“When people see patterns in the world, they tend to assume some type of centralized control. For example, when people see a flock of birds, they typically assume that the bird in the front is leading and the others are following. But that’s not the case. Most bird flocks don’t have leaders at all. Rather, each bird follows a set of simple rules, reacting to the movements of the birds nearby. Orderly flock patterns arise from these simple, local interactions. The flock is organized without an organizer, coordinated without a coordinator.” - Heppner & Grenander. A Stochastic Nonlinear Model for Coordinated Bird Flocks. In S. Krasner (Ed.), The Ubiquity of Chaos. Washington, D.C.: AAAS Publications.

FLOCK

Flock is an appropriation of the algorithms used for simulating the non-hierarchical flocking movement of birds and schools of fish to create new modes of collaborative action within the built-environment. A method for exploring cities, suburbs, and other environments in entirely new and different ways, for creating self-organized groups which navigate in a way that is both autonomous and collaborative. FLOCK takes advantage of the new wireless and location-based technologies to coordinate motion between a group of individuals without any single person directing, leading, or guiding that motion, and without a particular destination or route in mind.

This is the very opposite of the recent Flash Mob phenomenon. Rather than the deliberate, orchestrated act of bringing people together for a very specific, usually absurdist, purpose, Flock is merely an open protocol for decentralized, yet coordinated, movement. It has no purpose other than exploration and experience. It is a means for people to drift through and engage their built environment in unexpected, playful ways. The whole point of Flock is that we don’t know precisely what will happen - we don’t know how big or small flocks might become, where they’ll roam, or how they’ll interact and intersect with the environments being traversed. The project is flexible enough for flocking to take place in a variety of places and environments, from dense urban centers, to suburban subdivisions, to large retail stores.

TECHNOLOGY

Creating the system or apparatus needed to implement Flock can be done entirely through off-the-shelf technology that is already available today. No new technological breakthroughs are needed.

The equipment needed is:

- A wirelessly-enabled PDA or smartphone with either an attached or integrated GPS (Global Positioning System) module running the Flock software.

- A central server running a simple web application that participants log-into and which tracks information about position, velocity, and direction and then relays this information to all other participants. (If the participants of the Flock are within close enough proximity to one another, it is also possible to dispense with a central server and utilize a self-organizing, ad hoc, mesh

network instead).

The Flock software does two simple things: it communicates the GPS co-ordinates of participants back to the central relay server, and then collects the relayed data co-ordinates of other participants and processes them according to the algorithms of Flocking software.

For the purposes of this project, we use the computer model of coordinated flocking behavior pioneered by Craig Reynolds and further refined by Daryl Gates. Their software program uses simple rules of motion to govern the behavior of each individual actor, and utilizes what is known as a “stateless” algorithm: that is, each decision the program generates about how participants should modify their path of motion is based on the current state of the Flock, not on the participant’s own past behavior.

The rules of the algorithm are deceptively simple:

1. If you are far away from other participants, move towards the nearest participant.

2. Move away from neighbors that are too close; try to maintain the mean distance between yourself and the nearest participants.

3. Otherwise, attempt to move in the same direction and at the same speed as the participant nearest to you.

As Gates writes, “From these simple rules, large-scale, complex behaviour patterns emerge.”

With the collected vector data giving a real-time snapshot of the position, direction, and velocity of the other participants of the Flock, using this algorithm the portable computing device (whether a PDA or smartphone) can instantly calculate whether the participant needs to modify his or her path of motion to remain in tandem with the flock. There are several ways in which these refinements to motion can be communicated to the individual participant. The handheld device can merely display the information on its screen at appropriate moments, or, for a more fully immersive experience, wearable displays such as the Eyetop, a pair of eyeglasses with an attached LCD screen, would be used. These devices would create a sort of “heads-up” display, with arrows for re-directed paths of motions virtually superimposed onto the environment.

By creating connections between participants, FLOCK creates a scenario in which each person’s individual experiences and explorations of the city/suburb are influencing and affecting the paths of motion of those also participating, and vice versa. No one person directs the movement of the flock; the direction and velocity is an outpouring of the collective actions of every member, interacting and reacting to every other person’s behavior in a real-time feedback loop.

PLAY

Becoming a participant in a Flock is as simple a matter as logging-on to a Flocking web page, selecting a Flock to join (assuming there is more than one in your area), registering your position, and then begin following flocking software-defined paths of motion.

Flocks can be created in several ways. One method is for an interested participant to register on the site with his or her availability for Flocking (2a, 2b), receiving notice when enough willing participants are in the area (while strictly speaking there is no maximum number of participants, Flocking with less than three or four others is less effective). The system then chooses the parameters for the Flock (2b, 3a) such as mean distance between participants, flocker radius, etc., then initiates the Flocking software and begins coordinating the flockers’ motion. Another method would be for a group of willing participants establishing the time, place, and parameters of a Flock beforehand.
The parameters of a Flock are simple, but critical. The mean, or desired distance between participants is one of the fundamental elements of the algorithm which governs motion, and will vary based on the environment and scale of the Flock. In a dense urban environment, the mean distance might be one city block, with the each participant striving to be no more and no less than the length of one city block from the nearest other member of the Flock. In a suburban or rural environment, this distance might be increased to a quarter- or a half-kilometer, while a Flock taking place in so-called “big box” retail store such as Wal-Mart might shorten this distance to five meters. The mean distance can also be readjusted, either by participants or automatically, to reflect the scale and scope of the Flock as it expands and contracts.

The flocker radius is a flocker’s “hotspot.” It defines how far a flocker can be from the exact geographical co-ordinate while still counting as being at that co-ordinate. Thus the flocker radius increases with the scale of the flock. In a flock in a dense urban environment, for example, the flocker radius might be ten feet, while in a suburban environment the radius would be significantly larger. This prevents the flocker from having to travel great distances to get to the mean.

HISTORY/THEORY

The historical antecedent for Flock lies in the

psychogeographical dérives, or drifts, of the Situationists of the late Nineteen Fifties and early Nineteen Sixties. The Situationist dérive was a method for dissecting the intersection of capitalism and urbanism in the post-war era, and for investigating the ways in which ambiance of the urban environment constructed and reconstructed people’s lives. Guy Debord, leader of the Situationist International, wrote in “Theory of the Dérive,” that it is “[A] technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.”

The dérive was never intended to be a random stroll through an urban center. Rather it was construed as a method of exploration that would entail participants using the psychogeograpical cues within the environment to guide them. This, of course, raised several logistical issues, particularly how to prevent one member of the group from dominating the direction of the dérive.

FLOCK is merely one method among many others possible that takes advantage of new technology to create a fresh method for practicing the dérive, using recent advances in wireless technology to enable large numbers of people to simultaneously explore environments without any one person directing that motion.

Similar to the original Situationist dérives described by Debord, which involved participants explored cities based on the psychogeographical cues and ambiances found in different neighborhoods, streets, and zones, the motion created through Flocking is the sum of the experiences and encounters of all the participants. Each participant’s unique exploration of the built environment is synthesized and aggregated into a connected group experience of that environment. A single participant’s discoveries on his or her journey will ripple throughout the rest of the flock, affecting every other participant’s experience, and vice versa. The Situationists themselves saw the potential for wireless technology to create an “assisted-dérive”, in 1959 using handheld two-way radios and a “dérive director” to coordinate and redirect the motion of dérivers around Amsterdam (see footnote 1).

The question we seek to address with Flock is whether the dérive is still a viable critical practice given the vast changes that have taken place to the built environment and the way people live their lives in the 40-odd years since its conception. Nearly fifty percent of the population of the United States lives in suburbs now - the city is no longer the locus of most peoples’ lives, and for many people is only of tangential importance. Rather, it is the structures and destinations of the suburban landscape - malls, housing subdivisions, “big box” retail stores - that places where meaning is created and recreated in many people’s lives. A practice of the dérive which ignores these locations is all but irrelevant.

We believe that Flock is just one of what could be many potential responses to the deterritorialization of the built-environment that has occurred in recent decades. By its very nature as a connected action, Flock addresses both the problems of distance and scale that arise when attempting to create a dérive for environments ranging from city neighborhoods to sprawling exurban areas. Participants can be as close or as far apart from each other as necessary, coordinating their movements and investigations regardless of the scale of the environment.

FOOTNOTE 1: “Two groups, each containing three situationists, would dérive for three days, on foot or eventually by boat (sleeping in hotels along the way) without leaving the center of Amsterdam. By means of the walkie-talkies with which they would be equipped, these groups would remain in contact, with each other, if possible, and in any case with the radio-truck of the cartographic team, from where the director of the dérive - in this case Constant - moving around so as to maintain contact, would define their routes and sometimes give instructions (it was also the director of the dérive’s responsibility to prepare experiments at certain locations and secretly arranged events).”

“When people see patterns in the world, they tend to assume some type of centralized control. For example, when people see a flock of birds, they typically assume that the bird in the front is leading and the others are following. But that’s not the case. Most bird flocks don’t have leaders at all. Rather, each bird follows a set of simple rules, reacting to the movements of the birds nearby. Orderly flock patterns arise from these simple, local interactions. The flock is organized without an organizer, coordinated without a coordinator.” - Heppner & Grenander. A Stochastic Nonlinear Model for Coordinated Bird Flocks. In S. Krasner (Ed.), The Ubiquity of Chaos. Washington, D.C.: AAAS Publications.