Summary
Abstract
With the umbrella term formats, this chapter explores the history of technical enhancements of swarm research between 1930 and 1980. It is concerned with the various attempts that were made to gain quantitative and formalizable access to the swarm by suppressing noise. Efforts were made to record swarms with optical media in a variety of experimental systems, and in the open sea researchers additionally tried to make swarms visible by means of innovative diving techniques and sonar technology. Again and again, however, disruptive forces like the internal movements of the collectives or the distortive effects of the environmental medium of water interrupted the acquisition of data. Empirical research thus found itself mired in a ‘technological morass.’
Keywords: fish school, epistemic things, smooth and striated space, Jean Painlevé, history of sonar, oriented particles
Fishy Business: Media Technologies of Observation and Experimentation
What is a fish? A fish is a back-boned animal which lives in the water and cannot ever live very long anywhere else. Its ancestors have always dwelt in the water, and most likely its descendants will forever follow their example.
Schools of fish have not been studied as complex systems for very long. It was not until the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s that researchers first engaged with questions concerning the possible parameters and observational media that would be necessary to gain any knowledge about them. In his 1931 article on schooling behavior, Guy Malcolm Spooner remarked: “The phenomenon of schooling has received surprisingly little attention either from fishery investigators or from those studying animal behaviour.” The Russian biologist Dimitri Radakov similarly commented: “The phenomenon of schooling has undoubtedly been known since ancient times, at any rate since our ancestors began to catch fish. But it was not until comparatively recently that special investigations of fish were launched: at the end of the 1920s.”
At the beginning, investigations of the form and structure of fish schools were not as strongly motivated by the sense of fascination that can be found in literature or, as we have seen, in the work of early swarm researchers such as Edmund Selous.
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- ZootechnologiesA Media History of Swarm Research, pp. 105 - 182Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019