My initial interest in participatory design led me to start working with multi agent systems. The idea that consensus emerges without anybody actually taking charge or leading the group felt like it might have an interesting analogous connection to questions of democracy (and I also found Grasshopper plugins that seemed fun to try), so I decided to go in this direction.
The agents are programmed to have several concurrent behaviors, the main ones being attraction and repulsion. After starting to play with the idea that the agents were in fact aliens out to colonize Malmön (and laughing out loud at my own silliness) I got the ideas that the repellants would be the existing housing on the island and the attractor points certain terrain conditions. Obviously, aliens want to keep their colonization efforts secret from the humans on the island, and they are here to gather data on the granite that is so abundant in Malmön…
Moving on, first of all I want to see how I can take the concepts I’ve worked with so far from 2D to 3D. Furthermore, I’m also thinking about experimenting with a hierarchy within the swarm; the brief includes 5 ”camp leaders”, something that both works well with my hypothetical alien colony situation and could potentially generate interesting results depending on how the leaders and the swarm interact with each other.