I have been looking at the dynamics of creatures with small brains who come together on mass. I am continually surprised at the results of processing these group behaviors. As we collect more data and attempt to track and visualize it – I feel the study of these movements in our urban nature habitats can serve as a powerful model for visualizing complex systems. To some degree these videos are studies of mob behavior. Are these decisions instinctual or a small thoughtful considerations? Does one leader guide the group or is there a common brain? Is a virus a single creature or a diffused body that we inhabit? So many of these patterns are visualizations of randomization. Is randomization an instinctual or predictive? Are creatures naturally prone to randomness rather than the organization to which humans aspire?
On the site I am posting video clips I have made using a process I call “extruded time”. There are no digital additions to the video. They are processed by stacking a sequence of frames and adding the darkest pixels together. The frame at the beginning of the stack is dropped and the next frame in sequence is added to the end of the stack. This process is repeated until the entire video clip is rendered. I do not use time lapse in the traditional sense of the word but offer a glimpse seconds long of the paths these creatures take. I find each “flock” has a form, a rhythm, and pattern to the glyphs they leave as they perambulate.
It is the beauty of this that gives me pause when I think about the connected social network and the “viral” quality assigned to tidbits of media.