From Swarm Art Toward Ecosystem Art

Swarm intelligence deals with the study of collectively intelligent behavior that emerges from a decentralized system of non-intelligent individual agents. The concept is widely used in the fields of simulation, optimization or robotics, but less known in the domain of generative art. This paper presents the swarm paradigm in the context of artistic creation, and more particularly explores the interest of enhancing swarm models with dynamics inspired from natural ecosystems. We introduce an energy budget to the agents of a swarm system, and show how mapping the energy level to visual information such as line width or color, combined with mechanisms such as resource chasing and consumption, enriches the search space of possible images. Moreover, we highlight that the approach allows the user to partially control the creation process of the drawings. We argue that the exploration of ecosystem dynamics in generative systems may open up novel artistic opportunities and shift the perspective from swarm art toward ecosystem art.