written by Guy Theraulaz
shared by sean on November 3rd, 2007 at 1:26 am
(co-authors: Jacques Gautrais, Scott Camazine, and Jean-Louis Deneubourg.)
I am adding this to the redundancy conversation for its discussion of stigmergy in the context of self-organization. Stigmergy is a process where independent bodies communicate indirectly (often unintentionally) through their shared environment, producing complex but coherent results. I am prone to being literal and so I thought to myself: “the art world is a termite mound.” Termites seem a little too proletarian for this metaphor to work, but I’m more interested in thinking about what our shared landscape is and how artists respond to it in practice (for a dumb example: we’re hyper-informed by international magazines and weblogs, which must trigger both similarity and difference for the artist).
This article is fairly technical and focuses on “problem-solving” ingenuity of social insects (which is interesting in itself: why does so much of the literature on self-organization focus on accomplishing a task?) but Theraulaz is an oft cited figure in the swarm intelligence world and I can’t really find a significantly better article. My take on it is that stigmergy (a) provides a useful analytic concept and (b) is formative within a larger cultural understanding of complex, social processes; perhaps it’s already part of the redundancy conversation and it simply needs to be pointed out. (I think a self-organization or emergence issue would be a good thing.)
(See: making room for redundancy)