Share Prize interview: Kuai Auson

October 18, 2010 4:27 pm

Kuai Auson has been selected for the Share Prize 2010 exhibition, that wil be presented from the 2nd until the 7th of November at the Regional Museum of Natural Science of Turin.

– Taking simple elements and a handful of rules as its starting point, 0h!m1gas presents us with some rather complex behaviour. What can you tell us about the relationship between simplicity and recursion in emergent processes?
Emergence, approached as a recursive occurrence rather than as a process, is a phenomenon in natural systems, which of course includes design thinking in humans and social behaviour. When we think, when we want to be creative, we are engaging in an emergent experience producing thoughts that are in fact recursive, to the extent that our brains have to recall successful actions or solutions we have learned in the past, in order to provide an effective action in response to an actual problem. As an artist, who is in love with ants, I try to simplify my way of thinking to adapt to the way a tiny ant confronts decisions. This is a very difficult process, thus, I have to emerge with new ideas all the time. Thinking in a different manner with a different set of rules to understand other natural beings and natural processes is difficult, not to say impossible, because at the end all you have is interpretation. Being simple is not an easy achievement for the human brain, but the beautiful analogy between ants and the human brain is that you can see the brain as a colony of hard working neurons, which act as simple agents that self-organize in order to react internally to the perturbations imposed by the outside world. We are all composed by simple agents, our cells, organs and neurons, who interact locally with each other and emerge with unexpected behaviours. The creative process in human beings is emergent to the extent that it is biologically driven by simple agents, from single neurons to brains, to single humans getting together, to societies living in cities. 0h!m1gas is a reactive sound system that collects the simple activities of single ants to create an emergent soundscape that cannot be predicted, yet experienced with fascination and curiosity.

– 0h!m1gas is a biomimetic system. What are your thoughts on the use of this approach in different fields, where from chemistry to aviation it is enjoying considerable success in creating technologies that draw inspiration from processes and elements of nature but are adapted to humans?
When you get to know the world of ants, you see how flexible and adaptable they have been. They have managed to migrate to almost every continent and have succeeded in territorial domination. If we take a look at the human endeavour throughout evolution, you have no doubts we became the social power in this planet, who have colonized every territory and controlled almost all the resources available. But now we are asking ourselves: what have we done with the planet? And every technological advancement we have achieved, we have done it by applying what we have perceived from nature. The greatest achievements of human design have been inspired by the magic of the nature we have exploited. We have to admit that we are selfish social beings. So in this time of ecological emergency, which must activate a collective emergence, why not apply the collective “intelligence” of ants, altruistic as it is, transform it in a social algorithm and apply it to human behaviour to form a social intelligence that can help solve the problems of common environments and ecosystems. That is what ants do, they recycle, they renew together. We have many collective consequences in common with ants, which we can reshape in order to harmonise with the natural world, from tribal initiations to crowd control and traffic systems, up to space optimization, organic architecture, and the stimulation of self-organized social networks based on a shared system of renewable energy. If we take a look at what we humans have achieved and destroyed with our technology and engineering, then we can let ourselves be inspired by ants with their non-hierarchical collective behaviour to create socially responsible art forms with sustainable functional purposes for the environment and based in sustainable organic materials.

– What made you choose ants? Have you observed any sort of behaviour which you would never have expected from these insects?
My interest in ants stems from a personal fascination and identification with these cybernetic micro-dwellers. I consider myself a non-stop workaholic agent. Also I was born and raised in a highly diverse tropical region, where you find ants everywhere. The first time I saw the soldier ants of our rainforests, I was completely charmed and starting writing fictive stories about them. 7 years later, after secretly observing and idealizing the life of ants in every kitchen and garden of the houses I lived in, I came to Germany to find by pure chance the revealing connection between ants, emergence,
self-organisation and cybernetics. Since that moment I have been working on social and artistic approaches that highlight the similarities and differences between us and ants. Moreover, I believe that by studying ants’ behaviour, a common ground for interspecies-communication may be established, which could help us understand emergent phenomena in nature and the biological relevance of social networking. I expect to always be surprised by my ants. Everything I’ve observed while cultivating ants, have most of the time filled me with wonder and a strong desire for contemplation and research. They can always surprise you. I remember that in 2008, while filming Eciton burchelli (soldier ants) in the Yasuni rainforest, I was amazed to see a display of respect from a big spider about 5 cm long, whose web happened to be blocking the ants’ marching path, and apparently neither the ants were interested in eating the spider nor the spider was interested in getting into trouble with the ants, so the spider began to retreat to one of the corners of her web while the ants marched all over her web without harming the spider or damaging her nest until the stream of ants passed over it. Meanwhile, my camera was filming another marching ants of the same colony that clashed with a rival colony of Eciton hamatum: the colony of Eciton burchelli attacked their relative species aggressively in what seemed to be a deadly confrontation for territory. I thought it would end up in a massacre, but after filming almost an hour, what actually happened was that both colonies engaged in a competition to establish who was the stronger. They just measured their soldier forces by grabbing, pulling and slightly biting without ripping any appendages or killing the opponent. As deadly and aggressive as they can be, ants have proven me to also be tolerant and understanding.