| Alan Sondheim on Mon, 9 Jul 2007 13:55:30 +0200 (CEST) |
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| <nettime> Gnat swarming behavior |
(This strongly relates to the construct of avatars in Second Life; think of the gnats as prims. Their homeostatic behavior is amazing. Hieroglyphs of an ancient species... Also check http://nikuko.blogspot.com ) Gnat swarming behavior The following video was made about 100 meters from the Jordan River trail in Salt Lake City (West Jordan / Midvale), Utah. The site is a pond per- haps one or two acres across; there are numerous birds (swallows, swifts, red-wing and yellow-head blackbirds, etc.) around. When I first saw the gnats, near sundown, they swarmed in a typical ellipsoidal fashion, i.e. similar to a free-falling water balloon in slow motion. I noticed several columns forming; in a short while, they became vertical, long and narrow. They swayed and held shape. In gnat swarms, males and females behave differently; in one of the vertical columns, a roughly spherical 'head' is visible to one side, and I wonder if there might be sexual differentiation here. What is fascinating to me is the relationship of millions of gnats to an over-arching geometry; this parallels slime mold behavior to some extent. I've seen lots of gnat swarms before, but nothing like this. We're leaving the Salt Lake City area today, so I have no time to investigate this further at the moment (we're leaving today), but I'm interested in any further input, images, videos, you might have. http://www.asondheim.org/gnats.mp4 Radio 'Radio' - modified recording in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir building; note the laptop in the foreground which controls and monitors the organ, light- ing, recording, etc., as far as I can tell. http://www.asondheim.org/radio.mp4 # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [email protected] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]