Glass Forest

This scanning electron microscope image, The Glass Forest by Mario De Stefano, won first place in photography in the International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. It shows a community of tiny diatoms - algae characterized by a peculiar glass-like cell wall.

(re)define swarm

Hopefully by now all of you have taken a look at potential swarms to study. The sooner that you begin to dive into this information the sooner it will begin to make sense. Emergence is a pretty easy read and will help with the vocabulary of our discussions regarding swarm study and collective intelligence.

Before you watch some of these videos, understand this principle; simple rule sets can yield potentially complex outputs...here is the best example

John Conway's Game of Life
Read through the rules, then play with all the outputs...brilliant work

some inspiration...

the time elapse helps make process more evident


yes!

collective intelligence in action



Here are some ideas...
Bacteria
Fungus
Mushrooms
Traffic (pedestrian/car locally specific to site)
Locus (interesting because they collectively swarm, but with time lapse between appearances the location of the swarm changes, hinting at emergent patterns)
Google/search engines/internet (this is difficult and potentially dangerous, but their is something provoking about this)