Swarm Intelligence and Collaboration

A photograph of the public sculpture Stroll (1995), by William King, located on the South Street walkway at Penn's Landing in Philadelphia, serves as a metaphor for the simple dynamics of all swarm behavior: follow the trail of the individual in front of you, and keep pace with the individual alongside you. Photo by James Haywood Rolling Jr.

WE CREATE FROM WHAT WE PARTAKE OF. Every art teacher knows from personal experience that as a result, art makes us smarter—artists routinely immerse themselves in the processes, resources, artifacts, and vast fields of play left behind by all the artists, designers, and inventors that practiced before us. In making art, we dive into humanity's collective genius and see our individual reflections shimmering brightly upon the water's surface. As art and museum educators, we document and display the evidence of hands-on learning as each student explores some of civilization's best ideas made visible, each student working to make personal sense of the cultural architecture they dwell in while arriving at new understandings through projects all their own.

Yet, conveying the value of shared resources, collaboration, and divergent outcomes emerging from contemporary art studio models and project-based classroom pedagogies can be daunting in a schooling paradigm fixated on standardized tests for individual achievement. In order to address this dilemma, the September 2016 issue of Art Education on swarm intelligence and collaboration has been assembled to help tell a story of how art makes us smarter, providing simple principles for behaving together in varying clusters of socially responsible creative activity that can channel the benefits of humanity's creative genius into any classroom, any workplace, and any nation.

While a negative reaction to the term “swarm” typically stems from a triggering association with “mindless” insect colonies, the reality is that all social creatures exhibit swarm behavior, from animal herds, to apes, to humans (Rolling, 2013). The more sophisticated the brain, the more sophisticated the swarm behavior—hence, while a swarm of ants is capable of building an extensive underground colony and a swarm of mammals (e.g., wolves, elephants, dolphins, or chimpanzees) can build a thriving pack or herd living harmoniously within their local ecologies, a swarm of humans can build a civilization that lasts for centuries (Fisher, 2009; Miller, 2010). A human swarm is a social network of individuals behaving for a time like-mindedly or self-similarly. While behaving together as a local swarm can at times lead to an unthinking “mob mentality” or ill-reasoned “crowd hysteria,” for the most part human swarm intelligence contributes to the ongoing development of distinct cultural practices, belief systems, and patterns of mutually beneficial social actions—our general altruistic intent to perpetuate our species and transmit “from one generation to the next, via teaching and imitation… knowledge, values, and other factors that influence behavior” (Boyd & Richerson, 1985, p. 2).

What triggers a swarm of creative activity? Most often, a swarm of mutually advantageous human thought and action is instigated by a common story, whether the collaborators are a small crowd of three or a nation of millions (Rolling, 2013). Ultimately, it does not matter whether that story is fictional, mythical, familial, scientific, cultural, political, or economic because the truth is that every one of us carries multiple motivating stories in our heads at the same time. In this September 2016 issue of Art Education, Aaron D. Knochel explores the multimodal participatory cultures of art + design education through the motivating story of preservice university students remixing and developing a variety of solutions for do-it-yourself (DIY) prosthetics intended to enable artmaking. Jessica Baker Kee, Cayla Bailey, Shabreia Horton, Katrice Kelly, James McClue, and Lionell Thomas instigate swarm intelligence and collaborative learning through the studio arts practice of assemblage, unpacking K–12 student cultural identities in the process of developing installations during a class offered at the Ashé Cultural Arts Center in central New Orleans. Canadian art + design educators Ehsan Akbari, Juan Carlos Castro, Martin Lalonde, Lina Moreno, and David Pariser explore the value of collective learning in the art classroom by presenting a lesson from MonCoin, their mobile media visual art curriculum. A key objective of their curriculum is to amplify the conditions for an aspect of swarm intelligence wherein individuals with a shared affinity for a particular story construct, self-organize to participate in autonomous activities as that story deems apt and without the need for outside direction, ultimately distributing the benefits of their problem solving between one another through multiple interactions over a period of time within a peer learning network (Rolling, 2013).

Also in this issue, Lisa Kay offers her perspective on why collaborations between art educators and art therapists are needed, providing readers with an example of an effective partnership program designed for adolescent girls who have experienced adverse childhoods. Jorge Lucero has organized a collaborative writing effort with Anna Nichols, Dawn Stienecker, Janet E. Nisbett, Lillian Lewis, Joana Hyatt, Kristen McCarthy, Lee Tyler Darter, Linda White Kieling, Jessica Green, Deborah S. Peters, Robin E. Brooks, Stephanie Brooks, Frank Juarez, Sue Ellen Jacobs, Laura K. Reeder, and James Haywood Rolling Jr. that utilizes a crowd-sourcing or swarming method of accumulative writing as an accessible publication model for busy practitioners. Kevin Slivka shares narrative vignettes that examine sovereign and traditional ecological practices of the Indigenous peoples of the Upper Great Lakes region for harvesting, cooking, and preserving blueberries as a means not only for enriching cultural pedagogies and literacies through visual ethnography, but also to entice Western thinkers and doers to mimic such sustainable practices until a much needed social adaptation for greater environmental responsibility emerges. Finally, Syracuse University graduate student Brianna Prisco presents an Instructional Resource featuring several interactive art installations, each one inviting swarms of participants to engage in and create new iterations of the public art.

As social creatures, we must learn to see our multitudinous art + design practices as an “adaptive, dynamic, goal-seeking, self-preserving, and sometimes evolutionary” system for perpetuating the human species (Meadows, 2008, p. 12). Likewise, as artists we must learn to see our works of art, design, and architecture as the storytelling exercises they essentially are. We use symbols and constructed materials to describe our experience of the world immediately surrounding us… to communicate our relationship with the people, places, practices, and events we hold dear and want to be remembered long after we are gone… and to interrogate the problems that won't go away. Story inventions are shared in order for our best ideas and solutions to spread (Johnson, 2010), allowing humans to move from one swarm of creative activity to the next, gathering advantages along the way.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James Haywood Rolling

James Haywood Rolling Jr. is Dual Professor and Chair of Art Education in the School of Art/College of Visual and Performing Arts, and the Department of Teaching and Leadership/School of Education, Syracuse University, New York. E-mail: [email protected]