Nature has proven to us through evolution that by organizing weak and uninformed individuals into a swarm, the collective whole is capable of extending beyond the knowledge of individuals and taking on complex tasks that guarantees the survival of the species. Without words or spoken languages, a swarm can successfully communicate and self-organize through rule-based collective intelligence and emergent behaviors. This project aims to create a language digitization process that utilizes the tactile senses of a person to produce a physical object that enables communication among people with visual, auditory and speech disabilities, or physical distancing. Swarm in this project is manifested through and enabled by an artificially constructed encoder, which serves as a translator of meaning and creator of a new pictogram-like language. We will demonstrate the encoding process and then move on to exploring using it as a new media to materialize abstract and ephemeral concept into physical object that one can hold in their hands or feel its volume, and by the very act of holding or observing can understand the content it carries through practice.

Within the framework of swarm, what the device generates could also be anti-swarm: the message encoding and decoding process is a centralized one carried out by the users alone based on deterministic algorithm. The algorithm, or a set of local rules governing individual to individual interaction lies at the heart of the swarm mechanism, without which the entire colony will descend into a precarious state of chaos. Therefore, the creation of an alphabet encoding algorithm is at the core of this project. We want to look beyond the façade of the swarm pattern, and explore deeper into the logic behind the apparent behavior to draw the connection at a more fundamental level. This is done by constructing a matrix based on the human hand (considered here as 4×4) and encode each cell with a 0 or 1 value to form a unique pattern.  This pattern will be used to determine the extrusion heights of the physical artifacts’ four sides. Each artifact carries a complete meaning of a phrase, as such, it abandons the traditional linear fashion of language processing.

Verbal communication would be forbidden in the physical exhibition gallery. This introduces a level of insecurity and precarity as seen in nature, which will force visitors to adapt and solve by seeking alternative means of interaction (by learning to encode messages), simulating a situation that human communication evolves to foster and acquire emotional bonds under environmental changes. Prone to human error and data loss, this digitally mediated social interaction on many levels (physical barrier to digital barrier) may lead to misreading of social sympathy once data entanglement happens, causing a deviation from the established collective awareness and mutual understanding of messages. Therefore, in this work,  given the opportunity for precarity from users, the mis-interpretation of message can lend to new formation of artifact creation and twisting the exhibit’s intention from a rigidly defined process into a fluid reactive performance.

Mengni Zhang (  ) & Ruixuan Li (  )