An exhibit at the Fabric Workshop and Museum explores swarm logic and emergence theory in patterns in art.

By:Ilene Dube
(Above: "Three Birds," leaves, photo collage, acrylic and resin on panel, by Fred Tomaselli. Facing page, from top: "Shoes, Domestic Production, 1960-1998 (vertebra)," digital C-print mounted to Plexiglas, by Jason Salavon; "SpiNN," digital animation, by Shahzia Sikander.)
   Birds do it, bees do it. Even sprawling roads from the cities
do it. Like messages on the Internet, they swarm.
   When a bee colony gets crowded, the bees divvy up and, in a
coordinated mass exodus, establish a new hive. Compare it to a family unit, where
the children grow up and start a household of their own. The difference is, the
family members each have a mind of their own.
   With bees, it’s group think that gets them to swarm — a
complicated process that involves the self-selection of the emigrant group, raising
adolescent princesses and scouting the new site.
   Ants swarm, too. They are leaderless. The queen is not an authority
figure; she spawns the brood but has no control over the colony. Scientists have
recently learned that as ants perform certain tasks, they leave scent trails.
These scents notify other ants, which may seek to engage in the same task. But
if there is an excess of that scent, new ants may choose to perform a different
task.
   Swarm, an exhibit at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in
Philadelphia, connects the social life of bees, birds, crowds and cities to contemporary
aesthetics. It seeks to find unlikely relationships between emerging and established
artists who have not previously "swarmed" together.
   A search for "swarm logic" on Google yields 486,000 results.
The subject is especially popular with regard to digital media, but also social
theory, science and contemporary art.
   Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and
Software (Scribner, 2002) by Steven Johnson describes how ants, without leaders
or laws, organize themselves into highly complex colonies that adapt to the environment
as a single entity. They exhibit a collective intelligence that he calls "emergence."
He uses the theory of the whole being smarter than the sum of its parts to explain
interconnectivity on the Web.
   "Swarms proliferate in the art and thought of the modern era,"
writes Marion Boulton Stroud in the exhibition catalog. "The artist Jean Dubuffet,
upon returning from Savoie to gather insect specimens for his textured collages,
draws a self-portrait depicting a swarm of butterflies descending on him… Alfred
Hitchcock’s terrifying take on the swarm is a flock of malevolent birds that inexplicably
converge on an idyllic California town."
   The exhibit includes painting, sculpture, design and digital
media, looking at patterns of life. There are installations to present a broader
cultural and scientific view of swarms, featuring games, cities, landscapes, crowds,
insect colonies and other forms of natural and simulated life.
   "The exhibition is not just about art, but about life," says
co-curator Ellen Lupton, curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National
Design Museum in New York. "The ideas in the exhibition relate to so many aspects
of everyday life, as well as animating works of art across a huge range of media.
Swarms are not controlled by a central plan or leader; they operate according
to small local interactions, where individual agents don’t have a picture of the
global system, and yet they are building. This is like so much in our lives, from
political movements and opinion-making to traffic jams and how crowds move."
   The idea of pattern is key to swarms, she says. "Pattern is
part of the texture and organization of life. Our show is not literally about
textiles, but it is about the organization of art and life according to small,
simple, local rules that add up to larger surfaces. Like fabrics, many of the
works of art on view have no obvious center or focal point; they stretch out like
maps. "
   The exhibition can be experienced on a purely visual and sensual
level: a petri dish that appears full of tiny walking people by Michal Rovner;
paintings by Fred Tomaselli, made up of tiny insects and bits of paper. The paintings
contain real insects and pills as well as tiny photographs. These objects are
embedded inside layers of resin, and the artist paints on top of the resin to
further elaborate the forms, yielding a magical effect, a surface swimming with
depth.
   It can also be understood on a broader intellectual level. A
series of screens on an upper gallery floor show what scientists are doing with
swarm logic.
   Even children can enjoy the exhibit. Ms. Lupton’s 7- and 11-year-olds
especially liked the science section. "It helped them understand that art works
in a different way," she says.
   There is a three-month-long video by Paul Pfeiffer that is an
unedited look at a wasp assembling a nest. "This piece shows the gradual process
by which insects build their architecture," says Ms. Lupton. "Unlike most human
architects, they don’t begin from a floorplan and build up; rather, they work
one cell at a time, building in an accumulative, unplanned, yet logical way."
   Inkjet prints by C.E.B. Reas looks like balls of fur, or a microscopic
view of some kind of insect. In fact they are entirely computer-generated. "Reas
is an artist and computer scientist who writes his own software programs. He creates
a set of rules that produce these beautiful, lifelike ‘organisms,’" says Ms. Lupton.
"It is a form of automatic drawing. By changing the input to a simple set of rules,
Reas can generate different drawings, different forms of artificial life."
   Ms. Lupton, who also directs the MFA program in graphic design
at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, says she does not keep
bees. However, "every spring my house is invaded by ants. I respect these creatures
a lot, but alas, I don’t want to live with them."
Swarm is on view at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, 1315 Cherry St., Philadelphia,
through March 18. Museum hours: Mon-Fri. 10 a.m.-6 p.m., Sat. noon-4 p.m. The
museum will be closed Dec. 30-31 and Jan. 2. For information, call (215) 568-1111.
On the Web: www.fabricworkshopandmuseum.org