I - Deformations: A Media Theory of Swarming
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
Summary
Abstract
Under the concept of deformations, this chapter presents crucial aspects that link the phenomena of swarms to media theory. Here swarms are treated as a materialization of Serres's figure of the ‘parasite.’ By attending to disruptive potential, swarm research has yielded new information in the context of a comprehensive media theory of interference. This includes methodological insights that are productive for concepts of media historiography. The chapter closes by tracing the epistemological and cultural-technical expansion of the zone affected by swarms. The conversion of the swarm as an object of knowledge into an operative figure of knowledge by computer simulation signifies a general shift in epistemic strategies: self-organizational phenomena came to be applied to the study of complex interactive processes.
Keywords: media theory, parasite, noise, cultural techniques, computer simulation, epistemology
Theory: Noise
Amalgamations of Perplexity
“In the beginning was the noise.” This is not the opening sentence of Michel Serres's The Parasite(that would have been too prosaic). It rather concludes a paragraph in which he emphasizes the productivity of interference – the bruit parasite, as the French goes. Thus, instead of beginning this chapter with one hackneyed pronouncement or another about the fascinating nature of flocking birds, schooling fish, their tendency to ‘hover’ and ‘dance,’ and the apparently mystical beauty of such activity, I have decided to take the diametrically opposite approach. This is because a phenomenological or anthropological ‘view’ obscures the fact that, in the swarm itself, perception is always disrupted. Swarms shimmer in a field of tension between interference and organization whose discursive and historical dynamics are resistant to any subject-oriented or analytical perspective. Or, in Serres’s words:
We are fascinated by the unit; only a unit seems rational to us. We scorn the senses, because their information reaches us in bursts. We scorn the groupings of the world (things like ‘a flight of screaming birds,’ ‘a cloud of chirping crickets,’ ‘crowds, packs, hordes on the move’) […]. Disaggregation and aggregation, as such, and without contradiction […] are repugnant to us. […] We want a principle, a system, an integration, and we want elements, atoms, numbers. We want them, and we make them. A single God, and identifiable individuals.
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- Information
- ZootechnologiesA Media History of Swarm Research, pp. 29 - 58Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019