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'Embrace the Swarm’ is the first in a series of projects designed to promote collaboration between students in various fields. Works resulting from the current cooperative effort by the Ars Electronica Center with University of Arts and Industrial Design, Linz and the Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication Kent (GB) will be presented.

“The undertaking calls into question both traditional educational concepts in the sense of a master-student relationship as well as the belief that high-quality creative work can result only from one individual working alone”, says Dietmar Offenhuber in his catalogue essay.

Since the emergence of the World Wide Web, many institutions have begun to experiment with temporally and geographically dispersed joint ventures taking advantage of the communications possibilities afforded by the Internet. The research project being described here, however, goes far beyond the usual modes of utilizing the World Wide Web in that it attempts to investigate the creative potential of networked collaboration in the fields of art and design (architecture, industrial design etc.).

The project’s primary objective is to ascertain the extent to which computer networks like the World Wide Web are currently able to open up completely new models of collaboration in the fields of art and design; whether there are realistic alternatives to conventional teaching methods in the artistic field, and whether the quality of the output can match - or even surpass - the results achieved by individual authors.

The way in which the project has gone about this is easy to explain. A virtual design studio “set up” in the World Wide Web enables geographically dispersed collaborators to interact. A databank, the Design Process Recorder, stores all individual contributions as well as the overall progress of the joint project and makes this transparent to all parties involved. The tools for interaction and the utilization of the virtual design studio are set up in such a way that all participants - whether artist, architect or designer etc. - can use them in relatively simple fashion and without specialized computer skills, and can also communicate their ideas by means of their respective preferred means of expression (hand-drawn sketch, blueprint, physical model or sculpture, video etc.).

Interactive Chairs

This project was first presented at Ars Electronica festival 2002, Linz, Austria, in Art - Tech Institute. Within the space are nine chairs, randomly scattered around the room. The chairs are physical representation of each student involved in the project.

By pusinging the chair into certain area you are able to trigger a movie, which is then projected onto the screen.
The videos show presentations of each student of group work, in the form of representational video.
When two chairs are triggered at the same time or one after the other, it will be possible to see two members of the group talking together. Each team has it’s own identity that is demonstrates through the manner in which the videos are created.