“Swarm for April 3, 2010″
In my ponderings about control and chaos, I’m really intrigued by the idea of swarms: you know—how thousands of little fish will all swim in one bunch then—zing—all of them hang a quick left turn in unison, so it seems. Bees and some birds do it too. There are sometimes thousands of individuals, each with their own path, but acting as one and making—really—one path. How does this work? Is there a leader? Do they have a greater kinesthetic awareness than we do and just instantly cue off each other? Then where does the “Hey! Turn left!” impulse originate? Or is their individuality overridden by some kind of “one mind” experience? Do all those little brain waves somehow converge?
Last Summer, I read “Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead” the autobiography of bassist Phil Lesh, and he said their concerts were experiments in trying to achieve a kind of “one mind” experience. From the vantage point of the stage, the music (and of course, pharmaceuticals) caused the crowd to move and respond like one organism.
Cool National Geographic article on the subject: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/07/swarms/miller-text
Which made me think of the Christian idea (okay, weird connection, but what do you expect?) that believers are “the Body of Christ” and Jesus acts as the head (Ephesians 4:11-16). It’s the same fascinating balance: an immense numbers of individuals, with individual paths and wills, some straying, lagging, or out ahead, but all engaged on this one path, one destination. Some overarching force or mind or awareness is causing individuals to achieve a single path. There’s always strays and stragglers, rough edges and the like, but the general vision happens. And God doesn’t seem to mind using this fuzzy-edged means to get his perfect plan accomplished.
So I’ve been working on a series of “swarm” paintings where I try to achieve a particular vision by vaguely influencing independently-acting individuals. In the painting above, I dumped hundreds of ping pong balls onto a smooth, white masonite surface with the vision of creating an orange circle. Before I spattered blue paint, I took a stick and pushed the balls vaguely where I wanted the orange circle, so they’d block out the blue. After the blue dried, I herded the balls to the center and edges to open the circle shape for the red spatters, then the same for the yellow, and so on.
Ping pong balls really like to roll on smooth masonite, so there was a limit to how much I could influence the swarm—their assertion of their independence is strong, and there were a lot of strays each time. But after dozens of layers and repetitions, the swarm actions created a unified image that reflected my intended vision, but a vision filtered through the unruly movement of hundreds of individuals.
