Swarming

A Swarm of Poachers

by Eben Kirksey, Craig Scheutze (University of California, Santa Cruz) & Nick Shapiro (University of Oxford)

Cite as: Kirksey, Eben, Craig Schuetze and Nick Shapiro (2011) Poaching at the Multispecies Salon: Introduction. Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 99/100: 130-134 (Download article PDF)

A curatorial swarm – a team of six intellectuals – staged an art exhibit, The Multispecies Salon, alongside the 2010 meetings of the AAA in New Orleans. Swarming, a form of collective action modeled after honeybees, has been celebrated (by the likes of Hardt and Negri) as a form of radical politics: “In the swarm model suggested by animal societies… we see emerging new networks of political organizations… composed of a multitude of different creative agents” (2004:92). Over eighty artists, a multitude inspired by the tactics of swarming, participated in the Multispecies Salon. The Swarm Orbs, a group of knee-high spherical robots (video below), were just one artwork that embodied these animal-machine becomings. These kinetic sculptures were built “to explore the aesthetic possibilities and the emergent behavior of artificial systems” by a collective of self-proclaimed “tinkerers” – biologists, physicists, psychologists, computer scientists, and artists – with a $50,000 grant from the Black Rock Foundation.

As Eugene Thacker notes, the figure of the swarm has generated mutations in the body politic that are “structurally innovative but politically ambivalent” (Thacker 2004). Lately, Pentagon strategists have appropriated the tactics of swarming. Jake Kosek, an ethnographer whose work was offered up for poaching at the Multispecies Salon, studied the ambivalent nature of the swarm by deploying time-tested methods of multi-sited ethnography – “following a thing” (Marcus 1995). Focusing his study on a single species, the honeybee (Apis mellifera), Kosek followed figural and literal swarms from his own backyard hive in northern California, to military laboratories, and to the hinterlands of Afghanistan.

As U.S. military strategists replaced their AirLand Battle tactics with strategies of swarm warfare, Kosek began to study the zoological consequences of war (cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1988:243). “Military understandings of the swarm are not solely metaphoric,” according to Kosek, “but make possible new assemblages of people and animals, new forms of social relations, and new technologies” (2010:665).

Kosek describes one of the most technologically sophisticated forms of these animal becomings on the frontlines of the Global War on Terror. Bush Administration officials began an assassination campaign with drones, killing alleged terrorists and civilian bystanders with these remotely-piloted aircraft. The Obama administration promoted these unmanned vehicles “as technical solutions to the legal, moral, and political conundrum surrounding targeted assassinations” (Kosek 2010:667). The first generation of drones did not fully actualize military dreams of swarming. John Sauter, a private contractor for the U.S. government, told Kosek that it was “an inefficient and laborious 20th century technological warfare practice of including humans in every aspect of technological warfare decision making” (quoted in Kosek 2010:667). He went on to say that “a central aspect of the future of warfare technology is to get networks of machines to operate as self-synchronized war fighting units that can act as complex adaptive systems… We want these machines to be fighting units that can operate as reconfigurable swarms that are less mechanical and more organic, less engineered and more grown.”

A new generation of swarming drones has been developed to respond to all sorts of sensory input from ground sensors, cameras, intelligence, satellite information, and data from other drones. Drones now can communicate information to each other directly and react to received information in real time without mediation by humans. One controller can manage a central drone and the other drones follow – adapting, reacting, and coordinating. The first coordinated swarm drone attacks took place in December 2009, in which five drones attacked alleged Taliban fighters with ten closely coordinated hellfire missiles, killing fifteen people (Kosek 2010:668).

Perhaps these flying machines embody the nightmares of Hugh Raffles: “There is the nightmare of fecundity and the nightmare of the multitude… There is the nightmare of knowing and the nightmare of non-recognition… Nightmare begets nightmare. Swarm begets swarm. Dreams beget dreams. Terror begets terror” (2010:201–203).

Artists and other interlopers poached ideas about swarming from Hugh Raffles and Jake Kosek at the Multispecies Salon. Even as the figure of the swarm was flourishing within the modern militarized state, the Swarm Orb collective imagined that their robots were playfully reappropriating the tactics and technologies of war. At the AAA meetings, they were given license to roam around the book exhibition hall on the third floor of the New Orleans Sheraton. In open spaces, where there are no people and few obstacles, the Swarm Orbs operate like the Pentagon’s swarming drones: a central orb, which is controlled by a human, serves as a mother hen which the other orbs follow. But the book hall, a space lined with tables showcasing the latest anthropological texts, left little room for coordinated maneuvering.

If the Pentagon drones are terrifying specters, able to strike at lightning speed in coordinated attacks, the Swarm Orbs seemed to struggle to get through the maze of booksellers and legs of conference attendees. One casual ethnographer from McGill University observed that they were moving like his own child, a toddler. The robots rolled around the room tentatively, hesitating as if they were uncertain about where to go next. Perhaps these behaviors by the Swarm Orbs more closely resemble the patterns of honeybees than the attack drones of the U.S. government. “In my experience,” writes Jake Kosek, “swarms are often gentle, sometimes confused” (2010:652).

In the New Orleans Sheraton three “orb wranglers,” carrying a retrofit Xbox video game controller, each operated a single robot on manual control. Mingling amongst the anthropologists, hiding the controllers behind their backs, these wranglers tried to become hidden specters animating the machines. The orbs and their spectral wranglers certainly provoked ambivalence – contradictory emotions and capricious corporeal responses. Some anthropologists entered into a flirtatious dance with the orbs, moving in concert with them – following the robots and letting themselves be followed. Others were clearly unnerved. One conference attendee kicked an orb after it got too close, sending it spinning across the room and prompting the wrangler to emerge from the crowd to check the expensive sculpture for damage.

Alongside these fleeting encounters in the conference hotel, the curators of the Multispecies Salon populated three nearby galleries with work by a multitude of artists. Here art became a companion and catalyst practice for thinking through and against nature-culture dichotomies (cf. Kirksey & Helmreich 2010). The galleries became an ethnographic “para-site” that “blurred the boundaries between the field site and the academic conference” (Marcus 2000:5). Para-sites were originally developed by George Marcus to help generate unexpected ways of speaking and thinking with “moderately empowered people” who are implicated in great social transformations. At the Multispecies Salon we staged a series of para-ethnographic encounters – involving biologists, chemists, community activists, and artists – to explore the themes of “Hope in Blasted Landscapes,” “Edible Companions,” and “Life in the Age of Biotechnology.” We are currently writing up gleanings from these encounters in collaboration with a team of para-ethnographers.

Swarming was the tactic, rather than the theme, of the Multispecies Salon in New Orleans. If the first two Multispecies Salon events at AAA (in 2006 and 2008) showcased works in progress by the emerging cohort of multispecies ethnographers, the 2010 event was an opportunity for these scholars to further explore connections among their already-published work. Multispecies ethnographers are studying the host of organisms whose lives and deaths are linked to human social worlds, bringing animals, plants, fungi, and microbes from the realm of zoe or “bare life” that which is killable, into the realm of the bios, biographical or political life (cf. Agamben 1998). The poached essays in this special submission to the Kroeber Anthropological Society give a sense of where this (re)emerging mode of anthropological inquiry is heading.

References

Agamben, Giorgio (1998) Homo Sacer. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari (1988) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Athlone Press.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri (2004) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: The Penguin Press.

Kirksey, S. Eben, and Stefan Helmreich (2010) “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography.” Cultural Anthropology 25(4):545-687.

Kosek, Jake (2010) “Ecologies of Empire: On the New Uses of the Honeybee.” Cultural Anthropology 25(4):650-78.

Marcus, George E (1995) “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24:96-117.

Marcus, George E (2000) Para-Sites: A Casebook against Cynical Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Morgan, Henry Lewis (1868) The American Beaver and His Works. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co.

Raffles, Hugh (2010) The Illustrated Insectopedia: Insect Love from A-Z. New York: Pantheon/Vintage.

Thacker, Eugene (2004) “Networks, Swarms, Multitudes (Part One).” CTheory a142a. Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker, eds. http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=422, accessed May 18, 2004.

Poaching at the Multispecies Salon

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Swarm Paraethnography Poaching

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