[Commlist] New book! Zootechnologies: A Media History of Swarm Research

The most recent book in the Recursions book series (Amsterdam University 
Press) is Sebastian /Vehlken’s Zootechnologies: A Media History of Swarm 
Research/.

/Swarming has become a fundamental cultural technique related to dynamic 
processes and an effective metaphor for the collaborative efforts of 
society. This book examines the media history of swarm research and its 
significance to current socio-technological processes. It shows that the 
hype about collective intelligence is based on a reciprocal 
computerization of biology and biologization of computer science: After 
decades of painstaking biological observations in the ocean, experiments 
in aquariums, and mathematical model-making, it was swarms-inspired 
computer simulation which provided biological researchers with enduring 
knowledge about animal collectives. At the same time, a turn to 
biological principles of self-organization made it possible to adapt to 
unclearly delineated sets of problems and clarify the operation of 
opaque systems - from logistics to architecture, or from crowd control 
to robot collectives. As zootechnologies, swarms offer performative, 
synthetic, and approximate solutions in cases where analytical 
approaches are doomed to fail./

More information about the book online at 
https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789462986206/zootechnologies


All of the Recursions books are listed here:
https://www.aup.nl/en/series/recursions


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