happen as a designer ?

That is the unknown path we tried to borrow. What could be the data, the inputs we could used to define this individual and neighborhood protocols of exchanges. Could we use naively some cellular automata process and justify that this logic of life and death could be a mimesis of swarm intelligences social meanings. Of course not. That is tricky, naïve and ridiculous.

To take an example: Lsystem describe the mimicry of the branching of the nature but it s never describe the permanent logic of re-adaptation of the growing, of the photosynthesis exchanges and the research of the equilibrium of trees, as incremental and recursive process. We are exactly on the same borderline. Swarm intelligences cannot be reduced to a morphological toolings or computational exercises. It has to be a part of the research, but it cannot be the core of it, still less its technoid alibi. Swarm intelligences is a tool for political and social transformation, its voluntary reduction to a ‘’geek’’ attitude will burn its potential.

For example, in the ‘’Ive heard about’’ experiment, we have first tried to re-question the emission of the desires and own the desires is able to be collected to start in a second step a neighborhood protocol.

We know that the human pheromones (vector of sharing knowledge) are missing or so weak, that we cannot distribute an instantaneous and collective informational network so easily. On another way, we could suspect the language and the notion of ‘’libre arbitre’’ to be too easily influenced and manipulated (Spinoza show us how this notion could become, contradictorily our own lever of slaveness).

To start a protocol of swarm intelligences, we have first to develop the factor and vector of exchanges from something which could be shared…

One way we tried was to analyze the multiple disorder of the human secretion, the body chemical emission, and to introduce a balance between language as the expression of our personal contradictions in the public space and the neuro-biology as a direct analyze our chemical body…Some things between consciousness and pre- consciousness…negotiating the schizophrenia between the vector of the emission of ‘’ libre arbitre’’ (free will) and the chemical secretion of ’’le corps acéphale’’ (body acephala), ‘’le corps chimique, neurobiologique’’. (Concentration of Cortisol, Dopamine, Adrenaline, Melatonin…).

We have developed a nano-particle interface (see pictures) to re-read this chemical aspect with a safe intrusive system (without syringe and blood collect) by analyzing the composition of the air coming from the breathing.

The protocol is:

NANOCAPTEURS INTERFACE – Nanoreceptors, n. (physics, from nanos, 1nm = 10-9 m) -1. Nanoparticles (NP) used to capture and detect the presence of a chemical substance in a particular atmosphere. -2A. Nanoreceptors can be inhaled, making it possible to “sniff” the chemical state of the human body. -2B. Functioning: Like pollens, they are concentrated in the bronchia and attach themselves to the blood vessels. This location makes it possible for them to detect traces of stress hormones (hydrocortisone) carried by the haemoglobin. As soon as they come into contact with this substance, the phospholipidic membrane of the NP dissolves and releases several molecules, including formaldehyde (H2CO) in a gaseous state. The molecules rejected by the respiratory tract are detected using cavity ring-down spectroscopy (C.R.D.S.). This is a method of optical analysis using laser beams programmed to a particular frequency, making it possible to measure the density of air-borne molecules. The wavelength used for the detection of formaldehyde is around 350 nanometres. -3. Consequently, the nanoreceptors are becoming the pheromonal re-reading of the chemical body, as one of the vectors of the negociation between neighbourhood.

This chemical aspect in real time, could work as a substitute of the missing pheromone….

What are the political impacts of such a process ?

We will see…. First it s how this work of three year ago, in a lost territories of Paris, is becoming a subject of research in US as Pratt…I could be afraid if you are not going further, beyond of post-parametric process…

Would you say that we are heading towards an interactive ubiquity ? May you tell us a short story about it ?

Interactive is a word I try to never use. What interest us is to increase the possibility of MPD (multiple psycho disorders) to deliver an other negotiation between fiction and reality. As Alice in Wonderland, where mathematic become the support of illogic, or which appears as illogic (Lewis Carroll as mathematician)

In this case ‘’interactive’’ is something which articulate our paranoia (psycho production) with our biology (physio production)

# SWARM /// Interview of Valerie Chatelet

Valerie Chatelet is the publication director of Interactive Cities, published in 2007 by HYX. You can download her own article from HYX website.

You are using swarm/network intelligence as a process of creation. Would you say that it is a form of loss of control from the architect ? If it is the case why would you think it is relevant in our era ?

Valerie Chatelet: What is pretty fascinating in emergent processes in human situations without any centralized or voluntary organization, is not really their intelligence, but much more their absurdity. We keep calling intelligence patterns which emerges at a superior level from the one where were taken the decisions, even when those patterns are fatal. We are the heir of a fascination for emergent processes which take their roots in the origins of computer science and simulation possibilities. This fascination is still persisting nowadays, in particular for the architects, by the omnipotence that provides the enormity of flux we potentially succeed to manipulate.
Although if anthill are magic/intelligent in their mechanism despite its composing individuals’ simplicity, what emerges from human society is more about traffic jams, congestion phenomena, pollution, resources waste, stock exchange crisis, public space privatization, urban spreading or scattering.
The point is not to simulate those processes, neither to reproduce them but on the contrary to come out of those emergent absurdity. There are thus two intervention hypothesis: the structure or the awareness. Structures which could be architecture works are imposing themselves in a centralized way and find their legitimacy in the fact that they allow to go beyond the emergent phenomena’s insufficiency. What is new nowadays is the move offered to architecture to design, not anymore structures which organize and solve emergence’s anomalies, but to design devices allowing people to become collectively aware of these phenomena and to modify their behaviors in order to avoid their absurdity.

Swarm intelligence is based on a neighborhood negotiation; how do you make that happen as a designer ?

Valerie Chatelet: I struggle to allow people to go beyond the neighboring negotiation and to establish tools which allow them to choose depending on their interests on the one hand, and on the other hand, depending on a sharp awareness of aggregation of behaviors, not only of their neighbors, but of further away people as well.

What are the political impacts of such a process ?

Valerie Chatelet: Huge! In a first time, it surely is a re-legitimacy of politic but which should on a longer time basis, make the representation politic as we know it disappear. However, I prefer not to anticipate too much since it is nowadays too difficult to get those impacts.

Would you say that we are heading towards an interactive ubiquity ? May you tell us a short story about it ?

Valerie Chatelet: Sure! It seems to me that ubiquitous interactivity is ineluctable. Nevertheless, it won’t universal, neither in its geographical and spatial diffusion, nor in its shapes, on the contrary of what seems to think most of ubiquity thinkers and apostles. There will be as many ubiquitous interactivities that we have cultures and societies nowadays.
The story I am thinking about is the one which was recounted in an old Wired magazine about the traffic management in Singapore. Everything is perfectly controlled there, space is full of sensors and technology and traffic jams have disappeared which makes the inhabitants very satisfied. This article’s author was concluding that Singapore’s most important achievement was not so much in the technologies which have been developed and which was existing in the same way in the United States, but more in the administration’s power and its capacity of coordinate itself which was totally unimaginable at this time in the States, for technical issues just as much as its social status.
Two big directions are growing: the decisions’ automation starting from live captured data depending on the experts’ knowledge or the devices development allowing a collective awareness to emerge and to modify behaviors without controlling them.
I believe in mirrors, not in automatism.

# SWARM /// Multitude by Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt

Here is the wholeness of the chapter called Swarm intelligence in Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt's wonderful book Multitude published in 2004.

When a distributed network attacks, it swarms its enemy: innumerable independent forces seem to strike from all directions at a particular point and then disappear back into the environment. From an external perspective, the network attack is described as a swarm because it appears formless. Since the network has no center that dictates order, those who can only think in terms of traditional models may assume it has no organization whatsoever-they see mere spontaneity and anarchy. The network attack appears as something like a swarm of birds or insects in a horror film, a multitude of mindless assailants, unknown, uncertain, unseen and unexpected. If one looks inside a network, however, one can see that it is indeed organized, rational, and creative. It has swarm intelligence.

Recent researches in artificial intelligence and computational methods use the term swarm intelligence to name collective and distributed techniques of problem solving without centralized control or the provision of a global mode. Part of the problem with much of the previous artificial intelligence research, they claim, is that it assumes intelligence to be based in an individual mind, whereas they assert that intelligence is fundamentally social. These researches thus derive the notion of the swarm from the collective behavior of social animals, such as ants, bees, and termites, to investigate multi-agent-distributed systems of intelligence. Common animal behavior can give an initial approximation of this idea. Consider, for example, how tropical termites build magnificent, elaborated domed structures by communicating with each other; researchers hypothesize that each termite follows the pheromone concentration left by other termites in the swarm. Although none of the individual termites has a high intelligence, the swarm of termites forms an intelligent system with no central control. The intelligence of the swarm is based fundamentally on communication. For researchers in artificial intelligence and computational methods, understanding this swarm behavior helps in writing algorithms to optimize problem-solving computations. Computers too can be designed to process information faster using swarm architecture rather than a conventional centralized processing model.

The swarm model suggested by animal societies and developed by these researchers assumes that each of the agents or particles in the swarm is effectively the same and on its own not very creative. The swarms that we see emerging in the new network political organizations, in contrast, are composed of a multitude of different creative agents. This adds several more layers of complexity to the model. The members of the multitude do not have to become the same or renounce their creativity in order to communicate and cooperate with each other. They remain different in terms of race, sex, sexuality, and so forth. What we need to understand, then, is the collective intelligence that can emerge from the communication and cooperation of such a varied multiplicity. Perhaps when we grasp the enormous potential of this swarm intelligence we can finally understand why the poet Arthur Rimbaud in his beautiful hymns to the Paris Commune in 1871 continually imagined the revolutionary Communards as insects. It is not uncommon, of course, to imagine enemy troops as insects. Recounting the events of the previous year, in fact, Emile Zola in his historical novel La Debacle describes the “black swarms” of Prussians overrunning the French positions at Sedan like invading ants, “un si noir fourmillement de troupes allemandes.” Such insect metaphors for enemy swarms emphasize the inevitable defeat while maintaining the inferiority of the enemy-they are merely mindless insects. Rimbaud, however, takes this wartime cliché and inverts it, singing the praises of the swarm. The Communards defending their revolutionary Paris against the government forces attacking from Versailles roam about the city like ants (fourmiller) in Rimbaud’s poetry and their barricades bustle with activity like anthill (fourmilieres). Why would Rimbaud describe the Communards whom he loves and admires as swarming ants? When we look more closely we can see that all of Rimbaud’s poetry is full of insects, particularly the sounds of insects, buzzing, swarming, teeming (bourdonner, grouiller). “Insect-verse” is how one reader describes Rimbaud’s poetry, “music of the swarm”. The reawakening and reinvention of the senses in the youthful body-the centerpiece of Rimbaud’s poetic world- takes place in the buzzing and swarming of the flesh. This is a new kind of intelligence, a collective intelligence, a swarm intelligence, that Rimbaud and the Communards anticipated.

# SWARM /// Netlogo

Netlogo is a computer software gathering a lot of various simulations of interactive behaviors following several moving simple rules. It is literally an experimentation laboratory since a lot of variants affect those behaviors in various combination.

Obviously you can write you own script for it, but a large library of simulations is already available exploring the fields of art, biology, chemistry, computer science, earth science, mathematics, networks, social sciences and system dynamics.
I particularly like this one, called rebellion which simulates a illegitimate authority (here in blue) suppressing agents of the rebellion (here in red) by putting them in jail (here in black) in front of quiet people (here in yellow). There are numerous variants to be set and observe the change of behavior.

# SWARM /// Cartoon

...because being too serious can be lethal ! (start to watch up to the eighth minute)

# SWARM /// The Brooklyn Pigeon Project

In 2004, the young architects Ben Aranda and Chris Lasch have realized a research on the swarm phenomenon of homing pigeon flight the " brooklyn pigeon project, a terraswarm project".
They used small localization devices that were carried individually by each Pigeon.
They measure and observed the flight of each pigeon and then they have done a modelisation/visualization like maps and diagrams of the itinerary of the birds that is linked to the atmosphere of the neighborhood.

More in their book Tooling (Pamphlet Architecture 27)
More on the Aranda/Lasch Flickr account

PHOTO CREDIT:
Peter Hall

# SWARM /// Ants, termites, bees, birds, fishes etc.

Here are two articles to introduce the swarm as an intelligent animal group. One is from the National Geographic, it is very complete and tries to see very much the human application (see also the photographs gallery) and the other is from the New York Times and even if it more concise, it proposes those two diagrams which are very important to understand how those colonies of ants and other animals evolves as swarm to create a collective intelligence.

# SWARM /// Introduction

For the purpose of Ferda Kolatan Pratt's course called Design by Nature, I have to prepare a presentation for September 28th about Networks intelligence and I thought it could be interesting to report my research on boiteaoutils then readers might comment on it and give some ideas !
Swarm intelligence is interesting in its absence of hierarchy and its greater production as a group than as the sum of individualities composing it. This topic is widely tackled by biologists, programmers/architects and their work may appear in this research, but I would like to also link it to its political potential.

To begin, here are two formers articles on boiteaoutils (here and here)and a recent one on Pruned about birds migrations (and some more pictures from Richard Barnes)