Includes bibliographical references.

Cover; Table of Contents; Acknowledgements; Introduction; I. Deformations: A Media Theory of Swarming; 1. Theory: Noise; Amalgamations of Perplexity; Bodies without Surfaces; The Paradox of the Parasite; Radical Relationality; 2. Historiography: Recursion; Media-Becoming; Repetition and Variation; 3. Epistemology: Computer Simulation; Mindsets of Messiness; The Governmental Constitution of the Present; II. Formations; 1. Odd Birds; Sportsmen without Swarm Spirit; Wave Events; The Psychology of the Fish School; 2. On the Edge; Seeing Fish: Between Observation and Experimentation

The Psychomechanics of the PeripheryAnimal Aggregations; III. Formats; 1. Fishy Business: Media Technologies of Observation and Experimentation; 2. Plunging into the Deep; Writing in Water; The Linearity of the Doughnut: Swimming with the Current; Hand Digitizing: Data Tablets; 3. Fishmen; From the 'Institute in the Cellar' to the Open Sea; "Half Tarzan, Half Grzimek"; The Subaquatic Astronaut; Swarm Research in the Open Water; 4. Acoustic Visualization; Noisy Targets: Copulating Shrimp and Flatulent Herring; Pings; Blobs; Oriented Particles; IV. Formulas; 1. Models as Media

2. Synchronization ProjectsElementary Operations; Synchronized Swimming; Alpha Rhythm; A Race for Relaxation; 3. Anchovy ex Machina; Falling into Formation; Sensory Integration Systems; 3. The Third Dimension of Science; Space Lattices and Crystalized Schools; SelFish Behavior; 4. Ahead of Their Time: Schooling Simulations in Japan; V. Transformations; 1. Fish and Chips; 2. Agent Games; Playing with Fire; The Boid King; Artifishial Life; Cellular Automata; Object Orientation; The KISS Principle; Simulation and Similarity; Massive Attack; 3. Written in Their Own Medium

Self-Propelled ParticlesTraffic Rules in Fish Schools; Robofish: Empiricism Strikes Back; VI. Zootechnologies; 1. Drone Swarms, or Upside-Down Evolution; Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control; Swarm Robotics; Weapons of Mass Production, or: An Abuse of Consumer Electronics; 2. Swarming Out; 3. Swarm Architecture; Shaken or Stirred: Do I Look Like I Give a Damn?; Cultural Techniques and Architecture; From Insect Media to Bodies with a Vector; Constructing Collectives; Superconnected Idiots Savants; 4. Calculating Survival: Crowd Control; From Mass Panic to Crowd Dynamics

Crowd Sensing and Foggy LogicConclusion; Works Cited

Swarming has become a fundamental cultural technique related to dynamic processes and an effective metaphor for the collaborative efforts of society. This book examines the media history of swarm research and its significance to current socio-technological processes. It shows that the hype about collective intelligence is based on a reciprocal computerization of biology and biologization of computer science: After decades of painstaking biological observations in the ocean, experiments in aquariums, and mathematical model-making, it was swarms-inspired computer simulation which provided biological researchers with enduring knowledge about animal collectives. At the same time, a turn to biological principles of self-organization made it possible to adapt to unclearly delineated sets of problems and clarify the operation of opaque systems - from logistics to architecture, or from crowd control to robot collectives. As Zootechnologies, swarms offer performative, synthetic, and approximate solutions in cases where analytical approaches are doomed to fail.

Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on March 12, 2020).

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