The Forest: Towards Emergent Collaborative Art Through Human Swarming

The Forest is a modular system of pillars inviting an audience to create an emergent audio-visual landscape through collective interactions over time. The pillars are designed to invoke reaction from participants through function and visual aesthetic, and act as a mediator for human-human collaboration–whether direct or indirect–towards an evolving piece of art to be experienced as a whole. In this paper, we show two variations of the Forest each with two pillars, which we demonstrated at public outreach events. The first variation has no explicit interaction rules whereas in the second variation, we introduce “human swarm” rules towards emergent patterns in the installation. We show that the “human swarm” rules are able to produce diverse emergent outputs through simulation. Finally, we present anecdotal observations of the outcomes from outreach events, where interaction feedback empowers individuals in their creative exploration to produce consensus art.