Mahsoo Salimi - Swarm Systems in Art and Architecture: State of the Art

Creativity has become the motto of the modern world: everyone, every institution, and every company is exhorted to create, to innovate, to think out of the box. This calls for the design of a new class of technology, aimed at assisting humans in tasks that are deemed creative.

Developing a machine capable of synthesizing completely novel instances from a certain domain of interest is a formidable challenge for computer science, with potentially ground-breaking applications in fields such as biotechnology, design, and art. Creativity and originality are major requirements, as is the ability to interact with humans in a virtuous loop of recommendation and feedback. The problem calls for an interdisciplinary perspective, combining fields such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, engineering, design, and experimental psychology. Related questions and challenges include the design of systems that effectively explore large instance spaces; evaluating automatic generation systems, notably in creative domains; designing systems that foster creativity in humans; formalizing (aspects of) the notions of creativity and originality; designing productive collaboration scenarios between humans and machines for creative tasks; and understanding the dynamics of creative collective systems.

This book series intends to publish monographs, textbooks and edited books with a strong technical content, and focuses on approaches to computational synthesis that contribute not only to specific problem areas, but more generally introduce new problems, new data, or new well-defined challenges to computer science.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15219

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Swarm simulations are a paradigmatic example of a bottom-up modelling approach, in which rich and diverse phenomena can be synthetically obtained by implementing local interactions among simple entities. Since the invention of the Boids algorithm by Craig Reynolds in 1986, these types of simulations have made great inroads into various artistic domains. Here, these simulations have been adopted as generative systems that shape how media are created and/or how the audience can engage with an artwork.

The artistic use of swarm simulations will likely continue to play an important role in the art world. Ongoing science and engineering research has the potential to deepen existing artistic approaches and inspire new forms of artistic experimentation. For example, Fan et al. (2018) employ a swarm of mobile devices to perform collaborative computation of sensory data streams. This approach opens the possibility of exploiting the ubiquity of smart phones as personalized and decentralized computers for the purpose of deepening the connection between swarm-like behaviours of humans and the computational simulation of swarms. This in turn would allow for the creation of interactive situations in which participants engage as hybrid entities that exhibit partially natural and partially synthetic swarm behaviours.

Swarm principles can also be used to explain cultural phenomena such as the formation and propagation of opinions in social media (e.g. Kaiser et al., 2011). This extension into the cultural domain opens up the possibility for artists to employ swarm simulations to explore such things as the spread of cultural memes or the trending of artistic styles.