January 27, 2006
Swarm Exhibition
Favoring Unplanned and Decentralized Modes of Organization
Swarm brings together works that express swarming as a social effect generated by masses of objects, images, data, or organisms. The fascination with swarming reflects a contemporary view of nature, politics, and social life–one that favors unplanned and decentralized modes of organization. The exhibition combines emerging and historically significant artists, revealing a series of unlikely and previously unimagined relationships between artists who have not been connected before.
Swarm theory is an idea animating contemporary art, science, design, digital media, and social theory. "Swarm logic" is seen in works that use vast numbers of small parts to create systems whose final behavior or effect cannot be wholly predicted. Artists working with computers and new media construct rules that draw together data and generate behaviors that evolve over time...Swarm connects the social life of bees, birds, crowds, and cities to contemporary aesthetics, as seen in the fascination of artists and designers with how simple, discrete units accumulate into complex systems. [via Rhizome]
Posted by jo at January 27, 2006 02:34 PM
